Page 14 of The Bone King and the Starling

THE TEMPTRESS

T he surprise on her face wounds me, but I release her and let her push herself up on my chest. She looks thoroughly fucked even though she still wears her tunic and I still wear my pants. My cum-covered pants. I cannot believe I emptied inside of my trousers like a young lad… Then again… My gaze runs over her face, its luminous color, her voluminous curls, her lush breasts and hips…and I chuckle.

“You tempt me too greatly, little bird,” I say, laughing outright. “You’ve made a liar of me.” I slide out from beneath her body and resettle her on the bed while she stares. Quickly, before I can command the obedience of my own limbs, I spread her legs at the knees, duck my head between her thighs and press an open-mouthed kiss onto her lower lips.

She gasps and I pull back as soon as I feel her fingers light on the back of my head. I cannot stand the feel of her touch. It sends me to places I find difficult to crawl out of. Dark, dangerous pits where there exists nothing but our bodies, nothing but flesh and want and lust. And she needs rest.

Fuck.

“Fuck.” I groan and tilt my head back, separating our bodies by the length of the bed. Standing at its foot, I grab hold of my lengthening cock through my trousers and watch her sitting there, her brown shoulder gleaming in the torchlight as her tunic slips. “You are a temptation too great for a poor, weak man like me. I want to fuck you like a filthy whore every night, but that is not all that I want from you. I want so much more.”

Cheeks flushed, eyes aglow, she still looks so…uncertain. “But…” She shakes her head, her curls twisting and glistening in the light. She is stunning. Stunning is even too trite a word. “But I don’t…You cannot want me for a queen…”

“Not a queen. The queen.” I feel uncomfortable, and not only because of the semen drying in my pants. “I want you for my wife.” My voice breaks. Does she hear it? I hope, for the sake of my own pride, she does not.

“How…many wives do you keep?”

“One.”

“So, I would become your second?”

“No, little bird.”

Her lower lip trembles. “I…I cannot do that.”

I clench, my entire body tightening. “Why not?”

“I’m a thrall…”

“Were a thrall…”

“I just…”

“What?”

“I cannot…” She shakes her head.

“Why?”

“Why?” She sounds shocked. Her lower lip trembles. “Why would you…make such an offer to me?”

“Why do you care?”

“It frightens me.”

Our exchange has become slightly more heated and I find myself riled and wanting to ravage, knowing that I have found a wife with whom I can spar, yet annoyed that our sparring over this subject — the subject of her worth — is so constant. I try to ease my tone as I speak next, Puhyo’s words ringing in my mind over again. Easy.

“The gods placed you in my path. When I saw you, they spoke.”

But she’s still shaking her head. “If that were true, you would have made me an offer before bringing me to your bed.”

I find myself unable to counter what she has said with anything but the truth. I rush her, returning to where I sat at her side at the head of the bed. I slide both hands around her neck, tilt her torso back until she’s forced to give me her weight and move in to kiss her. She yields to me, her lips opening like a gift, but I manage restraint like I never have.

“I am weak.” I deny her mouth and instead, plant small kisses over her cheeks. “I have waited a long time for my wife. To have found her, yet be unable to touch her until our return to Ithanuir was too great a torture to imagine. I have…” I falter, knowing this confession will cost me. “I have not taken another before.”

She stares between my eyes, disbelieving. “You are…king…”

“And I am first a believer in Ghabari and Raya. Would he have disrespected Raya so?”

“But…but you…” She shakes her head, seeming to shake off the shock of hearing that hers is the first body I’ve claimed for my own. Her voice grows shrewd as she asks, “Why then did you have Torbun suggest…that I would be offered riches in exchange for my body? You could have simply asked me… You’re the king. I wouldn’t have said no.”

Anger licks up and down my spine, hot and hard to contain. I wrench back, pacing away from her once more and running my hands through my hair. “You would have said yes to the king, but what would you have said to Calai?”

She bites her trembling bottom lip, temptress that she is. I grab my cock. She glances at it and I see that she’s holding her breath before she exhales words meant to torture me. “You frighten me, Calai. Not just the stories I’ve heard of you as king but your intensity…the way you seem so sure about me.”

