by Cat Marsters
Kett couldn’t move. Bael didn’t seem inclined to. She supposed that was because he was sporting a massive hard-on that he didn’t particularly want to display.
“You get down first,” she managed through gritted teeth. “Keep the cloak.”
He hesitated. “You sure?”
She nodded, tears in her eyes as his movements jolted her leg just the tiniest bit. How the hell she was ever going to make it inside, she had no idea. She didn’t even know how she was going to get off the munta.
“You coming?” Bael asked, looking up, and she managed a nod but didn’t move. He frowned, then his eyes slid down to her bare thigh where the mangled, twisted scar glowed, pink and vicious. Kett ignored him and, with a monumental effort of will, swung her left leg across the munta’s back. If she could slide her weight onto her left side, she might just—
She squawked in sudden pain and surprise as Bael scooped one arm under her knees and wrapped the other around her shoulders, cradling her against him. A trickle of fresh blood slid down his arm, but the arrow wound didn’t seem to be causing him any extra distress as he supported her full weight.
Breathless and astonished, she stared up at him. He grinned back.
“I know you have your pride, my sweet, but I have mine too, and I just can’t allow you to walk barefoot a moment longer.”
Kett opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
“No no, don’t protest,” Bael said, adjusting her weight in his arms as he carried her across the courtyard, following an obviously amused Miho. “Nothing’s too good for my angel.”
Kett finally recovered her voice as they entered the warmth of the house. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Saving my lady the exhaustion of walking a step farther,” Bael said grandly. Then added in a whisper, “And the embarrassment of admitting she can’t walk at all.”
“I can—”
“Sweetheart, you couldn’t even dismount.”
Miho led them down vast hallways before opening a door and ushering them inside a room with a large bed and lacquered furniture. The low window looked out over an exquisitely designed garden. There was a large table covered with food and steam flowing from a second door. To Kett, it looked a lot like heaven.
“There are clothes in the closet,” Miho said, “and the bath is hot. If you need anything, call for the kelfs.” She indicated a bell pull. “And try not to pick a fight with any of them.” She gave them a bow then left, closing the door.
“Will you put me down now?” Kett asked.
“And watch you lying there all naked and helpless? Actually…” Bael seemed to be considering this.
“Knock it off.”
He grinned and strode through to the bathroom, dumping her in a huge sunken bath filled with scalding water that steamed fragrantly and shocked her into silence.
Feeling a little like a lobster plunged into the pot, she could only stare up at Bael, but he was already leaving the room. Feeling returned gradually, her skin throbbing in the mad heat, her muscles forced to relax. Her leg seemed to have given up the fight, faced with such indomitable heat, and she managed to move it an inch or two.
Bael came back in with several plates of food, plonked them by her elbow then went back out again. Still speechless, Kett stared at the piles of sandwiches, noodles, vegetables, kebabs—and then Bael came back in again. He put down more food, a couple pitchers and a tray of medical supplies, then dropped the cloak and stepped into the bath.
Then he leaped like a cat on drugs and yelped, “Fucking hell, that’s hot!”
“Yes, isn’t it?” Kett asked, recovering her voice. She picked up a pitcher, sniffed at it and ascertained that it was beer. Which she proceeded to drink.
“Bleeding hell,” Bael swore, bravely going back in. He gingerly dunked his arm under the water, flinching as heat seared the arrow wound.
“Yep.” She grabbed a sandwich and devoured it whole. Unable to remember the last time she’d eaten anything, she was suddenly ravenous.
Bael picked through the bottles on the food tray, sniffing at a few until he found one he liked the smell of. But instead of drinking, he poured it all over the wound on his arm, stiffening in pain. Kett frowned; he was wasting good saki.
“Food good?” Bael asked as he took a pair of tweezers from the tray and started picking at the hole in his arm. He watched Kett as she demolished the sandwiches and started on the noodles, eating them with her fingers.
“Right now I’d eat a raw kelf,” she said, raising her eyebrows at him.
