Chapter 17: Counseling Session.
Kerr was nestled deep inside her, the world reduced to the push and pull of their hips, the slick heat where they were joined. The plush, high-backed chair groaned under their combined weight, a complaint swallowed by the fire’s low crackle. Elspeth’s hands were braced on his broad shoulders, her knuckles pale where she gripped him. She set the pace, a steady, rolling undulation that squeezed them both down to a singular, breathless point.
“Duty is an ugly cloak,” he grunted, his voice thick as he rocked up to meet her descent. His hands, spanning the sharp wing-blades of her hips, guided her. “Itches in all the wrong places. Shields nothing worthwhile.”
She caught his rhythm, sinking onto him with a low, shuddering sigh that was mostly pleasure, a fraction exhaustion. Years of flour-dust and stew-steam hadn’t softened her, but hardened her into something lean and durable. She could ride him like this for hours, always had. “So you trade it for another,” she breathed, eyes unfocused. “A better-stitched one?”
“Father doesn’t see a trade. He sees a merchant’s ledger. A box to be ticked. The Howe alliance stitched up with a marriage license.” He bucked up, a sharp punctuation that drew a gasp from her. The movement sloshed the whiskey in the glass he’d left on the table, amber catching firelight. “She’s… fine. Sharp-tongued. Terrible laugh. Sounds like a hinge on a rusted gate.”
Elspeth laughed then, a real one, rough and honest. It made her clench around him, and Kerr’s eyes rolled back for a second, a feral sound escaping his throat. “There’s your poetry, my lord,” she managed, her rhythm faltering. She bore down, taking him impossibly deeper, driving the air from his lungs. “The bards will sing of the lady with the gate-hinge laugh.”
“Fuck the bards.” His grip tightened, his fingers pressing into her flesh. He wasn’t laughing. The frustration he’d carried in all day—from the council meeting, from his mother’s pointed questions—found its outlet here, in this dark, quiet room. It wasn’t anger at Elspeth. It was a restless, seething energy that needed a physical form. “Fuck this… this quiet negotiation of my life. Bryce is off ruling. Fergus is off fighting. I’m left here to be… sorted. Polished for presentation.”
“You are polished.” She leaned forward, her small, weathered breasts pressing against the hard wall of his chest. The tips brushed him with every motion. She put her lips to his ear, her voice a hot whisper in the dim. “And well-presented. And currently fucking your kitchen maid.”
He snorted, a half-laugh that was also a plea. He was close. The coil was winding tight in his gut, a familiar, inevitable pressure. The conversation, the movement, the sheer, intimate shape of her around him—it all funneled towards the same explosive conclusion. But he fought it, hanging onto the thread of his grievance. “Delilah wants a lord. A portrait on the wall. She wants heirs and a demure husband who quotes the Chant at breakfast. She doesn’t want… this.”
“Doesn’t want what?” Elspeth asked, her own breathing ragged. She was chasing her end now too, the climb getting steep, the pleasure starting to fray her control. Her hips moved with sharper purpose. “A man who feels trapped? A man whose head is full of battle formations and whose body is in a silk-lined cage?”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t want the fire,” she whispered, her eyes locked on his, no longer distant but fiercely present. “Doesn’t want the mess. The heat of a real fight, or the sweat of a real bed.” She shifted, angling herself, and cried out softly as the new position sent a bright spike of sensation through them both.
Kerr groaned, his forehead dropping to her collarbone. The smell of her skin—soap, a trace of woodsmoke from the kitchens, and her own particular salt-sweet musk—filled his senses. It was the antithesis of perfumed oil and political delicacy.It was real. It was now. He moved faster, the chair slamming back against the rug with their force.
“Tell me you’ll die fighting,” she urged, her voice cracking. It wasn’t a morbid wish. It was the same dark, visceral turn-on from the night before, surfacing again. The acceptance of his truth, raw and unadorned. “Tell me.”
“I will,” he growled, the words ripped from him. Promises in the dark held a different weight. They were confession, not prophecy. “On some muddy field, with a sword in my hand. Not… not faded in a bed, surrounded by vases of winter roses.”
“Good.” The syllable was a shudder. “Good. Then fuck me like it’s your last fight.”
That was all he needed. The last shred of control evaporated. He wrapped his arms around her narrow back, crushing her to him, and stood from the chair in one heaving motion.
Elspeth yelped, her legs locking around his waist, the sudden change in gravity driving him even deeper. She clung to his neck as he took three stumbling strides to the edge of the four-poster bed.
He fell onto the dark silk, taking her with him, their landing soft yet jarring. He was on top now, caging her. The rhythm became frantic, punishing, a relentless piston-stroke that shook the bedframe. He was making his point, wordlessly, with every thrust. This is me. This is the mess.
Her cries were muffled against his shoulder, bitten off, desperate things. Her hands scrabbled at his back, leaving faint, red trails.
“Elspeth,” he choked out. A warning, and a plea.
Her answer was to drag her nails down hard, a final, claiming stroke. It tipped them both over the edge.
For him, it was a silent, convulsive roar, his body locking as he buried himself inside her, the world dissolving into a blinding, white-hot release. It felt less like pleasure and more like exorcism, the pumping of his hot seed a physical expulsion of all the day’s coiled tension.
For her, it was a drawn-out, whimpering unraveling, her whole body bowing up against his as she trembled through her own climax, her inner walls pulsing around him in a tight, possessive rhythm.
The silence that followed was broken only by the ragged symphony of their breathing and the distant pop of the dying fire.
He collapsed to the side, pulling her with him, unwilling to break the connection just yet. They were slick with sweat, glued together. The spicy, intimate smell of sex layered over the room’s other scents.
His heart was a war drum against her cheek.
