Page 73 of The Royal Curse

When he lifted his head, he gazed down at me with that light still shining in his eyes. “I love you, Your Highness,” he said. “Now come upstairs. I have treason to commit before you take that nap.”

I couldn’t help my nervous glance at the study door. “My mother might hear you!”

Andreas shrugged. “Then we should probably go upstairs,” he said, far too calmly, and only grinned at me when I glared.

Damn it, I couldn’t exactly argue, could I? Not when he was so obviously right. Especially not when I wanted to be alone with him at least as much as he did.

He wrapped his arm around me, and I leaned my head on his shoulder, and we went upstairs, heedless of passing servants or guards.

We even took a nap, Amara’s skepticism be damned.

Eventually. With Andreas’s arms wrapped around me from behind, his cock nestled between my thighs.

And I’d never slept better in my life than in my own bed, and with the man I loved. I was truly home at last.

Epilogue

Two months later

Pacing the terrace outside my bedchamber wasn’t nearly enough to burn off my anger, frustration—and creeping dread.

Damn it all to hell. I ran into the wall, slapped it with my open palm, cursed when it stung, and spun and paced the other way. I paused for a moment at the other side, leaning out over the parapet and scowling at the gorgeous pink-tinged honey-gold of the sunset pouring over the early springtime flowers beginning to bloom in the garden below. The plash of a fountain and the chirp of an enthusiastic bird seeking a mate only added to the overall peaceful beauty of the world around me.

Fucking stupid beautiful world.

Fucking Andreas.

Gods, I hadn’t even thought about my curse for months, not since we came home. I hadn’t needed to. Andreas spent every night in my bed—our bed, really, because I was pretty sure he’d moved into my rooms a few weeks after we returned. We hadn’t discussed it, but three or four black tunics and an equal number of black trousers had appeared in a neat stack on a shelf in my dressing room, and a small chest full of swords, knives, armor, and undergarments occupied a corner of it. That seemed to be the extent of Andreas’s possessions.

And every night that he spent in our bed, he fucked me. Without fail, without question, as if he could never get enough of me. Sometimes I protested, claiming exhaustion or an early morning the next day, simply for the pleasure of being firmly overruled, flipped onto my stomach and pinned, Andreas’s low voice in my ear telling meI’ll take your orders anywhere but in this bed, Your Highness.

The nights would’ve been enough to ensure that I never came close to reaching the limit of my curse. But no matter how busy he was with his new duties training the royal guard as their second in command, he always found the time to track me down in the middle of the day, too. When he sauntered out and went back to work, whistling and with his coat over his shoulder, I was usually still sprawled across our bed, sticky and flushed and aching in the most perfect possible way.

And my magic thrived on it. The more he filled me, the stronger I became—far beyond the vitiation of my curse. Control was coming more slowly. Much more slowly, as my singed eyebrows could attest. But every bit of practice brought me closer to mastery, and I had more to work with than I’d ever thought possible.

I’d even written a letter to those eastern priests and asked them to send me copies of their texts. Because while I didn’t think I completely believed in the idea of one perfect match for every mage, there was clearly more to this than simple removal of a curse. Healing Andreas’s wound even though I’d taken the potion had been one strong piece of evidence, but now I had a pattern.

So I wasn’t entirely convinced yet…but my wonderings had started to coalesce into belief.

One night over a bottle of wine shared with Phil, I’d confided my secret fear: that I loved Andreas, and he loved me, because of some divine trickery, some gods-decreed magical compatibility. The very thought made my skin crawl. Not only that Andreas’s feelings could be false, in some sense, but that yet another aspect of my life had somehow been determined for me.

But Phil had laughed, shaking her head and patting my hand in an obnoxiously condescending big-sister way. “Don’t be silly, Niko,” she said. “You were in love with him before you ever touched each other, and you were using the potion the whole time. And don’t even try to tell me you weren’t.”

Well, when she put it that way, I found it hard to argue. Loving Andreas didn’t require any outside assistance—and I’d been content to accept the idea that loving me didn’t, either, especially when Andreas gazed at me with his heart shining in his eyes. He’d given me no reason to doubt him, after all.

Until two days ago, anyway.

It’d been forty hours since he was inside me, and he’d spent the last two nights in the barracks, not coming near me at all. I hadn’t even seen him since he’d glared at me, tight-lipped and with a muscle ticking in his jaw, spun on his heel, and strode out, slamming the door behind him.

For fuck’s sake, my mother wanted to make him a lord, not have him publicly whipped—although you’d have thought it was the latter by his reaction. But he’d been infuriatingly measured in his tone and his words as we argued, mostly, until I’d demanded to know how I was supposed to introduce him to foreign dignitaries if he didn’t even have a title—and what I’d really been thinking, and had been too afraid to say, was that by Surbino’s laws he couldn’t marry me without a title, which he manifestly didn’t want.

“I have a rank, and that’s always been good enough before,” he’d said, and then he’d left me.

I’d lain in bed without blowing out the candles for hours that night, and the next, waiting for him to come back and apologize.

He hadn’t.

And now, I’d be in pain by the time the sun went down unless I found him, swallowed my pride, and begged.

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