Page 42 of The Royal Curse

My thoughts stopped so abruptly they might as well have crashed into a stone wall.

Magic.

My eyes popped open as my heart lurched and sped up again.

I’d taken the potion. But not only had my body and mind demanded the satisfaction of Andreas inside me, I’d—I lifted my head and glanced down, ignoring Andreas’s faintly interrogative murmur. He didn’t have any trousers on. Neither did I. They weren’t just torn or open, they weregone. And whatever slippery substance had appeared to make me ready to get fucked hadn’t come from any mundane source.

“Our trousers are gone,” I said.

Andreas stroked one hand up and down my back, lightly scraping his nails along my spine. Even through the fabric of my shirt it made me smile and shiver. “So they are,” he replied. “I’m going to think twice before tearing your clothes in the future, if this is how you take your revenge. Any idea what you did with them? Or are they gone forever? Because I only have two other pairs in my bags. Good thing I carried everything up with us, or I’d be giving everyone downstairs quite a show in a few minutes.”

His lazy, casual tone irritated me nearly as much as his touch soothed me, and the contrast annoyed me all the more. Didn’t he understand the problem here? Who gave a damn about how many pairs of pants he had!

“Too bad for you,” I snapped. “But I don’t care where they are. I shouldn’t have been able to make them disappear in the first place! I don’t even know how I did it. I mean, I wouldn’t be able to do it again on purpose, aside from not understanding how I managed to do it at all when I took the potion last ni—”

“You what?” He suddenly sounded much, much more alert, and his hands slipped down to my waist again as he pushed me off his chest enough so that he could see my face.

I glanced back up. Yes, that was guard-Andreas, not lover-Andreas, all sharp eyes and firm jaw and furrowed brow. And now I wished he hadn’t taken me seriously after all. Five more minutes of perfect peace and contentment and lying to myself. Would that have been too much to ask?

“You took the potion?” he went on. “You wanted—that is, you needed me. Just now. I assumed you must not have taken it yet. And hang on. You used magic, unless there’s another mage hiding in the corner waiting to vanish our trousers away at critical moments.”

I couldn’t let that pass. “Mages can’t make anything just vanish. Objects can be moved with force and energy, and they can be transmuted into any other type of object, including air, the similarity or differences between the two making it more or less difficult, but you can’t simply—”

Andreas’s hand landed firmly across my mouth, and the words “make them disappear” vanished, ironically, into his skin.

“That’s not the point,” he said sternly, and his tone made me want to—well, want him. Again. Already. “The potion’s not working. Right? That’s a problem. If it’s not working, the gods only know what’s wrong with it. It could make you sick.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. I hadn’t even thought of that. But…no. It had tasted like the other one, and it certainly wasn’t spoiled.

“Mmmph!” I said. He took his hand away. “I feel fine. This potion’s incredibly difficult to make correctly, but screwing it up doesn’t make it dangerous, just ineffective. Don’t worry about that,” I said more softly, the pinched look on his face tugging at something in my chest. Gods. I knew he had to be concerned about my well-being. He was paid to be. But this felt like more than that. Maybe I was still lying to myself after all. “Our problem’s that it isn’t working. That’s all. And obviously we can deal with that.”

My cheeks went fiery hot, and I had to fix my eyes on a point over his shoulder rather than meet his. Andreas shifted under me. The motion pulled his cock the rest of the way out, and the squelching sound and resulting gush of come didn’t help with my embarrassment.

“We can,” he said, voice low and gravelly. He cleared his throat. “As long as you’re not in pain. Were you? Was that why you, uh, needed me?”

The chair’s worn green fabric upholstery had a patch that had gotten completely threadbare on the wing. The shape vaguely resembled a fish. Perhaps if I focused on that intently enough I’d be able to admit the truth without combusting. I certainly couldn’t lie. That would be unworthy of a prince. And besides, Andreas would probably know, and then he’d make me look at him and admit it anyway.

“No,” I whispered. “I wasn’t in pain. It wasn’t time yet. The—only way to really test the potion would be to wait until I start to feel it, and then take a dose and see what happens.”

“Good.” Both of his hands had been resting on my back, but one of them crept down, tugging up my shirt as it went. “You must be getting cold, Your Highness. We should probably find our pants. Wherever they’ve gone. Or get some new ones.”

Pulling up my shirt would only make me colder, but that didn’t seem to have occurred to him. My breath started to come faster again, hitching in my chest, as Andreas slipped his hand under the trailing hem of the shirt and palmed the cheek of my ass, tracing delicate patterns on my tingling skin with his fingertips.

“Are you checking to see if I’m cold?” I asked, sounding a little choked.

“You have goosebumps,” he said, and stroked lower, and then in, until his fingers slid between my cheeks and his palm cupped the lower curve.

I finally tore my eyes away from the fish-shaped patch on the chair, and I found Andreas’s eyes fixed intently on my face. Searching, perhaps? But for what?

My goosebumps weren’t from the cold. And if he kept touching me like that, my cock stirring against his stomach would tell him that without my having to say anything at all.

The words that came out of my mouth, accompanied by a glance at him through my half-lowered eyelashes, were, “You could warm me up.”

Andreas’s eyes darkened, the hand on my ass gripping me more tightly.

Oh, gods. I hadn’t meant to sound quite so…sultry.

“I could, but don’t you want to wait? It’s about a day and a half, isn’t it? To see if the potion works after all.”

---