by Megan Hart
“What is that?”
“One of the five principles.”
Jacquin’s smile stretched thin. “One you’ve not yet managed to follow, then.”
“You’re thinking of yourself as well,” Annalise said wearily. A dull throbbing had begun behind her eyes. She wanted him to go. She wanted this all to go.
“I make no claims at a calling. Ask yourself what would be the best course here, sweetheart. That’s all I want you to do. Think about it. I plead your mercy,” he added, a hand over his heart and sounding sincere. “I’ve spoken out of turn and with anger, and that was never my intent.”
She nodded, unwilling to forget all he’d said but unable to replace the affection of years with contempt, now. “I will think about what you said.”
“Then I suppose that’s all I can ask.” He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it formally. “Good-bye, Annalise. I’ll write to you. Don’t let another month pass without doing the same.”
“I won’t.”
Then, with another look back at her, Jacquin headed toward the stables. Annalise waited a few minutes to gather her composure before making her way toward the Motherhouse. She was in sore need of some quiet to think.
Her feet led her there as though she’d been tied to a ribbon being pulled by an unseen hand. Step by step, through familiar halls and past dark rooms, down some stairs, until she got to his room.
She sought peace, but found Cassian instead.
Chapter 20
He was unsurprised to find her at his door. When she pushed past him and into his room, Cassian shut the door behind her and left it unlocked. It seemed likely Annalise would be leaving as swiftly as she’d entered.
She stalked to his dresser, helped herself to a glass of worm. Quaffed it. Wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. Turned.
“Your betrothed has taken his horse from the stables and gone away. And here you are. Is he sending a carriage for you, later?” Cassian formed the words carefully yet didn’t manage to keep his tone as neutral as he’d planned.
Annalise’s head snapped up, her gaze stormy and mouth grimly set. “No, he’s not, no matter how that might please you.”
He bristled at once, she ever the oil to his water. “Don’t presume you know my mind well enough to speak it for me.”
She drew a sharp, hitching breath and turned her back. “I presume naught, sir, but speak my mind as freely as I ever have. If I presume, it’s because you yourself have led me to make such a guess as to your thoughts.”
“So you’re not leaving, then?”
Her shoulders slumped. “Should I?”
He’d thought for sure she’d be gone already. That she seemed hesitant should’ve set him a bit more at ease, but for the fact that Cassian had long ago ceased to understand the feeling of ease. It was better that way.
“I wouldn’t presume to make your decision for you.”
In her cheeks, two bright pink spots burned. “No? You have ever made your opinions clear on all else. Yet this time, when I come to you with a clear request for your thoughts, you . . . you . . .”
“Why is this even a question?” Cassian asked, hoping to fend off her tears.
“Why?” Annalise tossed up her hands and shook her head until her braid swung. “This is my life we’re discussing, not some random happenstance. My life!”
“Your life,” he pointed out. He doubted in that moment she’d have noticed any quaver in his voice, but he did his best to keep it calm anyway. “Your choices.”
When she buried her face in her hands, he thought for sure she wept. Yet the tears but glinted in her gaze; they hadn’t yet escaped her eyes. She blinked and turned her face up to the ceiling. She drew in a breath. When she looked at him again, it was steadily.
“I have choices?”
“One always has choices, Annalise.”
She gave a short bark of laughter and lifted her glass, this time to drain it. She settled it carefully on the dresser and ran her fingertip around the rim of, then licked it. She looked at him.
“When I came here, I honestly didn’t believe I’d ever finish the training, take the vows. I didn’t think I’d ever find whatever the others have inside them that allows them to serve. Absolute solace?” she scoffed. “How on earth could I possibly lead anyone toward what I’ve never known, myself? What I don’t believe exists?”
“You needn’t have experienced it to provide it to another.”
“Pretty words from a pretty mouth.” She licked her lips, gaze bright, hectic color still dotting her cheeks. “But it’s a lie, Cassian. Tell me it’s not.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You won’t tell me. That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
She made to pour herself another glass, but he strode across the room and took the bottle from her. He corked it. Then he opened the dresser’s top drawer and placed the bottle carefully inside and closed it, locked it with the small key jutting from the lock, and tucked the key into his pocket.
“I thought we were friends,” she said, “yet you’d be so stingy with your drink, I cannot believe it.”
“You’ve had enough. Come, Annalise,” he said softly. “You should go to your room until this passes.”
She shrugged off his grip. “Until what passes?”
“This melancholy.”
She gaped, then shook her head and backed away from him. “Melancholy? You think this is something as light as melancholy, Cassian?”
“You’re intoxicated on worm.”
“I’m not,” she protested, “for you’ve stolen it away before I could possibly have drunk enough.”
She stared at him defiantly, then dropped her gaze and squared her shoulders. “Never mind. I thought I could come to you with my worries. I see I was wrong.”
“If ever I gave you the impression otherwise, I plead your mercy,” he told her, uncertain if she meant to leave or shame him further with her accusations. He rather expected the latter. He wasn’t certain he didn’t deserve to be so shamed.
“You can’t have it.”
“Annalise.” He sighed. “What would you have me do?”
