Page 31 of The Royal Curse

Living like that, subject to my mother’s control in every other aspect of my life and a lover or husband’s in this one, would be hell on earth.

But that didn’t matter at the moment. Because Andreas was sauntering toward me, giant cock swinging hypnotically and the rest of him, smooth expanses of muscle and freckled long limbs and a perfect dusting of dark red hair, on full display. I’d get my potion tomorrow.

For tonight…

“You,” he said, reminding me that I’d asked him a question before I got lost again in mentally tracing every line of him. “You seemed uncomfortable. And more to the point, I have plans for you. What’s your alternative? If it doesn’t involve my plans, I may have to overrule you, Your Highness. I am in charge of this expedition, you may recall.”

Oh, gods. As if I’d had the chance to forget.

And as for his plans, well. That could be negotiated.

Clenching the muscles of my ass didn’t…hurt, precisely, but it didn’t feel wonderful, either. More of his come trickled out of me. The bed really had been, if not ruined, then put into a less-than-ideal state. Ugh. And I could say the same for my body. Another deep, hard fuck, Andreas’s thick cock pounding me into jelly, his heavy body pinning me, all of him showing me how in charge he was…well, all right, maybe I’d manage despite the soreness between my legs. That hot, swirling sensation had returned, making my lower abdomen heavy and tight.

“I don’t know what your plans are,” I said hoarsely. This would be so revealing, too revealing, in more than one way. If I failed it might be the most humiliating thing that’d ever happened to me—and possibly the most injurious, too, depending on how badly I failed. Using magic on one’s own ass might be more polite, but it certainly carried its own set of risks.

Although if I succeeded, Andreas might finally see that I had some value beyond my royal title.

I might see it too, for that matter.

“You won’t need that cloth, though,” I added, and propped myself up on my elbows, drawing up my knees with my feet flat on the bed. “Watch.”

That instruction appeared to have been redundant. Andreas had stopped dead, the cloth dripping unheeded onto the floor, with his eyes fixed on me avidly.

His cock stirred and went from soft to half-roused within seconds. I’d been uncertain a moment ago, embarrassed by my wantonness. But Andreas’s reaction gave me confidence I’d never have believed I could possess.

I shifted my weight, spreading my legs a little more, and reached between my legs, lifting my balls out of the way and massaging them as I did simply because it felt so incredibly good, exposing myself to him completely.

Andreas’s chest rose and fell sharply, his fist clenching around the cloth. In a moment he’d be fully hard again. My focus wavered.

No, I had to do this—but I obviously couldn’t look at Andreas’s erection while I did. Forcing myself to close my eyes, I sank into my other senses. It didn’t help much. My eyelids were no barrier to my magic and how it helped me see the world. Andreas still stood out to me just as he had before, golden and glowing and seductive in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with his body or the pleasure I knew he could give me. Gods, he was even more beautiful like this than he was physically. There were places in the world where mages’ impressions of a person’s nature were used as part of the criminal justice system, a way to determine the contents of a soul. We didn’t employ mages that way in Surbino. It was too subjective a process. And I’d always thought, bluntly, that it was bullshit to begin with.

Now I knew differently. Andreasshone, his honesty gleaming and his honor glowing.

And something else…arousal. Fuck, I could see it as clearly as I’d seen his erection with my physical eyes, a thread of shimmering crimson through his being, a warmth that strained toward me.

All of the texts I’d read by mages about the actual practical usage of magic—and the few that I’d been able to find were maddeningly vague and glossed over most of what you’d really need to know—emphasized the critical importance of concentration, of keeping the mind focused on the task at hand. The careful manipulation of the forces inherent in objects took great care. The one thing all mages seemed to agree on was the principle that destruction and chaos were far easier to bring about than orderly creation.

But my magic disagreed vehemently on the subject of control and focus. The sparking heat of my magic-infused being yearned irresistibly toward his glow. It felt right.

And so…I took a leap of faith. Instead of sticking to the scientific precepts of magic, such as they were, I followed my instincts.

Somehow, like I’d reached out with a physical limb—only I knew I hadn’t moved, I could feel the stillness of my body too, superimposed on the motion of my mind—I shifted toward Andreas. My questing spark seeking his steady, luminous presence.

Below the range of my physical ears, a steady, low buzzing began to build, as if I’d stirred up a hive of magical bees. It grew louder the closer I came to Andreas. And it hurt, a stinging behind my teeth and an ache in my temples, akin to the sensation of being too close to a lightning strike in the midst of a storm.

I pulled back. Maybe it made me a coward, and I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d been close to something incredible, but the relief was also instantaneous.

I was stronger now, though. I could feel it. Had I somehow harvested some of the brilliant energy that poured from him, the radiance of his soul? That had to be impossible, didn’t it? Only mages had magic. If you had magic, you were a mage. That was the definition of it. He didn’t have magic to harvest.

Gods, it didn’t matter. Power thrummed in my blood and tingled in my fingertips. It strained at the leash, begging to be set free.

Examining my skin and the small particles of matter that composed it, the oil and come that coated it, and the layer where one stopped and the other began, I began to disassemble the mess and detach it from my body. Making an object cease to exist was impossible, but anything could be altered into anything else if you could hold the target shape in your mind. Most people wouldn’t know it, but even air had a texture, a pattern, a substance. Matching that took less effort than I’d thought, my natural abilities taking over. And once I had the shape of it, pushing energy through the slick on and inside me to tear it apart and reform it into a pattern like the air took a fraction of a second, a blink, a shimmering twist in the fabric of the universe and a sensation deep inside me not unlike the moment before an orgasm when everything in my body was poised and ready to fall.

My eyes opened as I fell back on the bed, panting, staring up at the flickers of candlelight on the smoke-blackened beam that crossed the ceiling, at the faint flutter of a cobweb, all of it thrown into sparklingly bright relief by the wash of residual magic across my mind.

“Your Highness?” Andreas’s voice reverberated as if I’d heard it through a drum. Everything spun around me. “Your Highness, are you all right?”

Through numb lips, I managed, “I’m fine. I told you to watch. Did you watch? I used my magic. I’m all clean.” I wanted to tell him that next, if he allowed it, I’d use it on him, clean him up and then lick him everywhere.

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