Chapter 6: The Wardrobe Aftermath
Without another word, Gareth picks her up and presses her against the wall. The cold stone kissed her flushed back, a shocking contrast to the furnace of his chest against her. He yanked her nightgown up to her waist, exposing her wet, glistening cunt to the cool air. He spat on his fingers, the sound crude and immediate, and shoved them inside her, stretching her roughly. She was still slick from his mouth, but his fingers were intrusive, a claiming.
“You think you can sneak into my chambers and leave unsatisfied?” he growls, lining his thick, rigid cock at her entrance.
He slams into her in one brutal thrust, burying himself to the hilt.
Aurelia moans, a deep, guttural sound torn from her chest. Her head leans back against the wall, her chestnut hair catching on the rough stone. The fullness was breathtaking, a delicious, splitting ache. He filled her completely, a conqueror taking ground.
“Yes, yes, fuck me,” she gasps, pushing back against him, meeting his invasion with a roll of her hips.
One of his hands braces against the wall beside her head. The other snakes around her body, his calloused fingers finding her nipple through the thin silk. He pinches it hard, twisting it. The sharp pain blossomed into a bright point of pleasure, making her cry out.
“You’re mine tonight, princess. Say it.”
“I’m yours!” she cries as he drives deeper, pulling back and thrusting again, establishing a punishing, relentless rhythm.
Each slam of his hips drove her pelvis into the unyielding stone, a dual sensation of hard and harder. The sounds were obscene: the wet slap of skin, his ragged breaths, her choked gasps. She felt the coil tightening again already, a miracle after the orgasm he’d wrung from her with his tongue. His pace was furious, unthinking, a physical vent for the adrenaline of his father’s interruption.
He reached down between her legs, his thumb finding her clit, and rubbed it with rough, circular strokes.
It was too much. It was everything.
She shattered, her walls clenching around him in frantic, rhythmic pulses as she came with a wail, her vision spotting at the edges. Her knees buckled, but he held her up, pinned between his body and the wall, fucking her through the convulsions.
But he doesn’t stop.
With a grunt, he pulls out of her, his cock sliding free, gleaming with her release. He spun her around, her back now to the room. Before her vision could clear, he hooked his hands under her thighs and lifted her, draping her legs over his shoulders. He carried her the few steps to the bed and laid her down, her ass at the very edge, her hips canted up. He loomed over her, his amber eyes black with need in the lamplight.
He drove back into her soaking cunt.
“I’m not done with you,” he snarls, his hips slamming against hers.
This angle was different. Deeper. Each measured, powerful stroke hit that perfect, devastating spot inside her. The earlier frenzy was gone, replaced by a terrifying, focused intensity. He was looking right at her, watching every flicker of sensation on her face. The overstimulation was acute, a hypersensitivity that bordered on pain. Pleasure built again, a tide she couldn’t possibly ride.
She was gasping, tears streaming from the corners of her eyes, mingling with the sweat on her temples. “Please, Gareth, I can’t—”
“You can and you will.”
He fucked her harder, faster, his breathing ragged, his abdominal muscles clenched and quivering with the effort. His control was slipping. The deep strokes became shorter, more frantic. The slap of skin grew louder, wetter.
Her third orgasm crashed over her like a rogue wave, pulling her under. There was no peak, just a drowning, endless surrender. Her body convulsed, back arching off the bed, a raw, broken sob of his name the only sound she could make.
Only then does he pull out.
He stood over her, stroking his cock furiously with a slick, tight fist. His gaze was locked on her spent form, on her large, heaving breasts. He grunted, a low, animal sound, and thick ropes of hot cum spurt across her pale skin, painting stripes of white over her breasts and trembling belly.
He collapsed beside her on the ravaged sheets, both of them panting, the scent of sex and salt and sweat thick and heavy in the air.
The silence that followed was almost louder than their noises had been. The palace clock chimed a distant hour. Aurelia’s body felt liquefied, every nerve singing and then going quiet. She stared at the canopy above, trying to catch the scattered pieces of herself.
Gareth’s hand found hers on the sheet. His fingers laced through hers, tight. It was a simple gesture, but it felt more intimate than anything that had just transpired.
“My father,” he began, his voice gravelly and spent. “He didn’t come here to discuss the trade treaty.”
Aurelia turned her head on the pillow to look at him. The warrior’s mask was gone. In its place was a grim, weary honesty. The cum on her skin was cooling.
“I know,” she whispered.
He looked at her, surprised.
