“That is the last time you will ever touch me, prince,” she swore, using one of his best tunics as a towel and trampling it to the closet floor beneath her feet. The whole time she wished it was his face she smashed. She dressed quickly, still cursing in displeasure.
Eyeing the bed, she knew there was no way she could spend the night in it with him. So instead, she threw his pillow out the open doorway into the hall and slammed the door shut, locking it firmly behind her.
* * *
Olek stormed the length of his bathroom in frustration. His bride was more than he’d ever bargained for. Oh, but she was a stubborn little vixen. The image of her wet, restrained body stayed with him, making his arousal painfully hard when he would have it lessen.
Bitter, he shrugged out of his clothes and climbed into the natural hot spring tub. Closing his eyes, Nadja’s naked form danced before him, taunting him with what he couldn’t claim. His jaw tightened resentfully.
Olek lessened his sexual torment by stroking himself to a resentful release. Warm water and a rough palm was not the pleasure he wanted. When he was finished, the tension might have been gone from his hips, but the aching was still there in his body.
Drying off, he wrapped himself in a robe. His eyes sought the fountain. He hated to admit part of him hoped she would still be there, trapped, needing him. She wasn’t. Olek decided it was a good thing, as he would most likely be unable to control his actions.
Going to the bedroom, he stepped over his pillow in the hall, with a suspicious frown marring his already furrowed brow. Testing the door, he realized she’d locked him out of his own room. He glared at the locked barrier in irritation.
Olek banged on the door, but didn’t break through it. He growled out a bunch of multi-lingual curses before stomping away to sleep in his robe on the couch.
Chapter 15
The next day Nadja awoke way before the dawn—not that she could really claim lying in bed most of the night, after listening to Olek’s angry footsteps, as actually sleeping. She had shivered and kept quiet, trembling violently to hear his powerful voice cursing her through the door, the attempt much more effective than her efforts at swearing had been. A traitorous part of her had wanted him to break down the door and demand his husband’s rights from her. Instead, she’d heard Olek stomp away.
It wasn’t his anger that kept her up. It was the idea that he might leave the house to seek out someone less frustrating. She tried to tell herself she shouldn’t care. That was the way of powerful men. It was the way of the universes. Other wives lived with such affairs, and so could she.
Logic and emotion had never felt so out of sync.
She dressed and tiptoed from the bedroom. Olek slept on the couch. The sight caused a wave of relief to come over her. His robe parted over his chest, mocking her with the sculpted lines of his muscles, muscles she couldn’t touch. Tilting her head, she curiously tried to see along his thigh, but the robe hid his more private area from view.
Nadja didn’t wait for him to wake up, but instead went into her laboratory. She grabbed a book on herbs, her translator, paper and a pencil. Crossing silently over the marble hall, she tried to ignore the water fountain. Her pants and shredded shirt still floated in its moving waters.
She slipped out the front door with a whispered command and left.
* * *
Olek’s eyes opened and he gave a weary sigh. Blinking heavily, he automatically turned his attention to the front door. It was closed. Thinking he must have been dreaming, he stretched his tight arms over his head before standing. He needed to exercise. Prince Zoran would undoubtedly give him grief for missing practice for the last couple of days. His brother wouldn’t favor a new marriage as a reasonable excuse to be remiss in one’s training.
More than likely, Zoran was still out in the field every morning with the dawn, leaving his bride in bed while he went to drill the soldiers in battle exercises. From what the king had said about the unlucky state of all the princes’ marriages, Olek almost felt bad for the soldiers. Zoran was a hard taskmaster on his good days. If he was angry, the commander prince would be a monster to those under his training authority.
Olek chuckled, remembering Ualan covered in swamp muck the other night as he passed him in the hall.
