Page 27 of The Royal Curse

“Are you trying to make me beg again?” I demanded, voice embarrassingly thin and peevish and strained. Fuck, a lie was beyond me right now. “Because I absolutely will.”

“I was looking to make sure I hadn’t hurt you. And you can beg if you want to,” he said, tone unusually rough, and cleared his throat. He dropped my legs, sticking a hand into his pocket. “But I’m going to do precisely the same things whether you beg or not.”

Something glinted in his fist: a small bottle much like the ones my medicines had come in. Andreas had been speaking to the apothecary at the counter for a minute while I’d been browsing, hadn’t he? That sneaky bastard. He popped out the cork and poured something into his hand, his intention quite clear. The cork and bottle went on the nightstand, and he took hold of my leg again, lifting it and opening me.

For a moment, indignation left me speechless. He’d made me beg, when all along—!

“You,” I sputtered. “You—I can’t believe you. You acted like you weren’t going to—”

“And I wasn’t,” he snapped. “But if it came to this, I had to be prepared. What did you think, that I’d fuck you dry and hurt you?”

“You already did fuck me dry, and I was fine! Why didn’t you use this then?”

Andreas’s fingers tightened around my thigh, and his jaw set. “I didn’t have time to get you wetter, you were in too much pain. And I didn’t fuck you, despite your best efforts. That was just the tip plus a bit.”

“Just the—the hell it was!” Just the tip? Was he out of his mind? Plus his whole cock! “The tip of yours isn’t bigger than my entire cock, Andreas.” He glared at me, let go of my leg again, and started to tug at the buttons on his trousers. “You’re delusional if you think—oh.” The placket of his trousers fell away and he grunted, probably in relief as his erection escaped the constriction of a piece of fabric meant for something much smaller. “Oh,” I said again, as my mind went entirely blank. “Oh, fucking gods.”

That was…to be fair, I hadn’t seen a lot of pricks. Mine. Glimpses of guards’ and servants’ equipment when I was traveling and all the men went aside to wash in a stream or a pond. I’d seen precisely one up close, right before the man it belonged to put his hand in my trousers and found me limp and unresponsive and then broke off the encounter on the spot.

It was possible most of them were that size. I doubted it. The majority of the world’s women and a fair number of the men would be bowlegged.

I tore my eyes away and looked up at his face. Andreas bared his teeth at me in something like a grin, except that he seemed more likely to bite me than be friendly.

My gaze flicked back down again as he wrapped his oil-coated hand around his shaft.

His very large, long-fingered hand.

Which only covered a little more than half of his length, with his rosy-purple cockhead sticking out of his fist.

Andreas stroked down about two inches, leaving that and the monstrously thick head exposed.

“That’s all I had inside you,” he said. “Even after your little stunt.” He ran his thumb over the head, leaving it gleaming with oil. I gazed at it, transfixed. “You still think you’ve been fucked, Your Highness? That one more time won’t make any difference?”

If bymake any differencehe meantmight not survive the experience, then…no.

The clicking sound of my hard swallow carried clearly in the nearly silent room. The fire popped along softly in the background, but otherwise…Andreas really had cleared out this part of the inn, because I couldn’t hear a single sound of human occupancy. And it was dark as well as silent, the sun having gone down some time ago without my really paying attention, leaving the low-burning fire and the branch of candles on the dressing table the only illumination in the bedroom. Golden flickers danced on the ceiling and cast Andreas into stark relief.

I was afraid to glance over at the wall. The shadow thrown by his cock had to be terrifying. Like something out of a comic-erotic pantomime.

But terrified or not, chastened by the correction of my horribly naïve assumptions or not, I still had the same clenching heat in my stomach. My breathless longing had only intensified, my cock as stiff as Andreas’s and my body feeling horribly empty again. I tightened the muscles of my ass experimentally. Some of his come trickled out of me, and I shuddered with something between disgust and unbearable desire.

Maybe I needed him to fuck me as well as fill me. Another man’s spend, with or without a lengthy encounter to produce it, had always been the cure for the symptoms of cursed dawn magic, as far as I knew. Perhaps this was another way in which I was…special, needing more than that. Lucky me.

Andreas made an impatient sound, let go of his cock, and yanked his tunic up and off, tossing it to the floor. His singlet followed a moment later.

He leaned down, somehow prowling like that predatory forest cat without doing more than shifting his weight on the bed. Broad shoulders and a lean, muscled torso, the sharp V of his hips leading to that massive cock, even more spellbinding now that it stuck out on its own without a hand to hide any of it…

Lucky me indeed. I swallowed again, my throat horribly dry, and dared to look up and meet his eyes.

Steady as always, but with that gleam in them that promised more than I’d bargained for. Everything about him, from the short, soldierly brush of his auburn hair to the faint silvery scars along his ribs to the firm set of his jaw intimidated me, left me off-balance. He had from the moment we met.

Andreas cupped my face in his hand, thankfully the not-oily one, stroking my lower lip with his thumb, pushing it into the corner of my mouth and rubbing the pad of it over the tip of my tongue, thrusting lightly. He tasted like salt and steel. I whimpered helplessly as every muscle in my body went tight.

“I won’t,” he said softly, something flashing through his eyes and then gone again. “You should save that for someone you choose.”

Before I could even begin to formulate an answer, possibly that I’d choose him, or that I wasn’t quite sure what he meant but wanted very much to find out, he’d slipped his thumb out of my mouth and bent down the rest of the way, cutting off any possible words with his kiss.

Chapter Eleven

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