Page 15 of The Consort's Curse
All the blood rushed to my head, my face glowing and my scalp tingling. Red spots danced in front of my eyes.
“And I’d rather lose my virginity to the entire Calatrian army at once than to you,” I snarled. “Or to that snake.”
Lord Stefan barked out something like a laugh and muttered a few sarcasm-tinged words that could have been about my supposed virginity. Bastard. I ought to have been grateful that he didn’t believe me; I’d just contradicted the Lord Chancellor, too angry to think straight.
But I didn’t have a single drop of gratitude in me. I hated him, in that moment, more than I even hated his father, a burning deep under my ribs.
The carriage slowed to a smooth stop, the coachman calling softly to the horses and the footman jumping down with a bounce. As the carriage stilled, I found my equilibrium and looked up at Lord Stefan, meeting his eyes. They gleamed in the light of the lamp on the outside of the door. His set jaw and the flush along his cheekbones didn’t give him the look of a happy bridegroom.
Oh, Ennolu. The heat of my fury and hurt faded to a bone-chilling anxiety.
The Lord Chancellor would see how completely I’d failed to soothe and satisfy my husband. And the footman would open the door at any moment. I had only a few seconds to rectify the situation.
If I’d really been that immoral creature who’d lie and seduce and betray his family, himself, and his new husband for alife of wealth, I might’ve been able to formulate a better strategy, and a better set of tactics to implement it. But I had only one—hopefully loose-lipped and gossiping—footman as a potential witness, and only one way to muss Lord Stefan enough to make it appear, once we left the carriage, as if we’d been engaged in marital pleasures.
And so I shoved off the side of the carriage again and lunged at him, ignoring his flinch and curse as I flung my arms around his neck and kissed him hard on the mouth.
Chapter Six
Lord Stefan’s lips were firm, warm, and parted enough that my tongue slipped between, letting me taste another man for the first time in my life. Liquor. He tasted mostly of liquor, with the faintest hint of…oh, gods, please let it not be yetanotherperson, whichever companion he’d been with at his brothel.
But whatever that elusive and possibly horrifying flavor was, it hit my body like an intoxicant far more powerful than the spirits he’d been drinking.
Every muscle and nerve and vein came alive, aware, from my tingling face all the way down to my curling toes. My leg across his lap. His broad shoulders under my arms, and the brush of his hair against the hands I’d clasped behind his neck. The solid strength of him, like an oak tree a vine could climb up and around and be kept safe from any storm…
Lord Stefan’s hands came to my waist again, gripping me tightly enough to bruise. He probably meant to throw me off again, but he’d pulled me closer first, his thigh slotting between my legs.
The curse left me unable to get an erection, but the pressure on my cock and balls and behind them, between my legs, still made my head spin all over again.
I gasped into his mouth, my tongue brushed his, fresh sparks shot down my spine, I might’ve let out the faintest moan, and with a click, a rush of cool evening air flowed into the carriage.
Lord Stefan wrenched his mouth away from mine. Both of our heads turned at once. The footman stood framed in the open carriage door, mouth open and eyes round.
“Forgive me,” he stammered. “My lord. Lords. Please forgive my intrusion, I didn’t—”
“There’s nothing to intrude upon, Jan,” Lord Stefan said, and I nearly broke my neck whipping my head back to gawk at him. His voice had returned, like magic, to that drawling, nonchalant tone I’d first heard at our wedding, the one he’d used to insult me and his father and even holy Ennolu without so much as blinking. He’d been flushed and furious and grappling with me mere moments before, and he’d become as smooth and unruffled and urbane as an illustration of a gentleman in a fashion quarterly. “We’re both fully clothed, as you can see.”
Jan met my eyes for the briefest of moments, and his expression ofGods, he must be jokingnearly broke me. A swelling bubble of hysterical laughter rose up in my throat, and with it came the words, “Please shut the door, and tell my new mother and father we’ll be right in. We need a few moments to collect ourselves.”
It came out breathy and high-pitched, possibly the way a well-fucked whore caught behaving indecently in a carriage might sound. I wouldn’t know, although I’d bet every copper coin in my husband’s coffers that he did.
Jan didn’t give his master the opportunity to contradict me, slamming the carriage door so quickly he barely got his nose out of the way. His quick footsteps retreated instantly after.
Silence fell in the carriage.
An ominous, pregnant silence.
Lord Stefan’s hands still gripped my waist, only now he wasn’t trying to toss me back across the carriage and out of his lap; he was holding me there withintent, and I had no idea what that might be.
I became conscious of the harshness of my breath in the quiet, and of his. Of the heat and nearness and sheer size of him, the humidity of the closed carriage. Of the span of his hands around my waist. I felt fragile in his grasp, and my breath came faster still. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his, so dark and so focused, as if he saw nothing in the world but me.
And so cold, as if he saw nothing he didn’t despise.
“Very good, Remigius,” he said after a moment, low and with controlled rage, and it made my blood run even icier, how swiftly and easily he discarded the insouciant fop that had been amused by giving his footman a show. “My father’s annoyance at being made to wait for us probably won’t outweigh his satisfaction in your ability to distract me. I’m not sure you look quite distracted enough yourself, though.”
He cocked his head and considered me, with a serpentine calculation uncomfortably close to his father’s.
Just as we were uncomfortably close. I squirmed, loosening my arms from around his neck.
