Maari sat, clutching the blanket to her chest, and Annah gracefully sank into the chair across from her, staring at her beautifully appointed plate with obvious delight. “It smells amazing, and those berries! The whole arrangement is so lovely!”
“I’m glad you’ve found such delight in my imprisonment,” Maari snapped as she selected her dinner fork.
“I— I apologize.” Annah looked crestfallen by the criticism. “I’ve just never…” She shrugged with a miserable glance at the beautiful meal.
Maari sighed. “Of course you haven’t. I’m sorry.” In truth, she had no idea how or what her handmaids had been fed at home, and while such culinary presentations were commonplace—and in fact, this one could be considered quite modest—for a princess, they were without a doubt unheard of for a servant. “Please enjoy the meal. One of us certainly should.”
But Annah only stared down at her plate, evidently reluctant to even pick up her fork before Maari took her first bite. So, with another sigh, the princess speared a cube of herbed potato and bit into it. And finally, Annah began to eat.
“I don’t suppose it would have been too much to ask for a little wine with our dinner, would it?” Maari frowned at her untouched glass of water. “I mean, I’m not pregnant yet.”
Annah’s fork stilled on its way to her mouth, and she leaned over the table to whisper to the princess, too softly to be overheard, if there were cameras in the room. “And you need not ever be pregnant, if you don’t want to.”
Maari blinked at her companion. Annah had said something similar earlier, in the bathroom. “Okay, that’s quite enough of the cryptic talk,” she whispered in return. “Exactly what are you trying to tell me?”
But before Annah could expound upon her enigmatic declaration, the bedroom door opened again, and Maari turned toward it so fast that a bite of chicken flew from her fork to land on the heated stone floor. Jude had told his brothers to let her recover. Surely he hadn’t changed his mind so—
Two women in gray domestic service uniforms entered the room carrying armloads of folded material, which they stacked on top of the dresser. While the princess and her companion ate in silence, each eager to continue their private conversation, the servants stripped the large four-post bed and remade it with the fresh bedding they’d brought. Even though only the comforter had been soiled.
On their way out of the room, carrying large bundles of the used bedding, one of the maids knelt to pick up Maari’s lost bite of chicken. As they retreated into the hallway, they closed and locked the door, isolating the two women inside once again.
“What if there’s a fire?” Maari demanded with a scowl at her half-full plate. “Are we going to roast alive in here?”
Annah shrugged around a mouthful of chicken. “Stone doesn’t burn. And I’m sure there’s a fire-suppression system built into every room. There was at home.” By which she meant Maari’s home, of course. The palace in Bannon, which the princess would likely never see again.
Maari pushed her plate aside and leaned over the table. “Finish what you were saying,” she whispered. “That I need not be pregnant, if I don’t want to be. How can I possibly avoid it, with three men determined to breed me?”
Annah’s brown eyes shone with the excitement of a friend about to bestow a precious gift. “The Camden princes aren’t the only ones the gods bestowed gifts on, princess. Women of your mother’s royal bloodline have a unique ability as well.”
“What ability?” Maari selected the largest strawberry from the tray and plucked the C-shaped chocolate accent from the cream filling. “How have I never heard this about my own family?”
“My mother served at your mother’s side, you know,” Annah began. “From the day she turned thirteen until the very end. And when the queen lay dying, after she’d given birth to your sister Amalie, you were too young to understand the gift she’d passed on to you, through your bloodline.”
Maari had been five years old at the time, and she was unable to understand the cause of her mother’s weakened state, or why no physician in the greatest stead on the planet could seem to help her.
Even now, she couldn’t quite understand a woman dying from childbirth, so far removed from both ancient times and modern poverty.
“So your mother confided in my mother,” Annah continued. “So that her secret might be passed down in her absence. The queen directed that you be told on your wedding night, as a gift from her—the gift of choice—even though she couldn’t be there with you.”
Maari’s sigh seemed to deflate her. “But now I’m not going to have a wedding night.”
“Yet you need that gift, all the more.” Annah smiled softly. “Princess, the women of your bloodline can choose not to ovulate until they reach a state of emotional fulfillment. Until they fall in love,” she clarified, when Maari appeared confused.
“I— What?” Maari frowned, her strawberry forgotten. “How is that possible?”
Annah shrugged as she picked up her fork, still careful to keep her voice low. “How is it possible that the Camden brothers can infect you with lust for them, making you vulnerable to your own urges the moment they come near you?”
“Fair enough. So, how does that work, exactly? How do I…choose?”
“According to your mother, it’s all a matter of desire. Should you want to conceive with a man you don’t love, you will be able to. I assume that would have proven helpful, if you had married Elan Edgar, yet never really come to care for him.” She shrugged. “That wouldn’t really have been any reason to deny yourself children or to deny him heirs. But now, so long as your heart remains hardened to the Camden brothers and you don’t wish to conceive for them, you will not ovulate.”
“Are you sure? Do you have any evidence that this is true?” Maari found such a wonderful secret difficult to believe, but she wasn’t sure who she suspected of originating the lie—Annah or her mother, or the late Delayne queen herself.
