Page 38 of The Royal Curse

“I’ll send someone up with coffee and breakfast, Your Highness,” he called through the door, sounding disgustingly alert for someone who must’ve risen at the same time I’d have been going to bed when I was at home.

Rolling over onto my side, I blinked blearily into the darkness, able to see only the faintest line of light around the edge of my door. The fire had burned down to nothing at all. Twisting about in bed tugged on muscles I’d never known I had. I tightened them, feeling the space Andreas had left in me—or at least it seemed that way. Surely I didn’t really have an emptiness within my body in the precise shape of his cock.

“Your Highness?” A note of worry there, and for a long, shameful moment I toyed with the idea of not answering at all, which would force him to open the door and come inside to check on me. If he’d wanted to, he already would have.

“Yes, thank you,” I said, my voice rasping. I couldn’t possibly have sounded less seductive.

Not that I wanted to seduce him! I didn’t need or want him at all. I’d taken my potion the night before.

“Breakfast in five minutes, Your Highness. We’ll ride whenever you’re ready.” His footsteps retreated down the corridor.

Ride.

That really had been my idea, hadn’t it? To mount a horse and trot through the rain and sleet along a pitted road, bouncing up and down in a hard, damp saddle. Why hadn’t I thought to try to heal myself before I drank the potion the night before?

Because I hadn’t been thinking at all, my mind taken over completely by the way Andreas had takenme.

I sat up with a shudder, fumbling a blanket around my shoulders to keep the chill off while the servants came to light the fire.

The day, if you could even call it that given the gloom, didn’t particularly improve from there. Icy water dripped off the brim of my hat and blew sideways under the collar of my coat. My fingers went too numb to feel the reins, and heavy dark clouds obscured the sun so thoroughly that the sky hadn’t brightened at all even after we’d been riding for hours.

We took the northern road, passing through endless expanses of soggy fields and frosty woodlands and exchanging a few words of greeting with other occasional soggy and frosty travelers. Andreas remained remarkably silent, riding beside me with his hat pulled down enough that I couldn’t even sneak looks at his face.

Partway through the morning, Andreas reined in and gestured that we’d stop for a rest, leading us under the shelter of a grove of spreading oaks.

As I stiffly swung my leg over, wincing at the tug between my legs, he appeared at my side and slipped a hand under my elbow as I slid down to the ground.

His fingers wrapped around my upper arm, strong and sure. Trapped between Fluffy’s bulk and Andreas’s tall, broad-shouldered body, I almost felt warm for the first time since I’d crawled out of my bed. The urge to lean into Andreas and close my eyes nearly overwhelmed me. Would he catch me? Wrap an arm around my back and tuck me against his shoulder? Would the men stand in shocked silence, or would they laugh? Would I care?

Heat bloomed in my belly, a tickling ache that I wouldn’t have recognized until a couple of days ago—a tight, needy sensation that should’ve been impossible given that I’d taken a full dose of my potion only sixteen hours before.

My breath hitched as my heart skipped and then thudded into motion again.

“Your Highness?” Andreas asked quietly, bending down toward me, too close, painfully close, close enough that I could’ve tilted my head into a kiss. “Are you well?”

Was I? Yes, in fact. Despite the heaviness in my balls, the rapid beat of my heart, I was. No pain, no fever, none of the lightning-bolt pains that shot along my veins and nerves when my tainted magic tormented me. And no magic, either. If the potion hadn’t been working I’d have had access to my powers, and I couldn’t detect so much as a faint flush of usable magic anywhere in me.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

That didn’t quite amount to a lie. Andreas wanted to know if he needed to take immediate action to solve a specific problem. He hadn’t intended a more general inquiry into my state of mind.

When he let go of me, nodded, and strode away, the air between us seemed to stretch like syrup, clinging and sticky, a prickly tug on every inch of my skin that made me lean toward him and catch myself with a fist around Fluffy’s reins.

As he got about ten feet away from me it felt like the stretched air between us snapped, and I reeled back, the air whooshing out of my lungs. But my cock stirred, and my balls tightened enough to make me gasp, and that space inside me…

I had to bite my lip to keep in a whimper, squeezing my eyes shut and leaning on Fluffy as my knees turned all watery.

Fuck. What was happening to me? I’d taken the potion. I knew it was working. And when it worked, it made me completely impotent, able to want in the abstract, perhaps, but not able to feel desire in a more visceral way. Certainly not capable of an erection. And while I hadn’t gotten even half-hard, anything more than completely limpshouldn’t be possible.

We were in the saddle again within twenty minutes, the sensations in the lower part of my body still unsettlingly powerful. Every time I shifted in the saddle my fingers twitched on the reins, my whole body going tense. Every time I couldn’t stop myself from glancing over at Andreas, it made me ache: desire, deep inside, clawing its way to the surface.

By late afternoon, we still had seven miles to go according to the signpost we’d stopped to examine, and the grisly gray of a wet winter twilight had fully closed in. My cock hadn’t gone completely soft since we stopped for our lunch. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get a full breath.

Panic hadn’t quite set in—but I was working on it. For fuck’s sake, I’d done the right thing! I’d taken my potion! But if I didn’t get Andreas’s cock in me, I felt like I might die—figuratively, if not literally. And if the potion truly didn’t work, then literally might be an option too. Andreas would string Doctor Serrano up by his toes after I died, but that didn’t comfort me much, especially since my mother would do the same to Andreas.

Gods, the pressure inside me…by the time we stopped for the night, I might go mad.

“…Highness? Are you all right?”

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