“Kelfs really annoy me.” He paused, apparently realizing she wasn’t impressed by that. “You do know I was joking, right?”
“You do know that kelfs aren’t known for their sense of humor, right?” She grabbed a kebab and ripped the meat off with her teeth.
“Well, I do now.” He extracted something from his arm and dropped it on the tray. “How’s your leg?”
“Five by five.” The empty kebab stick clattered on the plate.
“What does that mean?”
“Fine.”
“Well, clearly it’s not, since five minutes ago you couldn’t even move. What happened?”
She swallowed a handful of noodles and washed it down with beer. “Just an accident.”
“An accident involving something with big teeth?”
She gave him a sharp look, not easy to do with a mouthful of tomato. Swallowing the food, she said, “Really big.”
“What was it? A dog?”
“Bigger.”
“Are we going to play that game where I ask questions and you answer with single words? ’Cos we could be here for some time.”
Her mouth once again full, Kett held her hands about ten inches apart. Bael raised his eyebrows. She chewed and swallowed and said through half a mouthful, “Sabertooth. Really big teeth.”
He whistled. “You got bitten by a sabertooth tiger?”
She shrugged and quaffed some more beer. “Yeah. Piece of advice? If a sabertooth tiger ‘really annoys’ you, don’t pick a fight with it. Don’t taunt it. Just get the fuck out of there.”
Bael opened his mouth, then closed it and nodded. He gestured at the tray of medical supplies. “I think the pills in the brown bottle are painkillers.”
“Think?”
He picked up the bottle and squinted at the unfamiliar alphabet. “Well, take one and find out.”
Rolling her eyes, Kett took the bottle. Her Xinjiangese was rusty, but she’d learned the important words. And sadly, an important word for her was “painkiller”. She recognized it on the label and slugged a couple of the tablets.
“Brave,” Bael said. “I like that in a girl.”
“Read the label,” she said.
“I like that in a girl too.”
“What? Literacy?” She rested her head back against the edge of the bath.
He frowned at the symbols on the bottle. “It’s more like deciphering a code,” he said.
“If you think of it that way, all language is,” Kett said, closing her eyes, an image of the strange symbols around the cave mouth coming to mind. She suddenly felt sleepy. No telling what was in those bloody pills.
“Very profound for someone who’s naked.”
“I’ve always found nakedness a great excuse for profanity.”
Bael laughed. “Yeah, me too.” She felt him inch closer. “Kett?”
She yawned. “Yeah?”
“What really happened to your leg?”
“Told you. Pissed off a tiger.”
“Really?”
“Mmm. It came off worse though. Have one of its teeth somewhere.”
His hand touched her shoulder, caressing her slick skin. “What about your back?”
“It didn’t bite me there.” It was getting harder and harder to stay awake.
“No, I mean these.” His hand edged between her back and the wall of the bath, and traced the scars on her skin.
“Mmm. Tell you later.” Kett curled t
oward him, his body big and solid and comforting. “Sleepy now.”
“Those must be some pills.”
“Mmm,” Kett said, and slipped into blissful unconsciousness.
* * * * *
It was a testimony to the power of the pills that Kett woke slowly, groggily, instead of ricocheting awake on full alert, as she usually did. One by one, ideas trundled into place in her brain. The room was dark. The bed was soft and warm, and the sheets smelled sweet and clean.
Nuala’s house? She sniffed at some other scent that drifted over the bed, something slightly cloying, like jasmine or some other flower. But Nuala wasn’t inclined to leave flowers in Kett’s room, which usually only smelled of leather and wood polish. Besides, she hadn’t been to Elvyrn in ages.
The mattress dipped with someone else’s weight. Kett’s eyebrows rose in the dark. Someone big. Someone male. Well, it was nice to know she hadn’t switched sides. Someone—
Oh yeah. Now she remembered. Bael. The silver chain. The cave. The burnt remains.