Seeing Nadja wasn’t in the bedroom, he assumed she was in the atrium laboratory. As he dressed, he frowned to find his war council tunic damp and crumpled on the floor. Picking it up, he knew he would have to get it laundered immediately. The war council could meet at any time on the shortest of notice. Theirs was a land troubled by an uneasy truce. He should know. He had negotiated it.
Grabbing his sword, he strapped it over his shoulder and let it fall to his waist. Maybe a sour Zoran was just what his body needed. A day of that man’s workouts was enough to purge the foul temper out of even the most dedicated of soldiers.
Slipping out of the house without alerting Nadja, he tossed the tunic to the first servant he passed on his way to the practice field. The man nodded and took it straightway to the laundry without having to be asked.
Olek strode through the passageways and out the front gate. A courtyard surrounded the palace fortress, close to the surrounding valley, near where the breeding festival tents had been constructed. In the valley sat a small village under the protection of the House of Draig. The roads were made of rock, smoothed flat and even. The village was kept immaculately clean, built with roads and buildings symmetrically placed.
Olek loved his people almost as much as he loved his family. It was his duty to protect them the best he could. It was hard work and he took his duty very seriously, as did all the Draig princes. Sighing tiredly, he thought the burden seemed particularly heavy that morning.
The villagers’ homes were constructed of rock and wood. The population wore light linen tunics during the day much like the royal family, but minus the dragon crest and finer embroidery. No matter a person’s station in life, they were taken care of—even in times of war. If one man starved, then they all went without food. There was no special treatment for princes and nobles. In fact, he remembered a few times when his family skipped one meal a day so that rations would last longer. They had not asked anyone else to do so.
No Draig was left in need. Everyone was expected to pull their own weight as best they could, and very rarely did that not happen. They were a happy people, hardworking and honest.
Olek turned to look at the palace, thinking of his bride in her laboratory. From the ground, because of the carefully planned angle of the design, the palace looked like a mountain with a gate in the side. In times of war, even the iron gate could be camouflaged with rock to hide its exact location from the enemy. It was impenetrable. Should such a need arise, the castle could fit all of the villagers within its walls.
Olek found Zoran exactly where he thought the commander prince would be, standing, arms crossed, before the young soldiers, shouting gruff commands. Olek nodded solemnly at his brother’s attention. Zoran smiled a devilish older-brother grin, nodded back, and shouted the command for an attack. Olek blinked in surprise, but quickly swung his practice sword from his waist, as the whole of Zoran’s sparring battalion came to tackle him to the ground.
Chapter 16
Nadja spent her afternoon in the forest, crawling around on the ground, as she looked up the native plants in her book, and taught herself their Qurilixian names and properties. When a few of the young boys had stumbled upon her, she invited them to help search for plants. They made a great game of it, instantly trying to outdo the other for her attention by bringing her the most. One boy even cut his arm on a branch trying to climb up to a high peak to fetch her a clump of moss for her collection. She used a piece of the moss along with other wild herbs to make him a salve, and fashioned a makeshift bandage out of one of the colossal leaves. The boy wore it with pride—much to the envy of the others, who then tried to hurt themselves in similar ways.
By the time she headed home, her hands and kn
ees were covered with red dirt, her hair was frizzed out of her bun and a small smile of accomplishment lined her lips. The boys ran ahead of her, spreading their tales of the new princess and displaying the war wounds they had bravely received in her service. Nadja tried not to laugh as she overheard their boasting.
“She’s the only princess that’s come out of the palace,” one man whispered not too quietly. “What was she like?”
“Strange,” a boy said. “She is collecting the yellow. We told her to be careful though and watched over her.”
“Good lad,” a woman answered.
“The yellow?” the first man asked. “Do you suppose she’s going to dose the prince with it? I know there are times my wife has threatened to do that to me when she says I’m talking too much.”
Laughter sounded. Curious to see who’d said it, Nadja turned to look in his direction and the man ducked behind a stone wall. Others merely smiled at her. She nodded her head toward them in return. She was used to the attention and thought nothing of the small gathering that seemed to follow her at a distance as she made her way back to her new home.
