Page 18 of The Consort's Curse
“A masterstroke?” I repeated stupidly. Obviously he referred to what I’d said about wearing my cassock during our married seclusion, but… “Perverted? Truly? Because I made them think you’re able to be, to be, aroused,” and I hated myself for the heat rising to my cheeks as I choked the word out, hated those six years of abbey breeding with every fiber of my being, “by someone without any charms or sophistication? Is the idea of wanting to bed your consort even if I’m not beautiful and elegant really so shameful to courtiers like you?”
“Oh, for the love of Ennolu,” he snarled, “will you give up this pretense of…this pretense…shit. Holy buggering fuck.”
He stared at me, jaw clenched, while I twisted my hands in my lap, holding his gaze through sheer force of will. I’d been in his lap earlier, his tongue in my mouth. My legs spread over him. That same heat bloomed in the pit of my stomach. The way he fixed me in my chair with that intense look in his eyes had me breathless, as if he’d taken me in his arms again.
And then he started to laugh, dropping his forehead into one hand, the brandy spilling over the knuckles of the other. He ran his hand over his face, cursed again, and drank the last of his glass, setting it down empty on the sideboard with a thump.
Had he gone mad? Oh, gods, that would account for the Lord Chancellor’s desire to marry his son to someone like me, someone unknown and disposable and likely to be biddable. He wanted private reports on Lord Stefan’s descent into insanity, from a man no one would believe if he told the story publicly.
Another burst of laughter didn’t reassure me, and I shrank back in my chair, my heart pounding. The silence stretched.
“Since you really don’t seem to understand,” he said at last, his tone thoughtful now rather than wild, “I’ll explain it to you. Perhaps you’ll find it as amusing as I do once you comprehend your own unwitting genius. You weren’t shamingme for desiring a consort in a cassock, or not the way you thought. You don’t think it’s a bit mortifying for a lady to be told that her son is irresistibly stimulated, to an extreme degree, by a young, innocent devotee of Ennolu in a religious garment? One who’s too young and innocent to even realize that it’s out of the ordinary? And to think that I’m so obsessed with my own perverse satisfaction that I’d bring the object of my lust dressed in that same garment to dinner? You told them you’d been wearing the same cassock while I fucked you for three days, Remigius! Without taking it off! She’s probably having the servants bloody well burn the chair you sat on!”
If I’d thought I’d been blushing and lightheaded before, I’d underestimated my own capacity for it.
“Oh,” I managed, sinking back, closing my eyes against the way the study began to spin slowly around me. Burning the chair. Because no cleaning would remove the stains of…of…she thought I’d sat in her dining room covered in three days’ worth of sweat and semen and, and…
Abruptly, I did find it amusing, if you could call hysteria amusement. My diaphragm spasmed, and I had to collapse onto the arm of the chair, howling with laughter, tears running down my face, my sides heaving almost painfully.
At last I subsided, wheezing a bit, and let my head rest on my forearm. The rough sleeve of my cassock scratched my temple. My whole body prickled with sweat.
The soft clink of glass from over my shoulder indicated that Lord Stefan had poured another drink, and his heavy sigh told me how much he needed it. My mouth opened. I had to press my lips together to keep in the apology that wanted to spill out. He didn’t deserve one! And yet. In front of hismother.
Another burst of laughter nearly broke me, leaving me hiccupping and dizzy.
“Are you quite finished?” Lord Stefan asked, in a tone of deep unease. “I think you ought to have that brandy now, Remigius. Your nerves clearly need settling.”
In other words, he found it very uncomfortable to have his unwanted consort half-sobbing and entirely irrational in the previously quiet sanctum of his study. Well, then, perhaps he shouldn’t have brought me in here.
“Drink it yourself,” I mumbled into my arm. In a burst of malicious inspiration, I added, “I think I may sleep here. I’m too tired to go upstairs.”
The resulting silence held all the baffled dismay I could’ve wished.
“Or I could lock you up in the attic after all,” he muttered at last. “I can tell my mother’s dresser that you were taken ill.”
I lifted my head and brushed my hair out of my face enough that I could glare up at him, wishing with all my might I could light those golden eyebrows on fire with the force of it. Any urge to apologize had fled. He damn well deserved to have his mother think he’d spent three days in a lecherous orgy with an unfashionable redhead in a filthy potato sack.
“You know, you truly have no right to complain,” I said. “Or to threaten me with the same cruelty now that I’ve done precisely what you told me to do: I convinced the Lord Chancellor that you were satisfied with your marriage. You ought to be thanking me.” I pushed up in the chair again, wavering slightly but lifting my chin to make up for it. “And if you don’t want me to embarrass you in the future, you might try speaking to me reasonably rather than threatening me and berating me,” and my voice wavered too, and gods, if I cried in front of him I’d have to drown myself in the bathtub, “and telling me you’d rather consort with a snake.”
Lord Stefan stared down at me for a moment. “Thanking you. For doing precisely what I told you.” He took another sipof his brandy. “For one, pardon me, but satisfying my father’s expectations is at least as much in your interest as mine, I have no doubt, because whatever bargain you’ve made with him depends on it. And for another, are you suggesting that if I speak to you reasonably, as you put it, and issue instructions that don’t brook any willful misinterpretation whatsoever, you’ll meekly obey me? Forgive me, but I have my doubts.”
“You told me to remain in my room, and I’ve done so. You didn’t provide any clothing for me, and so I wore what I had rather than demanding something more appropriate. You told me to take my potion, and I have been.”
Not that I’d have wanted to disobey that last command, anyway, but I might as well take credit for it. In fact, I’d taken my scheduled dose the night before, leaving my curse comfortably soothed. Which only made my body’s response to his in the carriage all the more puzzling and disturbing.
No, I would not think about that, particularly not while we were in the same room. I might need to consider it more thoroughly later tonight when I was alone.
Oh, gods. If he even meant to continue to leave me alone. Sooner rather than later, he’d said.
And he’d kissed me in the carriage even though he’d claimed he didn’t want to. Kissed me, and held me so tightly I’d hardly been able to breathe.
As I could hardly breathe now.
“I took my potion last night,” I went on tentatively, as he hadn’t shown any sign of answering me, his brow furrowed and his jaw tight. “But it won’t prevent you from—it only prevents me from—do you mean to use me tonight? It makes me sick to ask you for anything.” His hand clenched around his glass so that his knuckles went white. I’d infuriated him, and he could still choose to lock me in that dusty attic, and it took every bit of my strength not to bury my face in my arms again. “But please don’ttorment me by leaving me to wonder if you’ll come to me later on when I’m not expecting it. If you want to come to me, I’ll be ready.”
For a moment I thought he might lash out at me; the sudden tension in his body, in the pressure of the air around him, demanded an explosion.
And then he seemed to pull himself in, calming, becoming the urbane Lord Stefan that I’d started to think might be his armor as much as his weapon.
