Page 23 of Consort's Glory
“Just tea.” Margot turned to shuffle back into the suite, her small hands hitching the comforter higher around her shoulders.
He frowned. “Are you cold?”
That didn’t seem possible, considering the sensors in the walls were programmed to change the air conditioning to the ideal setting depending on the body temperatures of its occupants, but the way she hugged that comforter around her slight frame had his instincts roaring.
“I’m always cold.” One small hand appeared from beneath the folds of the comforter to click on the instant heater. Everything about her was small and fragile-looking, but Margot appeared especially breakable as she hovered near the instant heater, her bare toes curled up against the cold tile. When she reached for a plain ceramic mug on a high shelf, he rushed to grab it for her.
Those luminous eyes swung in his direction. “You didn’t have to do that. I could have reached it.”
He fought the impulse to drape the blanket more securely around her shoulders. “I wanted to help.”
Theodore was desperate to help, actually. If one half of the pull was the animalistic need to provoke, to challenge, the other half was brutal tenderness. It clawed at him, this need to see her safe, to know she felt cared for. For no one else would he stand guard outside a door. For no one else would he hover, begging for a chance to do anything. Only for her would he move mountains and remake countries — or fetch mugs from high shelves.
Margot was quiet as she delicately thumbed through the selection of tea bags in the sample box. Plucking out two paper packages of chamomile, she slowly admitted, “You’re… not what I expected you’d be, Sovereign.”
He leaned his hip against the counter. Watching a lock of red hair slide out from behind her ear to brush her cheek, he asked, “What did you expect?”
“I never expected anything before tonight.” Placing the mugs under the spout of the heater, Margot waited until they were both full of steaming water before continuing. “But if I did expect anything, it wouldn’t be someone who sits in hallways all night. What if someone saw you? Wouldn’t that be considered strange for the sovereign to do?” Her eyes flicked in his direction; just a flash of copper. “Unless your staff is used to you spying on people, I suppose. Or sitting outside of unsuspecting women’s doors.”
Theodore gently accepted the mug she offered him. He didn’t often drink tea, but he would have gladly swallowed a mug full of motor oil to just be in her company. “I wasn’t spying.”
“I know.” She lifted her mug to her lips and turned to press her back against the lip of the counter, her gaze somewhere in the sitting room. “Maybe I shouldn’t be so sure of that. I know I shouldn’t be so sure of that. But you don’t feel like a liar.”
Swallowing a piping hot mouthful of flower water, he rasped, “I’m not. Never have been.” His abilities might have made him an exceptional one, but Theodore never had the patience for deception. “And you can call me Theodore, you know. Or Teddy.”
“You’re the sovereign.” She shook her head. Taking another long sip, Margot peered at him from over the rim of her mug. “Hardly seems proper to call you by your first name when you outrank me so thoroughly.”
Theodore set his mug down but didn’t release it. Holding onto the heated ceramic reminded him that he shouldn’t reach for her instead. “I’ve only been Sovereign for eight months,” he insisted, sensing that this was important, that she needed to see him as a man first and Sovereign second. “I’m still Teddy underneath the title.”
Margot cast him a strange look, as if she couldn’t quantify him in the way her quick mind wanted to. “You’ve never been Teddy to me, though. We just met, remember?”
Right. That was… getting harder to remember. No wonder, with the pull drawing him to her like a magnet and twenty-five years of yearning threatening to make him spill his heart out at her feet.
Swallowing, he replied, “I don’t see why we can’t disregard titles.”
“I don’t see why we’d want to.”
“Maybe for the same reason you didn’t want me to leave earlier.” He dared to lean closer, to breathe in more of her heady scent and feel the warmth of her radiate through layers of fabric. Margot didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. She simply stared, her pupils expanding to make the copper iris a thin ring around a fathomless black center.
“I honestly have no idea why I said you could stay.” She breathed deep, her chest rising and falling slowly, as if she wanted to get as much air in her lungs as possible, to keep it there for as long as she could. “My grandmother would be appalled. I’m appalled.”
Theodore couldn’t stop his grin. Was she always so proper? It tickled him to think so. In all his daydreams, never once had he pictured she’d be so very prim. It was a good thing he didn’t. Imagining what it would take to get her to shed that stiff, polite exterior would have driven him to madness.
“What’s so appalling about it?” He pressed closer, his tea abandoned. Theodore dared to tug on a fold of her comforter-turned-cloak. “That I’m Sovereign, or that I like you even when you don’t do as I say?”
Margot’s lips parted. Goddess, but she looked so soft and delectable and open. He would have given anything to have free rein to kiss her then, when she looked at him like he was the center of the world.
The softness vanished almost as quickly as it arrived. In its place came a bristling indignation. “I have no reason to do as you say, sir,” she shot back.
“No,” he agreed. Heart hammering, he gave in to the impulse to skim her cheek with the backs of his claws. “But it might be fun.”
It was a tease, a bit of flirtation, but the moment he caught the thinnest thread of her desire in the air, Theodore was lost. His claws, hidden beneath his gloves, retracted instantly. His pupils blew up to absorb the entirety of his irises. His cock throbbed with a painful, insistent beat in his slacks.
Theodore swayed forward, one hand gripping the edge of the counter in a futile attempt to hold himself back. Softness, his instinct whispered. She’s all softness until she bites. Oh, goddess, I want her to bite.
“Margot, I…” He sucked in a ragged breath. What did he want? What could he say?
“I’ve finished my tea.” Her cool voice, devoid of the warmth that had begun to color it, was a knife blade through the haze of the pull.
His voice was tight, strained, when he answered, “Right. I should let you sleep.”
“Yes.”
She held herself so still, he wondered what she was trying to accomplish. Did Margot fear he would lunge at her if she moved like prey? Or did she worry that she too would sway, bending under the electric current pulsing ever-stronger between them?
Glory, let it be the second, he prayed, forcing himself to leave her for the second time that night. I’d rather not be the only one suffering tonight.
