Once, I would have given into that heat between us, likely dashing our wine cups aside and bearing her back onto the table, pushing up her fancy gown and burying myself in her sweet cunt until she screamed with pleasure and—I shook my head hard to dispel the image. I drained my wine and set it down to find Ami still staring at me, color high on her cheeks and eyes deeper blue with desire.
“I’ll carve him a wooden sword,” I heard myself saying. “Tomorrow. It can be his feast gift. I don’t have anything for either of them yet.” Gifts. Likely people who weren’t peasants gave beautiful presents, not the hand-written promises my parents and I had exchanged.
“Can you carve one handed?” Ami asked, sounding breathless.
Was this what normal parents did, sublimated their unwise lust in discussions of gifts for the children? Not that we were normal parents—or that I was a parent at all—nor did I have any clue what parents who weren’t mine did.
“Skunk will help me,” I replied. “And I’ll think of something for Nilly.”
She nodded. “I have several things for each of them.”
“Good.” The strange conversation, so full of things we were saying under the words, lapsed.
“Are you ready to eat?” Ami finally asked, gesturing to the table. Two places were set at the end of the long table, not as elaborate as at Lianore, but with more candles set in long holders of tarnished metal that looked like old wood, twisting and dense. Fresh-blooming flowers sat in little water-filled vases, making me wonder where Ami had gotten them. Domes of cut crystal covered the plates.
“I told the staff we’d serve ourselves.” Ami glanced away, blushing. Had she also thought something like my momentary fantasy would occur? It certainly had enough times that she’d have learned to predict me. Except that we’d agreed to part ways, so she shouldn’t have expected anything of the kind. Right?
“Of course,” I said, and pulled out the chair at the head of the table for her.
“No, you sit there. I’ll take this one.” She moved to the chair immediately to the right.
“The queen should sit at the head of the table in her own castle.”
“It’s just us. I hardly see that it matters.”
“At a formally set dinner at the big table in the main hall?” She knew how to do this Eve of the Feast of Moranu properly and I didn’t. “It obviously matters.”
“I just wanted things to be pretty and it’s not as if there are dining tables for two in this place. Not elegant ones. It was this, the kitchens, or our rooms.”
That’s what we’d done in those few short days before we went after Stella—eaten in her rooms, feeding each other, usually in bed. The memories both warmed me and filled me with regret. Everywhere else we’d been, we’d eaten with other people.
“Where did you and Hugh eat?” I asked, before I thought to stop myself.
Ami gave me a funny look, still standing beside the chair she’d picked. “Here. If it was just the two of us, he’d sit there and I’d sit here.”
So formal their marriage had been. It made me angry for her sake, and unreasonably jealous for my own. Sitting in Hugh’s clothes in his chair. “Then I’m definitely not sitting there.”
The flush on Ami’s cheeks had gone to red. She clenched her fists, then hurled herself at me. “Why are we thrice-cursed fighting about every fucking thing every minute?” she shouted, pounding on my chest while I tried to hold her off my injured arm.
“Ami, stop,” I said, keeping my tone gentle, trying to soothe her. She wasn’t hitting me hard. In fact, she’d already sagged against me, fingers digging into my shirt as she held on, sobbing softly. I wrapped my good arm around her, ignoring the ache in the injured one in favor of the sweet delight of having her bosom crushed against it. “Ami, my Ami, my sun,” I murmured, kissing her hair and holding her against me. I reveled in holding her, even as I kicked myself for having upset her yet again.
“I just wanted to have a nice dinner,” she hiccupped. “I wanted things to be pretty.”
“They are pretty. It’s lovely. I’ll sit wherever you want me to.”
“No,” she said miserably, face pressed into my chest. “You’re right. It was thoughtless of me. I just…” She let out a long breath.
“What?” I urged. When she stubbornly shook her head, I levered the hand between us to lift her chin. Her eyes huge in her face, she looked fragile and vulnerable. Heartbreakingly beautiful. “Tell me, my sun.”
“I just really miss you,” she whispered. “I miss us, how we used to be.”
I groaned, losing everything to her, as I’d done all along—even before I ever knew her. And I was kissing her, lush mouth soft and sweet under mine, then parting and taking me into her heat. I devoured her, frustrated that I could only hold her with one hand, but using that to cup her head and hold her still so I could drink her in. I’d been starved for the taste of her, for the silk of her hair between my fingers and the delicate curve of her skull in my palm.
She returned the kiss with increasing heat, whimpering my name, straining on tiptoes to reach me, so I let go of her long enough to pick her up. Even one-handed I could easily lift her, scooting her onto the table. She pushed aside the place settings and something crashed, shattering.
“Wait,” I said.
“Fuck whatever it was,” she panted. “Don’t you dare stop.”
12
She’d tugged my shirt loose from the belt and had her hands on my chest, raking me with those deceptively rounded nails. I hissed, pushing between her legs and no more able to stop than if I were a wild and rutting beast. Every moan and whimper of hers fired my blood. She wrapped her legs around me, vising me in place, but the velvet mass of her skirts got in the way.
“Put your arms around my neck,” I told her, and she complied, deliciously yielding. No longer needing to brace her, I yanked down the pretty neckline of her gown, freeing her naked breasts. A growl tore out of me, a sound of base need. Round and fair, pink nipples so tightly drawn up with her arousal that the areolae barely showed, the sight of her breasts shoved me over the edge of reason. Bracing a hand under the curve of her lower back, I feasted on those perfect breasts and fantastically hard nipples.
She arched back, offering herself to my mouth, her mewls firing me onward as I licked and bit at her. With her hands in my hair, she hung on, chanting my name and incoherent encouragement. At last she bent so far back her head touched the table, so I let her relax onto it, a feast for my lust. Her hair spilled like liquid fire over the dark wood, her skin impossibly fair against the deeper hues, her turgid nipples and swollen mouth beacons of flushed pink. Like her sweet cunt would be.