Her arms loaded with a bag full of plant samples, her book and translator, Nadja walked to Olek’s wing of the castle. The door opened on her command and she stepped in before ordering it to close behind her. She paused and took a deep breath, feeling the eyes were finally off her. Trying not to make any noise, she crept to the laboratory. Everything was as she’d left it that morning.
A half hour later, with everything transplanted and labeled to her liking, she went to the kitchen. To her surprise, she saw Olek wasn’t in his office. Curious, she searched the house. He was gone.
She washed her hands in the kitchen sink. Not bothering to change, she grabbed a plateful of fruit. Seeing a red foil bag in the back of the refrigerator with her name on it, she opened it and grimaced. It was chocolate. It smelled temptingly sweet, but she remembered all too well what it had felt like coming up. Nadja wouldn’t be trying that again anytime soon. She pushed the bag back into its corner.
With nothing to distract her from work, she went back to the laboratory. There was a feeling of safety being locked away with her thoughts, away from the public eye. She knew it was a false feeling. Her father would come for her eventually. But, until he did, maybe she could do some good for once in her life.
* * *
That evening when Olek stumbled in, worn out from fighting off wave after wave of attacks from Zoran’s men, Nadja was still with her plants. A few of her books were spread out over the dining table next to the kitchen wall, along with papers filled with her tight handwriting. He saw she’d been writing in his language and smiled to see a few misspelled words and grammatical errors.
Tiredly, he dropped food into the fish tanks. The blue fish came to watch him, blinked at him, and then followed the wave of his hand as if he was a friend. Almost too exhausted to move, Olek went to take a bath. Nadja was still inside her room when he finished, the door shut to him. The books were gone and the table was cleared off.
Olek was almost sorry he had allowed the door to be built on the atrium, since he could think of no excuse to go in there. It wasn’t probable she would want him anywhere near her after what happened the night before. He couldn’t rightly blame her.
To his everlasting shame, he remembered leaving her tied up and helpless on the fountain. He’d been so angry, his body past the point of the most virtuous man’s tolerance. Her begging voice echoed in his head. His body’s suffering was his own fault. She had asked him to fulfill their needs, had urged him to kiss her. But, Olek knew that if he wanted a happy marriage, she needed to accept him fully. Falling into passion would be so easy, so mindlessly wonderful, but he wanted more from her. He wanted that connection he knew could be there—the melding of their souls. Perhaps he was a romantic, or a fool, but he’d always been fascinated by the stories of married couples claiming to hear each other’s thoughts and feelings. There was a void inside him, growing worse now that his crystal was gone, that he needed Nadja’s spirit to fill.
So many times he’d reached to his neck to feel the stone that was no longer there. It had been a part of him since birth. He couldn’t say he missed the stone, for that would mean he wouldn’t have Nadja, but he missed the familiarity of it and the hope it had inspired in him as he waited to find her.
Pouring a glass of alien wine and taking some papers off his desk, he sat on his couch before the fire. His pillow was still there from that morning and he knew he would more than likely spend the night where he was.
Scratching the back of his head, as he read a particularly frustrating document from the Lithor Republic located across the star system—it took twelve pages of scrambled wording before he figured out they were merely requesting the exports of ore and wilddeor meat—when he heard an excited yell from within Nadja’s sanctuary. Startled, he looked up in surprise.
Nadja came rushing out. Her clothes were covered in dried, red mud and her hair was kinked eccentrically around her dirt-smudged face. Her eyes found him instantly, as she proclaimed, “I need a guinea pig.”
“A what kind of pig?” Olek frowned. Sacred forest, she is even lovely covered in dirt!
His body leapt with the need to kiss her smiling face.
“A test dummy,” she said in distraction, coming for him.
“A what?” He grew wary at her determined look. He couldn’t so easily forget the green acid she’d made the day before because she’d mistranslated a word.
