Page 36 of The Captive's Curse
“I’m only taking two of them! You’re lucky I’m leaving you any after the way you—what are you—Enzo!”
He shoved me down onto the bed again, and I landed with a thump, unwilling to release my death grip on the pillows to catch myself.
“Get back in bed,” he said, “and stay there with the pillows. I’m too tired to argue about this. Lie down and shut up.”
My mouth opened, partly in a gasp of shock and partly because I meant to keep arguing.
But then I closed it again, put the pillows back at the head of the bed, and meekly started to pull off the outer layers of clothing that I hadn’t bothered removing earlier.
Because in the pale gray light of a drizzly dawn, his face was even grayer. And if he’d been trying to hide the bone-weariness in his voice, he’d failed. I might not be the most compassionate person in the world, but…I couldn’t keep fighting with him. Not when he looked like he might fall down if I gave him a hard push.
Enzo stood there watching me for a moment, perhaps to make sure I obeyed him. Or perhaps he’d simply hit that wall of exhaustion that made one too tired to even do all the little things necessary to go to bed properly. At last he nodded and turned away again, apparently satisfied that I’d been properly subdued, and stripped off his tunic, tossing it on top of the shirt on the chair.
I didn’t want to stare at him.
Well, all right, I very much did want to stare at him.
More accurately, I hated myself for staring at him, but my eyes were riveted to him, drinking in his long legs and his broad shoulders, the way the sweat-stained linen of his shirt clung to him before he ripped it off and dropped it on the floor, presumably for some servant or other to collect.
If the servants came up here to clean, how the hell did they deal with the ghost—but I lost my train of thought in the horror of realizing that his sweaty shirt had gotten my cock stirring.
That became half hard as he turned back to me from shutting the door, showing me the front of his body. Gods, his drawers molded so perfectly over his cock and his muscled thighs, and the heartstoppingly lustful way his sleeveless undertunic set off his bulging shoulders had to be against the law somewhere. Enzo climbed in beside me, claiming two of the four pillows and much more than half of the bed as he flopped onto his back.
“I cleaned up a bit before I came up to bed,” he said. “But I’m sure I still smell like a tired horse.”
I blinked at the ceiling. He sounded…apologetic? He did! Now I’d seen everything. Of course, I could immediately ease any guilt he might feel by telling him how the scent of him, and the heat of him, and the tingling awareness of his close presence dancing across every inch of my skin, were making my heart pound and everything south of my ribs go molten.
I’d rather die.
“Since I’m your captive, I can hardly complain about your odor,” I said primly. “I’ll simply have to bear it with fortitude.”
A beat. Another. My heart thudded.
And then Enzo burst out laughing, violently enough that the bed shook under me, loudly enough to make me wince.
“Fortitude,” he gasped. “You! Forti—oh, gods. Hardly…complain…I can’t…”
I lay rigidly still, face burning, biting my lower lip to shreds, as he practically roared with mirth and then slowly wore himself down.
Fuck. Him. I’d wait until he was asleep and I’d takeallof his pillows—except for the one I’d use to smother him.
“Ah,” he said at last. “Fuck. I needed that after the night I had. Lord Cyril, you haven’t gone more than a quarter of an hour without complaining since I met you. I’d wager you were complaining to your horse before I came along, for lack of a better audience. Weren’t you?”
Oh, I was going to do more than smother him. I was going tothrottlehim. “No,” I lied through my tightly clenched teeth. “I was not.”
“You absolutely were,” he replied with horridly rude and unsettlingly accurate certainty. “I simply gave you a better target.”
“By knocking me off my horse and taking me prisoner,” I pointed out for what felt like the hundredth time. Did he really not understand that he shouldn’t go around simply kidnapping people? What waswrongwith him? “If you hadn’t, then you never would’ve heard any of my complaints, because you wouldn’t have given me cause to make them. This is your fault, Enzo.”
He sighed, long and low. “Believe me, I’m aware that I bear some responsibility for you being here, infesting my bed like—”
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence!” I turned my head on my—his—my, dammit—pillow, and glared at his profile. The faint smile curling the corner of his mouth aggravated me almost past bearing. “I am not an infestation!”
“One Cyril probably doesn’t equal an infestation,” he agreed, his smile growing. “If there were more of you. Oh, gods help us all if there were more of you. You’re probably not theworst prisoner I could have,” he continued, shocking me so much that my tongue went dry, my next words drying up too. He turned his head to look into my eyes, and his smile faded away. “And I’m far from the worst captor you could have. Fuck. You haven’t asked me what happened with the Calatrians.”
Oh, gods, I hadn’t. Once in a while, I really did feel like a shallow, self-centered fool.
This was one of them. A possible invasion, my family potentially in danger, and I hadn’t evenasked. What would he think of me, when I couldn’t even excusemyselffor my lack of immediate concern?