Kett lay still for a while, frowning. What the fuck had that whole thing been about? She had woken in some pretty interesting circumstances in her life—once, memorably, to find that she’d recently been dead—but they’d generally been reasonably traceable. Last thing she remembered before the cave was performing for the Maharaja and his family, then going to bed in the modest suite provided for her in his palace. She’d been thinking about the journey home and planning to get up reasonably early to make a head start.
She sure as hell didn’t remember crossing the Realm, taking off her clothes and wandering into a cave, chaining herself to a naked hottie and suspending herself from the ceiling. That was the sort of thing, Kett figured, that ought to stick in your mind.
She shifted, her leg aching. Probably she ought to get up and see if there was any liniment on that tray of medical supplies. Did Miho know about her leg? Well, she must have seen the scar earlier. It was hard to miss.
The bed was warm and soft, and she didn’t really feel inclined to move. On the other hand, the longer she just lay there without sorting her leg out, the worse it would get. It was like an old cartwheel, she thought grumpily as she pushed the covers back. Keep it well oiled or it’d rust over.
This was proven when she swung her leg out of bed, tested its strength and found it to be totally useless. With a flash of sudden pain, it crumpled beneath her and she toppled to the floor, crying out as she hit the cold wood.
Her leg hurt so much she almost blacked out for a second, sound and vision dimming, her breath snatched away. Then sound returned and she heard someone scrambling from the bed, calling her name.
“Kett? What the— Are you okay?”
Five by five, she tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come. Breathless, trying hard to keep her leg still so it wouldn’t hurt any more than it already did, she nodded, blinking as her vision cleared and Bael appeared, hovering worriedly at her side.
Hmm. He was kind of adorable when he was worried. Or maybe pain was making her delirious.
“Don’t,” she cried as his hand moved to touch her leg. “Just don’t touch it.”
He snatched his hand back, and instead touched her shoulder as she rose up on her elbows and surveyed her leg with dismay.
“What happened?”
She took a deep breath and let it out shakily. “I just fell,” she said. “It’s not very strong. I mean, usually it’s fine, but I haven’t been taking medication or anything, and it’s just seized up. Give me a minute.”
“What medication? Maybe your friend Miho has something that will help.”
“Maybe,” said Kett, thinking it was unlikely anyone at all would have the stuff she took. “Could you go see if there’s any liniment on that tray?” Bael hesitated, so she added, “Just bring the tray.”
He bit his lip, looking uneasy, then nodded and rose gracefully to his feet. Kett, cursing the day she ever decided to fight a hungry sabertooth tiger instead of either shooting it or running the fuck away, tried to follow suit and ended up back on her backside on the floor.
Bael put the tray down on the bed then his hands on his hips and looked at her. There was a bandage wrapped around his arm where the kelf’s arrow had hit, the fabric very white against his skin.
“If you want help, you just have to say so.”
“I’m fine.” Stubbornly, she tried again, but her leg pulsed with pain and refused to cooperate.
“I mean, I have a great view here. I’m perfectly happy to see you stay right where you are.”
“Pervert.”
He grinned.
“Could you pass me the liniment, please?”
“What, down there on the floor? Come on, you’ll freeze.”
“I’m fine.”
“You blatantly are not.”
Kett glared at him. He grinned back. Eventually she sighed, gritted her teeth and said, “Oh, all right. Could you please help me up?”
“I’m sorry?” Bael cupped his ear exaggeratedly. “What was that?”
“Fuck off.”
“Thought so.” He scooped her up and dumped her on the bed so fast her leg hardly had time to protest. “You want a hand rubbing that stuff in?”
“No.”
“Tough. Payment for helping you out—I get to feel you up.”
“Perv—”
“You said that already.” He picked up a couple of jars, opened them and sniffed the contents. “Eurgh.”
“It’s not meant to smell nice.” She pointed out the right jar and Bael made another face.
“What’s it meant to do?”
She sighed. Evidently there was no way of getting out of this without Bael being involved in every detail. “Loosen up the muscles.”
“Right. Why are they tight?”