“Just hold still,” Nadja said coming to sit beside him. “This won’t hurt a bit. I’d use it on myself, but I couldn’t wake myself up.”
Olek saw her hand reaching for him and jerked back in dismay. Glancing down, he saw she held a green plant with a yellow center. The plants were found in abundance on the forest floor around the village. One smell of the pollen and he’d…
Olek reacted too late.
* * *
Nadja pinched and rubbed the plant beneath Olek’s nose and he instantly dropped onto her lap. She jolted, feeling the weight of his head buried in-between her thighs, face down. His breath heated into her flesh as he slept.
“Huh,” she whispered in amazement, eying his head and then the bud pressed between her fingertips. Her nerves danced wickedly at his weight against her thighs. The image of his dark hair against her shot vivid sparks of pleasure throughout her limbs. Weakly, she said, “It really does work fast.”
Pushing him up, she trembled at the rush of desire in her veins. She had tried to keep herself busy to ignore her feelings for him. For a moment, in her excitement about trying her discovery, she had forgotten she was mad at him. Now she looked at him and studied his handsome, motionless face. According to her notes, the size of the single flower would only knock a man of his size out for about ten minutes.
Olek’s lips were parted in silent breath and she couldn’t resist. Lightly, she kissed him, letting her mouth feel his. Her hand found a hold on his sturdy neck, resting over his pulse. Her tongue hesitantly edged out to try and discover more of him. Slowly, she let her fingers trail down his chest only to stop nervously on his hip. He tasted like wine and she nearly swooned.
This was hardly the professional experiment she’d intended.
Shaking herself, she pulled her lips away. Her heart beat erratically. It wouldn’t do to get caught molesting him while he slept. Gingerly, she opened the jar of antidote cream clutched in her non-flower hand and smeared some beneath his nose.
Olek blinked, jerking as he became aware. It took a moment for his eyes to focus on her but when they did he glared angrily in realization. Swiping at the cream under his nose, he rubbed it off.
“What did you do?” he asked furiously, as he darted forward to grab her hand with the squished bud.
Nadja blinked in surprise at the suddenness of his movements. She couldn’t hide the fact that her pulse raced beneath his curling fingers. “What? You’re not hurt.”
“What did you do
to me?” Olek demanded, suspiciously tasting his lips.
“I just needed to try this cream,” Nadja began. His hard glare cut her off and he shook her wrist.
“I am not your…guine-ah pig dummy.” Olek growled. “You won’t experiment on me. What did you do?”
“It’s harmless,” she said, lifting up the small jar. “Look, it’s just an herbal cream. You could practically eat it and be fine. It would taste horrible, I imagine, but it won’t kill you.” She bent her index finger into the cream before rubbing to her forearm next to where he held her wrist. “See. Harmless.”
He eyed the cream smear and then her. Again, he tasted his lips as if he could taste her on his mouth. Nadja colored slightly, but admitted to nothing.
“Your mother mentioned the sleeping flowers the other day,” she explained weakly. “And the villagers had warned me when they saw me collecting samples when I was shopping with her. So I looked it up in that book I took from the library. The book said that soldiers who fall in battle into a patch of sleeping flowers are often rendered helpless. The enemy can, you know, get them in their sleep and they become easy targets. It also said that if you are not found there is the possibility of starving to death before the pollen cycle goes dormant.”
Olek’s brow rose on his face, but he was at least listening to what she had to say. “In the past it has been a problem, but we have learned to get around it. Often, forest battles are avoided unless necessary.”
Falling into the comfortable familiarity of science, she continued, “You can’t very well kill off the plant species without severely endangering the forest ecosystem and I am against the extermination of any plant or animal life in most instances. Though, I did look at the possibility to weigh options should it…well, here, come and see, I drew a chart.”
Dragon Lords Books 1 - 4 Box Set: Anniversary Edition Page 39