“Be my friend!” She advanced upon him. “Such as you said you wished to be! Such as I’ve tried to be to you these past weeks, at no small cost to myself, I might add.”
“Nobody asked it of you. I didn’t ask it of you!”
“Why is it that every time it seems as though you and I are about to make some manner of progress in this, you make sure to push me away? For every brick I take down between us you add two more, Cassian.” She gazed at him from wet, bleak eyes he couldn’t bear. “Why?”
He had a handful of answers, all of which refused to leap from his tongue. She took two faltering steps toward him and stopped. He wanted to move closer. He wanted to move away.
He didn’t move.
“Should I stay and become a Handmaiden, Cassian, or should I leave and marry Jacquin, as he wishes?”
The sound of the other man’s name grated in his ears. “If I told you what to do in this matter, Annalise, and I pushed you toward the wrong path, you would ever blame me for so encouraging you.”
“And if it was the right path?”
“You would ever blame me for not allowing you to be the one who made the choice at taking it.”
She blinked.
“I know you,” he told her. “You may not believe it of me, Annalise, but I do. You would ever resent me for being the one who decided for you. And I . . . I find the idea of you resenting me forever unpalatable.”
A smile flickered briefly before vanishing. “You would have me stay here? In the Order? With . . . you?”
With me, he thought, but didn’t say. “In the Order, working toward the taking of your vows. After which, as you well know, you’d be required to begin taking patrons.”
She blinked again. “I know it.”
He turned to study the glass she set upon his dresser. He could see the faint mark of her
mouth on the glass. If he drank from it now, from just that spot, it would be almost as though he kissed her.
“I would hear you say it, anyway, if such is your preference,” Annalise said quietly.
Cassian said nothing.
“Do you remember the first time we met?”
“I’m fair certain I shall never forget it,” Cassian said.
“You pointed me to a certain path. You told me then it would take me to where I needed to go. Can you deny you told me true, then?”
His voice, pushed from a throat hoarse and dry, rasped on his reply. “No.”
“And yet you cannot tell me now?”
Cassian shook his head.
“Jacquin says he loves me.”
He looked at her and long silence spun between them, fragile as spidersilk. “He has every reason to.”
Her eyes fluttered against another spate of tears. The color had faded from her tawny cheeks, even from her normally crimson lips. He’d never seen her look so drawn, knew she’d have squawked did she know the state of her features . . . and yet she’d never looked so lovely to him as she did when she turned and left him behind.
Annalise. Wait.”
She didn’t stop, convinced she so wished to hear him stop her that she’d imagined Cassian’s burr-rough voice saying her name. When it came again, closer this time, she turned as his hand closed around her wrist.
And then his mouth was on hers, hard and sweet. She was in his arms, the floor beneath her sliding away as he lifted her. Cassian cradled her to his chest without ever moving his mouth from hers, only giving way when he lay her on his bed and she gasped against his mouth.
Words would ruin it as they so often had before, from both of them. And yet they spoke—in soft sighs and the small, unashamed groans. His mouth found hers again. His tongue slipped inside, stroking. She opened for him and held him close.
No frantic grappling, no frenzied coupling this time. She’d known from their interlude in the closet that Cassian knew delightfully well how to please a woman swiftly. Now she discovered he knew how to please her slowly, as well.
The buttons at the front of her gown were of carved bone, smooth and easily slipped from their moorings. She’d done it herself dozens of times. Now Annalise stretched her arms above her head, Cassian’s hand pinning her wrists as he used his other hand to slide free the buttons and lay open her gown. The thin shift she wore beneath offered no protection from the chill of the air or the puff of his hot breath as he moved his mouth from hers to her jaw, her throat, the first rising swells of her breasts above the shift’s neckline.
He flicked open the ribbon and the neckline drooped. Cassian’s mouth moved lower. Wet heat engulfed her flesh. Annalise moved beneath him, no longer held in place by his hand. She arched into his embrace.
Cassian sighed over wet flesh and suckled her nipples gently, first one then the other, before moving up to kiss her mouth again. The worm had blunted her tongue but she could still taste him. She put her hands into his hair’s dark thickness, wound her fingers tight to keep him from moving away from her.
His kisses gentled. He kissed her mouth, cheeks, each eye. His lips brushed her forehead and the slope of her brows. The curve of her ears and jaw. Then back to her mouth, where he just barely grazed her lips with his.
When he pulled away, Annalise thought Cassian meant to stop, and she let out a murmur of protest. He laughed, low and throaty and entirely unexpectedly. It was the most sensual noise she’d ever heard. Desire splintered inside her, beginning deep within her core but reaching every limb, every part of her within a heartbeat or two.
“Cassian.”
He closed his eyes for half a moment, and again she thought she’d lost him. But when he opened them, he focused first on her mouth, then her eyes. “Yes, Annalise.”
She wanted to ask him if she were there with him or if some memory had overtaken him, but she sealed the words up tight before they could be let loose. If it were true, she didn’t want to know. She would take this now, here with him, no matter what it was.
No matter what it would be.
“Kiss me?”
“Gladly.” He did.