“Because a tiger bit through them.”
He started examining her leg. “Actually through them?”
“Hamstrung me.”
He visibly flinched. “Youch. You must have had a hell of a surgeon.”
Kett thought about Striker and nearly laughed. “Yeah, sure,” she said.
Bael scooped out some of the smelly liniment and spread it over her leg. The scar ran mostly down the side of her thigh, but both ends of it curled round to the back where the tiger’s massive canines had ripped right through.
“Come on, roll over,” he said, nudging her hip. “Give me access.”
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“No need to sound so accusing.” He smoothed a warm hand over the back of her leg as she moved. “I’m doing this purely for your benefit, out of the goodness of my heart, the milk of human kindness that runs—”
“So it’s not payment for helping me?”
He grinned at her. “Call it more of a reward.”
She was silent for a moment as he stroked the warming ointment into her skin. He had good hands, strong and gentle hands, and a careful touch. He never pressed too hard or skimmed too lightly.
After a minute or two she asked, “Is that why you’re massaging bits of me that don’t need a massage?”
His fingers caressed her buttocks. “I’d say they’re crying out for it.”
She smiled despite herself. “Tell me you never trained to be a doctor.”
“Well, I do have an excellent bedside manner.”
His fingers stroked the sensitive skin inside her thighs, which Kett was pretty sure didn’t need any massaging at all, and she let out her breath. Okay, maybe she was enjoying it a bit. It had been a long time since anyone else had stroked her legs, that was for sure. In fact, there hadn’t been anyone since before the tiger had taken a chunk out of her. Three years! No wonder she’d jumped him last night. No wonder his magic hands were making her muscles turn to liquid and her heart flutter in her chest. It had been awhile and she was horny and he was hot as all hell.
Kett looked back over her shoulder at him. He was clean, but he still looked scruffy as hell. A day or two of stubble a
nd hair that went all over the place, eyes bracketed by lines that said he laughed a lot. A good mouth. A great mouth. Kett had a minor fantasy of that mouth on her pussy, that stubble scraping her inner thighs, and lost her breath.
“You okay?” Bael asked, his voice low and husky. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” Kett breathed, and his eyes met hers. A slow smile came over that great mouth of his.
“Maybe,” his thumb drew circles on the back of her thigh, “I should kiss it all better.”
“Not unless you like the taste of liniment,” Kett said, but otherwise the thought had great appeal.
“That’s a good point. Perhaps if I kiss other places instead it might take your mind off it?”
A roll of heat surged over her and she nodded, unable to speak. Bael grinned, dropped his head and licked her hip, and she let out a hard breath.
Then the door burst open. Kett’s head came up so fast her neck made a snapping sound, and her cousin was standing in the doorway, hand to her mouth.
“Oh, sorry,” she exclaimed, but she didn’t sound it.
Once again, Kett couldn’t quite manage to speak. She could feel the heat of Bael’s breath on her hip and thought about his tongue licking her somewhere else and nearly sobbed because she wanted it so much.
She swallowed and found her voice. “Chance,” she managed. “Don’t you knock?”
Chance grinned. “It’s more fun this way.”
“Oh, you are so your father’s daughter.”
Chance rolled her eyes, and Kett wondered if her cousin had undergone a lobotomy. Being reminded she was the daughter of the Realms’ most evil man wasn’t usually something Chance enjoyed.
Kett frequently thanked whichever gods might be listening that she wasn’t related to him by blood.
Then the doorway was filled from top to bottom, side to side, with the imposing frame of Chance’s—boyfriend? Lover? Fuck-buddy? Kett decided lobotomy was definitely the answer. It seemed to have the same sort of effect as falling in love.
And what a man she’d chosen to fall in love with. Kett wasn’t given to fits of jealousy, but surely it wasn’t fair that Chance had found a man who was not only potently delicious, handsome, strong and kind, but also bona fide royalty, the king of his people. The Nasc, who were born with an animal twin with whom to share their soul, worshipped their ruler.