“Since when is conviction something to be feared?”

She fists the hem of her tunic and sits back onto her heels. “You don’t even know me. And I don’t know you. We’ve known each other a day.”

“Two.”

She cocks her head.

“I saw you first in the darkness, at your town square. You were strong, tough, even though you are not a warrior and were being intimidated by a much larger boy. That is what I first admired about you. The ferocity I saw in you.”

She touches her mouth. Understanding sunrises in her eyes. “You…were the stranger in the square?”

“I was.”

She touches her chest. “You were very kind. I…” Her cheeks flame pale pink beneath her beautiful brown skin. She glows with her sheepishness, making me want to coddle her to my chest and keep her all to myself, forever. As I will. “I dreamed of you that night. I hoped I’d see you again.”

I smile. “The gods crossed our paths for a reason, Starling. I know that I ask much of you, wife, but even if you still fear me, do not fear the gods. They would not have laid your path over mine for no reason.” I cross the room towards her, knowing I have lingered too long and need to return to the hall. I can hear the rising sounds of commotion, the higher-ranked villagers likely fearing destabilization. Some may even want to challenge my edict. I will need to swiftly put a stop to that. Bloodily, perhaps.

Yet, this is more important.

I wait and watch my little bird make swift calculations in her mind. I know not if she is a believer in the gods, but when she finally issues me a curt nod, I smile. “You believe me? Believe in the gods?”

She returns my grin with a tentative, hopeful one of her own. “I’ve never had much reason to believe in the gods. They’ve never given me much — a terrible father and a terrified mother — and the little that I was given was always later taken away.”

I inhale rage, and exhale brighter rage. Easy. “Is that what you fear? That what might be offered will later be stripped from you?”

“Not wholly, but a little. I think…my greater fear…is disappointment. I am no great warrior, no great beauty. You will tire of me in days, or weeks, or even years. Even Olec is known to bed the thralls and the farm girls and he loves Rosalind…”

“Shh,” I say. I return to the bed, ignoring thoughts of her father, of Olec, of the males and females who’ve wronged or disappointed her, made her feel unworthy of me. I take her hands in mine and I offer her a simple vow, one I should have offered her before Ghabari had I the strength to do things properly.

“As I’ve told you, I am a believer in the gods. And I fear Raya as I do Ghabari. When I say I marry once, I mean that in all ways. Our binding, should you accept, will be the only one I’ll ever have. And I do not fear disappointment. Because you are a warrior, I have seen it.”

I tuck her hair behind her ear. Watch her face turn up to mine. Her eyelids flutter at my small touches, like she’s never been touched with any degree of kindness before in her life. “And you do not understand beauty if you do not see it in your own face,” I whisper. “I had not seen you yet when I decided to help you with Tori two nights ago, but when the moon shone on you in the square, I knew I had never seen anything so lovely. Do not deface or demean that which I hold in so high regard.”

“You speak too kindly to me. It would be easier to accept your offer if you were mean.”

I chuckle and press my lips to her forehead. “It will not be easy. We will need to learn each other. But I can tell you already I like all that I’ve seen.”

She looks up at me, such hope, such shaky, tenuous hope in her eyes, and says, “As do I. I think…I think I could make you a fine wife. At least, I will try.”

Her words are aloe against the bright burn across my chest. My heart swells. I feel the magic of the moment coalesce around us. I kiss her lips tenderly, then roughly twice more. Wrenching back, I clear my throat and try to speak through the glass that has embedded itself in my throat. “You do not need to try. Come as you are.”

She grins so wide, it hurts me in my bones. I know in this moment, I would do anything for this female, anything to guarantee her smiles. I drop my hand to her throat. “I am making some changes here in Winterbren. You have helped navigate me and I need to communicate some of these new thoughts you’ve given me to the others. I will be back for dinner. We will dine privately tonight and you will rest in the meantime, join me for the games tomorrow and sit beside me, as my wife. My queen. For the rest of our lives.”

“Y-yes, Calai.”

I fight to not say the words, fearful of scaring her again with my intensity, but the words still ring in my mind as I exit her chambers and return to the bedlam of the hall. I love you, Starling.