He bent back to the work of undoing her buttons, down past her waist and to the hem. She never unbuttoned her gown the entire way and felt laid out like a package now. A gift unwrapped. She slipped her arms from the sleeves and reveled in the air upon her naked flesh as Cassian took her wrist. He held his mouth to the spot where her pulse beat wildly. His teeth pressed her skin. His tongue swiped against her.
He got off the bed and stood to stare down at her. His jacket had the same buttons, same high collar as her gown, and Cassian stripped out of it as swiftly as he’d opened hers. His red shirt went next and he tossed it to the floor.
“Land Above,” Annalise said.
She’d known he was lean and muscled. She hadn’t guessed he would be so sculpted. His hair, as dark and thick as that on his head, curled around his nipples and in a narrow line leading from just below his navel and disappearing into his waistband. His arms, too, were muscled, the forearms covered in the same crisp, dark hair. She couldn’t see the thatch of it between his legs—but if what he had on his chest and arms was any indication, Cassian was thoroughly, utterly male.
The thought of it sent another wave of desire coursing through her. She’d ever found a fondness for men who groomed themselves—oiled their hair, shaved cleanly, dressed according to fashion, and made personal taste of the most importance. But with Cassian, there was naught about the clothes to turn the head. Not of his hair, or use of cologne, or in any affectations.
“You’re real,” she said aloud. “Entirely real.”
He ran a hand over his chest and belly almost absently, then put it to the buttons at his waist. “Is that a disappointment? That I’m not a dream, some myth?”
She pushed herself onto her elbows to watch him slide the trousers over his lean hips and down strong, muscled thighs. “No.”
Watching him, so suddenly comfortable in his nakedness, Annalise felt unaccountably shy. Her nipples had tightened. She felt exposed in her obvious arousal and cupped her breasts, the weight of them familiar, yet strange.
Naked, Cassian moved to the bed and up her body to kiss her again. Her gown shifted and bunched beneath them until he reached under her to pull it away. He rolled her at the same time until she ended atop him, sprawling on his broad chest with the shift tangled between them.
He ran his hands up and down her sleeves. “Take this off.”
“If it pleases you.” The words rose as naturally to her tongue as any ever had. Spoken as a true Handmaiden might to a patron.
Both of them froze, but Cassian melted first. He pulled her close to kiss her mouth, then breathe against her and speak, each word brushing his lips on hers.
“I would have it please you, as well.”
Annalise sat upright, straddling him. She tugged the shift off over her head and tossed it aside. His gaze covered her, eyes gleaming. She was no longer nervous.
Cassian ran his hands over her hips and belly to rest just below her breasts. “You are so beautiful.”
Heat had followed the path of his fingers; now it flared higher, up her throat and over her cheeks. She bit her lower lip to hold in a sigh, then let it out, anyway. There should be no shame in this, for either of them. It had taken them long enough to get here.
“I always thought you were beautiful, from the first,” he said.
Annalise moved on his thighs to rub herself gently along his lengthening cock and smiled when Cassian swallowed hard. “Really? You hid it well.”
He pushed his hips upward a little to stroke himself along the heat between her legs. “It would have been unseemly to do anything else.”
She leaned down, her hands flat on the bed to either side of his head. She kissed him, long and fully and thoroughly. “I believe I like you when you’re unseemly.”
Atop him this way, Annalise had the power to ki
ss him fiercely or pull away, to shift her body so she stroked his cock with her cunt and urged him to gasp. She reached between them to guide him inside her, but Cassian drew her tight against him, forcing her still. She looked into his eyes.
“It has been overlong for me. I would be . . . slower.”
“If it pleases you,” she teased and gloried in the way he groaned at her words.
“It would not please me to spend myself like an untried boy, Annalise.”
She laughed, but kindly, and took his lower lip between her teeth to gently tug when she kissed him. Under her palm, flat on his chest, Cassian’s heart thumped steadily and swift. She bent to kiss his skin there, the tickle of curling dark hair tickling her lips and nose.
She breathed him in. “I have ever found your scent so unbearably pleasant.”
“How can somewhat be both unbearable and pleasant?”
“Delicious,” she told him with a lick of his nipple that pulled it into sweet tightness. “Pleasant, lovely, and yet unbearable as it reminded me all the more of what I could not have.”
He shifted beneath her, hands roaming as she kissed and licked and nipped all over his chest. “Yet here you are, with me naked beneath you.”
“Ah, but I do not have you,” she whispered around the sudden swell of emotion closing her throat.
Cassian tugged off the ribbon binding the end of her braid and ran his fingers through her hair, unkinking the strands. He put his hands to the sides of her face and drew her to his mouth. He kissed her.
“You have me,” he said.
Annalise drew a slow, sobbing breath and buried her face into the side of his neck. Cassian held her close, big hands warm upon her naked flesh. They breathed in. Out. Her heart had taken up the beat of his.
She was unsure how she ended up under him again, only that it happened without effort. Their kisses ebbed and flowed, soft and hard, lingering and swift.
She was already languid and liquid when he moved his mouth along her throat to pause in the hollow at its base. He licked, then suckled along her collarbone. Down to her nipples, giving each one equal and thorough attention until she could no longer hold back a cry.