Page 41 of The Consort's Curse
“Ow?” he repeated. “Ow?I broke your fall, at great cost to my coat, I might add! I think the satin’s scuffed.”
I buried my face in his chest and hiccupped with laughter, my stomach starting to hurt.
“And the wine spilled on the carpet, damn it all to hell,” he added, but it came out on a sigh of resignation. “Magic will get it out, I suppose, even if soap won’t. The laundress is a witch, I’m nearly certain. I’ll have her look at it.”
“Half of it belongs to me, anyway.” I thought about it for a moment longer, turning my head so that I could speak without being so muffled by warm, firm muscles covered in soft linen. My eyes had slid closed. If he’d been here when I started in with the wine, I wouldn’t have needed a chair at all. “And the wine’s half yours. Besides, you’re the one who spilled it. After you stole it.”
“Remi.” His arms came up and around me, one hand sliding under my jacket and around my waist, the other threading into my curls. “Are you particularly good at math?”
What? “Mmm?”
“Because by my count, ah. I’d do better with some paper. Math wasn’t my subject. I stole the wine, but it was half mine to start with, so I really only stole half of it. And then I spilled it because you tripped me, but half of the spill and the rug it’s onare yours to begin with. And yet I have the distinct impression that you’re trying to blame me for all of it.”
The soothing rumble of his words through my ear pressed to his chest nearly compensated for the absolute wrongness of his accusations.
“Because it is your fault.” Simple statements of honest fact were always best. “Nothing happened to me or the wine or the rug until you disturbed my quiet con—” I almost stumbled over the rest of the word, but I forced the syllables out slowly: “tem-pla-tion.” Ha, I’d done it!
“Disturbed you,” he said, and now a note of something almost like danger had crept in. Strangely, it made me want to squirm closer.
And so I did, slinging my knee further over his hips. He let out a soft sound that went straight down between my legs in a way that I hadn’t known a sound could do. His arms tightened, the hand in my hair tugging my head back. The sound I made then wouldn’t have been entirely out of place in one of Stefan’s brothels.
“Disturbed you in my own study,” he went on, voice distinctly rougher, “where you’d been drinking my wine and lounging in my favorite chair. Were you, by chance, contemplating what else of mine you ought to appropriate?”
“Half yours. But then you stole the wine back, which gives you no moral high ground at all. Anyway, I was contemplat—” My brain stuttered to a halt, my tongue tripping over itself again.
Damn it, I couldn’t discuss anything like this. I wished I could clear my head the way I used to by jumping into the cold plunge pool at the abbey. The shock would start at my feet and travel all the way up, and I’d pop to the surface tingling and refreshed. My memory supplied such a vivid impression of those sensations that I almost thought it was real, a wave of overwhelming, invigorating chill sweeping up from my toes tomy scalp. Abruptly, the world beyond my current comfortable sprawl came rushing back in, bursting the bubble of my tipsiness.
I could still feel the effects of the wine in my relaxed muscles and a sense of warmth returning after the coolness passed—and the charming absurdity of lying in Stefan’s arms on the floor remained as delightful as it had a minute ago, although I had the sinking feeling that it hadn’t been an effect of the wine in the first place.
But my mind had cleared, like…magic.
My own magic carrying out my wishes automatically, the same way my legs moved when I wanted to walk and I didn’t need to think about every muscle’s part in the process.
Gods, no wonder so many dawn mages chose the uncertainty of depending on another man over the sure independence of the potion. I’d always thought them foolish and reckless. More fool me.
I lifted my head, savoring the way his fingers combed through my hair as he released his grip enough to let me. “Your father’s visit earlier,” I finished at last, and swallowed hard, bracing myself for an outburst.
He looked at me down his nose for a moment and then sighed. “Yes. That’s why I came home. Ben’s spell smacked me and sent me running back, but my father had already gone. And that’s the first thing Lars told me when I walked in, anyway.”
I blinked at him. “Ben’s what?”
Stefan rolled his eyes. “He put a clever bit of magic on the house that alerts me if anyone blood-related to me enters the building, but since it’s Ben, the way it alerts me is by a phantom hand slapping me on the ass.”
The wine’s effects might have mostly faded, but it still took me a couple of minutes to recover from that, burying myface in his shirt again and shaking with giggles. Stefan waited patiently through it.
“Sorry,” I gasped, lifting my head again. “But—”
“Don’t say it, you’ll only start laughing again.”
I nodded, blinking tears from my lashes. “Sorry. Stefan, he was only here for a short while, but he brought a mage with him. They had me show them my magic to prove that I could use it.”
Stefan’s face set, all grim lines and blazing eyes, and if he hadn’t still been holding me to him with arms like iron I’d have scuttled away across the floor like a terrified crab.
“How, precisely, did they ‘have you do magic,’ Remi? If the mage touched you. If he laid one single hand on you—”
Oh, gods, I simply couldn’t help it, and I shoved myself off the floor with my knee and pressed my mouth to his. Stefan went rigid under me, but his lips softened and parted, his tongue welcoming mine into his mouth. I pushed up further and kissed him with every tiny bit of skill I’d acquired in the past few days.If he laid one single hand on you.He didn’t need to finish the sentence to have me desperate to climb on top of him, wrap both of my legs around his hips, kiss my way down his neck, take him so deeply inside me that he’d be the only one touching me, the only one to ever touch me…
And that murmuring had been me, half-muffled against his skin.