Annah selected a strawberry, and she let the chocolate accent melt on her tongue before she answered. “According to my mother, it wasn’t simply bad fortune that has kept your aunt Elodie barren for twenty years, after she was married off to the third-born prince of Stead Aaron. They say her husband is an abusive brute who planned to use her as a broodmare while he philandered all over the globe.” She shrugged again as she bit into the cream-filled berry. “So Princess Elodie denied him what he wanted most in the world: an heir.”
“How very satisfying.” Maari sucked the cream from her berry, and while it dissolved on her tongue, she contemplated the power that must come with such an ability. Her power, to deny the Camden brothers the shared bloodline the council had promised them. No matter what they took from her.
“Don’t underestimate the Camdens, though, princess,” Annah said as she wiped chocolate from her fingers onto her napkin.
“Underestimate them, how?”
Annah considered a moment before she answered, clearly trying to decide how best to phrase her warning. “It is very difficult to maintain an emotional distance from someone who provides for your needs on a regular basis. That distance becomes even more difficult to maintain when the need being met is…pleasurable.”
Maari blinked at her companion, as her meaning became clear. “You think the Camdens can literally fuck the rage right out of me?”
If the princess meant to shock her companion with her vulgarity, she failed utterly. “I think if that happens, it’ll happen so slowly you won’t even notice the change until it’s too late. One day, one of them won’t leave as soon as he’s done with you, and you’ll begin to talk, still intoxicated by pleasure. Bonded to him by a shared release and vulnerable because just being near him makes you want him all over again. Common courtesy will begin to feel like kindness. Pleasure like affection.” Annah pushed her own plate aside and leaned across the table, holding Maari’s gaze with the intensity of her own. “You cannot afford to fall in love with even one of them, princess.”
Gareth’s face flashed behind her eyes, staring up at her from the floor where his head had landed when Jude Camden had detached it from his body. Maari’s hands clenched around fistfuls of the blanket she wore. “That will not be a problem.”
6
Jude
Jude sank into his favorite chair with a glass in his hand, filled with two fingers of amber liquor. “Fire, on,” he ordered, and as he sipped from the glass, the fireplace in front of him roared instantly to life.
He didn’t need the blaze for warmth, of course, this late in the spring. In fact, he’d had to lower the temperature in his private suite just to be able to stand the heat from the flames. But—though he’d never admit it to Malac—he loved to look into the fire, even when all it devoured was a steady feed of gas fuel.
Flames, regardless of their source, felt wild. They were the only thing in this damned palace that didn’t feel neat, and clean, and perfectly pressed. Scheduled and perfectly portioned. Domesticated.
That was the heart of it. Domestication. Jude abhorred domestication.
Battlefield chaos, he understood. Yes, soldiers strategized, but in war, plans never worked out exactly as they were intended. A soldier had to be prepared to improvise. To think on the fly. To adapt.
A soldier was never bored.
Kings, though… The cornerstone of a king’s castle was boredom. It had to be, to keep the sovereign out of harm’s way.
Jude never wanted to be king. At least, not until he was too old to be good for anything other than making decisions for other people, far-removed from the consequences. He’d planned to command the Stead Camden military—specifically, the spacefleet’s flagship—for the next decade, going wherever glory took him. Hopefully far off-world.
Then Gareth Delayne had murdered his father.
Planet-side war had followed, and as a commander, Jude had itched for the opportunity to avenge his father’s death on a large scale. But the very event that gave him the fight he’d always craved had also sidelined him from it. Because a king cannot fight on the front lines. A king has larger responsibilities, to himself, to his stead, and to his family.
A king’s primary duty is to stay safe, in order to lead his people.
Until today, Jude had not found pleasure or satisfaction in a single one of his sovereign responsibilities. But Maari Delayne…
His cock swelled, just thinking of the tight, warm passage between her thighs. Of the fire in her fierce gaze.
His request in the great hall at Saintton, the Stead Aaron capitol, hadn’t taken only the Delaynes by surprise. He hadn’t bothered to consult his brothers, either, before demanding the princess as their concubine. And in truth, he hadn’t been entirely confident the council would approve his demand. No doubt they’d only intended to give him one of the princess’s handmaids. To combine the Camden and Delayne bloodlines in a symbolic sense.
But they’d offered him a Delayne woman, and Jude Camden was not accustomed to accepting substitutions. And there tiny little Maari Delayne had stood, glaring daggers at him with those dark, beautiful eyes. Flames sparking in the whispered wrath she’d unleashed in that huddle with her brothers. There was no ring on her finger, and for a princess, that virtually guaranteed virginity. Which meant there would be no question, should she conceive quickly, that the child was truly the product of a Camden-Delayne union.
In addition, Maari Delayne hated him. Which meant she would need to be tamed. And there was little else in the world that Jude Camden liked more than taming a woman. At least now that his days on the flagship were through.
He’d known with one look at the Delayne princess that whatever else she might be, she would not be dull. And so far, she had proven him right about that.
With a satisfied growl, Jude drained his glass and set it on the side table to his left. He picked up the slim, transparent com screen and tapped through a menu to open a closed-circuit security feed.