“I’ve read the dispatches from our eastern garrisons,” she said, the scholar in her pushing through the haze of pleasure. “The ‘escorts’ for your retinue are three times the standard size for a diplomatic mission. They’re not guards. They’re the vanguard of an occupying force.”
He was silent for a long moment. “And you came here tonight anyway.”
“I came here tonight,” she said, squeezing his hand, “because I wanted to. Because whatever happens tomorrow, I needed to know this was real.”
He rolled onto his side, facing her. With a corner of the silk sheet, he gently began to wipe his spend from her skin. The tenderness of the act after the brutality of their coupling made her throat tighten.
“It’s real,” he said, the words a vow. “But he will move soon. Possibly at the signing ceremony tomorrow. He wants your libraries, your granaries, your harbors. He doesn’t believe in ‘shared prosperity.’ He believes in taking.”
Aurelia propped herself up on an elbow. The strategist in her was fully awake now, clicking pieces into place alongside the memory of his weight. “Then we don’t give him the chance. The signing is at noon in the Sun Chamber. The route from the guest wing passes through the Hall of Ancestors.”
Gareth’s eyes narrowed, calculating. “It’s narrow. Bottleneck points.”
“My personal guard can be stationed in the side alcoves. Not to attack. To… delay. To insist on a revised security detail. It would cause a diplomatic incident, but it would stall him.”
Gareth stared at her, his mind visibly racing through the tactical problem. “Stall him for what, Aurelia? A few hours? A day? Then he just claims we acted in bad faith and takes what he wants by force anyway. Stalling without an endgame is just a slower defeat.”
He ran a hand through his dark hair, frustrated. The oil lamp guttered, making the shadows of their tangled limbs leap on the wall.
Aurelia sat up fully, the silk sheet pooling around her waist. She looked at him, her hazel eyes clear and direct despite the exhaustion lining them. “What if he wouldn’t attack? What if the thing he wants to take already belongs to him?”
Gareth blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“Your father. Would he march his soldiers into a kingdom that already belonged to his bloodline?” she asked, her voice steady. “Would he spill Durnish blood to seize what a marriage treaty would simply… hand him?”
The question hung in the air, dense and unfamiliar. Conquest was the only language Aldric had ever taught him. This was a different syntax entirely.
“You’re not making sense,” Gareth said, but his voice lacked conviction. A strange, fragile hope was cracking through his pragmatic exterior.
“My father likes you, Gareth. He’s made that abundantly clear.” A soft, rueful smile touched her lips. “He’s been dropping hints about a union since your first hunting trip together. He’s old. He’s been sick for a long time. He’s told his council he will abdicate the day I marry, provided my choice is… suitable.”
She reached out, her finger tracing the line of his jaw. He caught her hand, holding it against his cheek.
“If we were married by the court chaplain at dawn,” she whispered, “Novaris would belong to Durn in name the moment my father signs the abdication scroll. Which he would do with glee, handing the crown directly to me. And to you.”
The enormity of it settled over him, heavy and bright. It wasn’t a battle plan. It was a chess move he’d never been allowed to consider.
“He wouldn’t see it coming,” Gareth breathed, his amber eyes wide. “He sees your father as a sentimental fool. He sees diplomacy as a veil for weakness. The thought of gaining a kingdom through a marriage bed instead of a battlefield…” He let out a short, disbelieving laugh. “It would never occur to him.”
“So we don’t stall him,” Aurelia said, her strategist’s mind fully aligning with this new, audacious path. “We leap over him. We make his war not just inconvenient, but logically pointless. Illegitimate.”
Gareth was already moving, swinging his legs out of bed. He stood, a powerful silhouette against the dim light, and began gathering his scattered clothes. The languid lover was gone, replaced by the decisive prince.
“Dawn,” he said, pulling on his breeches. “The chaplain. We’ll need witnesses from your council you trust absolutely. Mine are all my father’s men.”
“I have two,” Aurelia said, also rising, wrapping the sheet around herself. “Lord Berris and Lady Celine. They’re discreet. They’ll understand the necessity.”
He paused, looking at her standing there in the rumpled aftermath of their passion, speaking of royal succession with calm authority. The contrast was mesmerizing. “This is a political arrangement,” he stated, needing to hear her say it. “To save your kingdom.”
Aurelia walked to him. She placed a hand on his bare chest, over the steady, strong beat of his heart. “It started that way,” she admitted. Her gaze was unflinching. “But you are in my blood now, Gareth. After tonight? This is personal, too.”
He pulled her to him, the sheet between them, and kissed her forehead—a chaste, fierce promise where hours before there had only been hunger. “Then let’s go get married, Princess. Before the sun ruins everything.”