Page 26 of Given to the Fae
‘You’d let me be...by myself?’
‘The window isn’t real. There’s nowhere you can go,’ I reason. ‘And Bere chose me as your keeper because I don’t...partake. You have nothing to fear from me.’
‘Don’t partake?’
‘I don’t fuck slaves,’ I elaborate.
‘Oh.’
She turns back to the bath, now full of steaming water. She dips a finger into it and gives a small sigh at the heat that I try to ignore. Seeming to make her mind up, she drags the divider out and opens it, making herself a small area I can’t see past. I hear her splash in the water and giggle a little to herself and I find myself smiling faintly before I get a hold of myself and frown, steeping the tea well so that it's strong.
Her loud gasp has me looking up, my eyes boring into the dark carved wood of the partition.
‘All right?’ I ask.
‘It’s just...warm,’ comes her small, awed voice from the other side of the room.
I suppose I take it for granted, but she’ll never have experienced something as simple as being enveloped byperfectly heated water despite how many dwellings have a bath that’s conjured to provide such a thing on demand. They aren’t for her ilk in the Dark Realms.
‘There’ll be soap on the side.’
She lets out a surprised sound.
‘Scented soap,’ she murmurs, her excitement so easy to hear from her tone.
There’s more splashing and I leave the tea to cool. I empty my bag onto the bed and re-pack it, mostly so I have something to do instead of merely listening to the feminine sighs and groans that emanate from behind the screen as she enjoys her bath.
My cock hasn’t been at anything less than half-mast since she drew that screen across the room, imagining what she’s doing, what she looks like. Her long legs... tapered waist... She’s thin but her body is more than pleasing to the eye though I’ve tried desperately not to look when she’s bared to my eyes.
I stifle my own groan. I’ve never been so unable to control myself before. What the fuck is wrong with me? It’s not as if I haven’t had a female lately.
I hear her get out of the small tub and she rustles around with the folded linens stocked on the shelf as she dries herself.
When she emerges a moment later, dressed in her coarse, sleeveless, blue slave dress again, her long dark hair dripping as she dabs it with the drying linen. The scars on her body that I can see are reddened from the water.
‘Thank you,’ she says in a small voice.
My eyes lock onto lines of welts on her right arm. There was a bandage there at The Barrack, I remember. I grimace but I can’t help myself from asking. I want to know more about her.
‘What caused those?’ I ask, wishing I can take back the words as soon as I utter them because her expression shutters quickly.
‘A knife.’
‘What for?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
I want her to talk to me, tell me things. My eyes narrow slightly at myself. I haven’t wanted such things from the other females I’ve spent time with. Why this one?
‘The tea the healer gave us is there. Be sure to drink it all,’ I say gruffly.
Then, I gesture to the comb from my bag that’s now on the table waiting for her along with a leather tie for her hair. She stares at both for several moments before she glances up at me, her confusion evident.
‘For you to tame your locks,’ I say.
Nodding, she picks it up and tries to draw it through her gnarled wet strands from her scalp to the ends. It gets tangled, of course, and she pulls at the comb hard, making a face of pain when it gets stuck and stings her scalp.
‘Not like that,’ I say. ‘From the bottom up.’