The princess appeared on his screen, still flushed head-to-toe from their encounter. She lay face down on her bed—the four-post behemoth Jude had insisted upon—and appeared to be crying into the soiled comforter. He felt an odd tug at his gut as he watched.
Had he been too harsh with her?
No. He’d allowed her pleasure. Twice.
In fact, her release had pushed him over the edge—a phenomenon Jude had never experienced before. When she’d looked up at him with the mindless glaze of lust in her eyes… When she’d begun to clench around him. When she begged him for more… That surrender of everything she was to everything he could give her had made his balls tighten, his release taunting him like the grip of her hot cunt.
And it had been glorious, watching her gasp beneath him. Feeling her clench around him. The way her skin had flushed. The way her hands had clawed at him, her legs anchoring him to her, drawing him deeper into her tight, hot, demanding little pussy.
Somehow, Maari was the perfect combination of frightened virgin and wanton temptress. The best parts of both a wife and a whore. Though she was neither.
Somehow, she was more. She was his.
Yet now, she lay crying in her maid’s arms.
This princess was an enigma, that much was certain. She’d endured three days in the darkcell without food or water, yet she’d hardly shed a tear until he’d come to end her punishment. Which he knew, because he’d observed more of her time in the cell than he’d like to admit, as invigorated by her defiance as he was determined to quash it. As he was, perhaps, to spark it anew, and begin this game all over again.
And tonight, she’d swallowed his entire cock—a feat he’d been told was not altogether comfortable—and had then lost her virginity with no true gentleness on his part. Yet, again, she hadn’t shed a single tear until he’d left her to recover from his attentions.
True, he’d specifically ordered her not to cry, but that hadn’t seemed much of a concern, once lust had glazed over her eyes and taken control of her hips, thrusting them up at him in an untrained but sincere and enthusiastic effort to claim her own pleasure.
Which he’d given her in spades. So why was she now upset?
Not that it mattered.
Jude swiped the screen clear of the security feed and dropped the device on the table. A king could not allow himself to become concerned with what upset his concubine. Nor could he be expected to address her complaints. Whatever they were.
She should not be allowed to misunderstand this arrangement. To think that there would be kindness from him. Nor tenderness or affection. He had a job to do. A duty to conceive with her. And that was all there could be between them even if he never knew for sure that the child was his.
Best if Maari understood that right away.
Even if he privately enjoyed her defiance, and the opportunities it provided him to take a firm hand with her.
The door to his private den opened without so much as a courteous knock, and Jude exhaled slowly, without bothering to turn and look. Only one person in the entire kingdom would dare to enter without knocking.
“This is my private suite, Malac. Do you understand what the word ‘private’ means?”
“She’s crying.” Malac dropped into the chair across from Jude’s, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Waiting expectantly for his brother’s—his king’s—response.
“‘Private’ means I’m the only one who’s allowed to be in here.”
Malac glanced around the richly furnished space, unimpressed by the leather furniture and expensive rugs. “It’s just a fucking room. Did you hear me? The princess is crying.”
“How do you know that?” Malac didn’t have access to the security feed yet, which meant there was only one way he could know what was currently happening in the lilac room. Jude exhaled again, fighting for patience. While his brother avoided the question. “Did you listen outside her door? I told you to go to bed.”
“I’m not a fucking child. And what the hell am I supposed to do in bed, anyway?” Malac stood and helped h
imself to a glass from the liquor cart. “You prohibited me from getting my cock wet for the rest of the night.”
“You could sleep.”
“Fuck that. She’s crying, Jude. She’s in there with her fucking handmaid, crying.”
Jude snorted. “And you’re fundamentally offended by a woman’s tears?”
“Hell no. But I recognize an opportunity when I see one. Let me go comfort her.”
“You may not fuck her until Orlann’s had her. He’s second in line to the throne, and you’re a bastard.”
“Yet he sits behind a desk in Valemont, pushing a pencil and arguing with old men for half the year, while I’ve spent the past five years leading your fleet into combat. Defending Stead Camden and seizing glory in its name.”
Jude did not appreciate the reminder that Malac—unencumbered by the obligations of the crown—was free to earn commendations in battle that should rightly have belonged to him. But the whelp had distinguished himself, racking up victories in skirmishes where they were outnumbered and without reinforcements.
In large part, that was because Malac didn’t run the Camden fleet like a man who’d been formally educated in the art of war—because he hadn’t been. He approached battle with the bitter rage of a bastard accustomed to being told where he didn’t belong, and to forcing his way in anyway.
That tenacity had proven indispensable on the battlefield, both on terra firma and in the air.
“If you’re going to drink my liquor, at least have the courtesy to pour some for me.” Jude held his empty glass out.
With an easy grin, Malac filled it. “Come on, Jude. Let me have her.”
“She should rest.”
Malac replaced the stopper on the decanter and handed the king his drink. “She’ll sleep well, once I’m done with her. You know that’s true.”
“Tomorrow.” Jude took a long sip. “After Orlann’s had her. That’s only fair.”
“Just her ass, then.” Malac sank into his seat again. “I’ll teach her to like it. And that way her pussy can ‘rest.’”
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