Damen said, with helpless honesty, ‘Laurent, I am your slave.’
The words laid him open, truth exposed in the space between them. He wanted to prove it, as though, inarticulate, he could make up for what divided them. He was aware of the shallowness of Laurent’s breath, it matched his own; they were breathing each other’s air. He reached out, watching for any hesitation in Laurent’s eyes.
The touch he offered was accepted as it had not been last time, fingers gentle on Laurent’s jaw, thumb passing over his cheekbone, soft. Laurent’s controlled body was hard with tension, his rapid pulse urgent for flight, but he closed his eyes in the last seconds before it happened. Damen’s palm slid over Laurent’s warm nape; slowly, very slowly, making his height an offering, not a threat, Damen leaned in and kissed Laurent on the mouth.
The kiss was barely a suggestion of itself, with no yielding of the rigidity in Laurent, but the first kiss became a second, after a fraction of parting in which Damen felt the flicker of Laurent’s shallow breathing against his own lips.
It felt, in all the lies between them, as if this was the only true thing. It didn’t matter that he was leaving tomorrow. He felt remade with the desire to give Laurent this: to give him all he would allow, and to ask for nothing, this careful threshold something to be savoured because it was all Laurent would let himself have.
‘Your Highness—’
They broke apart at the voice, the burst of sound, of nearby footsteps. A head was cresting the stone steps. Damen took a step backwards, his stomach twisting.
It was Jord.
CHAPTER 18
Abruptly separated, Damen stood across from Laurent in one of the islands of light where the torches flamed at intervals. The length of the battlements stretched out on either side and Jord, several feet off, was halted in his approach.
‘I ordered the section cleared,’ Damen said. Jord was intruding. At home in Akielos, he’d only have had to glance up from what he was doing and order, Leave us, and the intrusion would be gone. And he could go back to what he had been doing.
To what, gloriously, he had been doing. He’d been kissing Laurent and that should not be interrupted. His eyes returned warmly, possessively to their object: Laurent looked like any young man who has been pressed against a battlement and kissed. The slight disturbance of the hair at Laurent’s nape was wonderful. His hand had lain there.
‘I’m not here for you,’ said Jord.
‘Then state your business and leave.’
‘My business is with the Prince.’
His hand had lain there, and pushed up into the soft, warm golden hair. Interrupted, the kiss was alive between them, in dark eyes and heartbeats. His attention swung back to the intruder. The threat that Jord posed to him was galvanising. What had happened was not going to be threatened by anything or anyone.
Laurent pushed himself away from the wall.
‘Here to warn me about the dangers of making command decisions in bed?’ Laurent said.
There was a short, spectacular silence. The flaming of the torches, the wind striking the walls were over-loud. Jord stood very still.
‘Something to say?’ said Laurent.
Jord was holding off from them. The same stubborn distaste was in his voice. ‘Not with him here.’
‘He’s your Captain,’ said Laurent.
‘He knows well enough he should go.’
‘While we compare notes on spreading for the enemy?’ said Laurent.
This silence was worse. Damen felt the distance between himself and Laurent with his whole body, four endless steps across the battlements.
‘Well?’ said Laurent.
Jord’s eyes had turned to Damen, full of bloody-mindedness. But, He is Damianos of Akielos, Jord didn’t say, though he looked strained to his limits with repulsion at what he had just seen, and the silence stretched out, thick and tangible with what lay underneath.
Damen stepped forward. ‘Maybe—’
More sound on the stairs, the clatter of several urgent footsteps. Jord turned. Guymar and another of the soldiers were coming to the section he had ordered cleared. Damen passed a hand over his face. Everyone in the fort was coming to the section he had ordered cleared.
‘Captain. I apologise for the breach in your orders. But there is a situation developing downstairs.’
‘A situation?’
‘A group of the men have it into their minds to make sport with one of the prisoners.’
The world was not going away. The intrusive world was returning its concerns, the issues of discipline, the mechanisms of captaincy.
‘The prisoners are to be well treated,’ said Damen. ‘If some of the men are too full of drink, you know how to keep them at bay. My orders were clear.’
There was a hesitation. Guymar was one of Enguerran’s men, a career soldier, polished and professional. Damen had promoted him for exactly those qualities.
‘Captain, your orders were clear, but . . .’ said Guymar.
‘But?’