After a long while, Elspeth stirred. Her hand slid down the damp, muscled plane of his stomach, coming to rest lightly on the thatch of hair at its base. His cock, still semi-hard and slick with both of them, twitched under her casual touch.
“You won’t do it, you know,” she said, her voice hoarse but calm.
Kerr stared up at the silk canopy, dark and infinite above them. “Won’t do what?”
“Marry the Howe girl. Not if it feels like a cage. You’ll smash the lock. You always do.” She turned her head, her lips brushing his pectoral. “You’re a terrible negotiator. Your heart shows on your face, and it’s never where it’s supposed to be.”
His chest vibrated with a rueful chuckle at her words. The empty, clean feeling from a moment ago began to recede, and the dull, hollow shape of his other life pressed back in at the edges of the room. The map of Orlais on the wall seemed to mock his stillness. He felt the soft, worn blanket of his post-coital lethargy, but something new was already pricking at him—a restless, dissatisfied energy that not even this could fully quell.
He felt the soft, worn blanket of his post-coital lethargy, but something new was already pricking at him—a restless, dissatisfied energy that not even this could fully quell. The map on the wall wasn’t just a map; it was a reminder of every road he hadn’t taken, every border that wasn’t his to cross. He slid out of her and stood, the cool air of the room hitting his sweat-sheened skin, and walked barefoot to the chair by the dying fire.
He dropped into it, the leather sighing under his weight. He stared at the amber residue in his whiskey glass, his body still humming. Elspeth watched him from the bed, not covering herself, her own skin gleaming in the low light. She saw the tension reclaiming his shoulders, the distant set of his jaw. He was already gone, his mind marching back to the problem of Delilah Howe and merchant ledgers and gates that needed rust.
“You’re still there,” she said, not a question. Her voice cut through the quiet, practical and unsurprised.
Kerr didn’t look at her. He just ran a hand through his hair, a rough, frustrated gesture. A drop of sweat, or something else, traced a path down his thigh. “It doesn’t stop. The thinking. It just… pauses.”
Elspeth pushed herself up. The silk clung to her damp back as she left the warmth of the bed. She crossed the room with that efficient, unhurried walk he knew so well, the firelight carving the lean lines of her body. She stood before him, not touching, just looking down at where he sat sweaty and spent, his cock lying heavy and dripping against his leg.
“Then stop thinking,” she said, her tone leaving no room for argument.
He finally looked up at her, the candlelight caught in her grey eyes. Without a word, his hands shot out and seized her hips, pulling her forward and down. She let out a sharp gasp as he guided her backwards onto him, onto the thick, semi-soft weight of him. She sank down, a slow, inexorable surrender, and felt him stir, lengthen, and swell impossibly inside her once more, a fullness that stole her breath.
“Stop thinking about the Howe girl,” Elspeth commanded, her voice a ragged whisper as she adjusted, settling him fully, buried to the hilt. She began to move, a slow, grinding rotation of her hips. “Just fill my cunt. Keep filling it until it rids your head of all thought.”
He groaned, a deep, surrendering sound, and buried his face in the crook of her neck. His lips found her salt-damp skin, not kissing so much as pressing into her, an anchor point. He held her there, impaled, as she took over the rhythm, grinding down onto him with a focused, relentless pressure that sought not her own peak but the utter dissolution of his.
She moaned, long and low and utterly beyond her control, at the sensation of him hardening further, stretching her, claiming a space that felt made for him alone. Every circular slide of her hips pushed his concerns further out, replacing strategy with sensation, obligation with this single, sweating, connected truth.
He moved his hands from her hips to her lower back, pressing her even closer. His breaths were hot gusts against her neck. “Elspeth.”
“Shut up,” she breathed, increasing her pace. “Just be here. Be in this. Nowhere else.”
Kerr obeyed, for once. His mind, a stubborn flock of crows circling the idea of Delilah Howe and iron-bound duty, finally stilled. The only thought was the rhythm of her hips on his, the drag of wet silk where they were joined. His hands slid from her back to grip the carved arms of the chair, the old wood biting into his palms. A counterpoint to the soft, enveloping heat of her.
He matched her pace, pushing up to meet her, finding a desperate, grinding harmony.
Words were gone, replaced by the wet sound of their skin, their mingled breath sawing in the quiet room. Sweat dripped from his brow onto her shoulder.
Elspeth’s head fell back, a strand of her damp grey hair sticking to her throat. Her movements became jagged, less a controlled rotation and more a series of sharp, seeking drops onto his lap.
She was close. He could feel the tell-tale flutter, the deep inner clench that always came before.
“Don’t you fucking dare stop,” she whispered, the words broken into shards.
As if he could. The coil in his own core was wound so tight it hurt, a sweet, promising ache. But he focused on her. On the cords standing out in her neck. On the slick, abandoned glide of her body taking him. He drove up, finding an angle he knew by decades of touch, a geography only he had mapped.
She cried out, a raw, broken sound, as the first convulsion ripped through her. Her body clenched down on him in a series of brutal, pleasurable spasms, pulling a groan from his own chest.
He held still, let her ride the wave, kept himself poised on the knife’s edge.
Her breathing hadn’t even leveled out, the aftershocks still fluttering inside her, when the second, unexpected peak surged. It left her gasping, trembling, her nails digging half-moons into his forearms as she pressed her face against his chest to stifle a scream.
Before that storm could fully pass, a third, rolling, slower crest took her. This one wrenched a long, pained groan from her, her body going lax for a second before tensing again in a helpless, involuntary bow. She shuddered against him, a puppet shaking under a master’s violent hand.
That third, final clenching release was too much for him. He shattered. A wave of pure physical oblivion crashed through his nerves, erasing his name, his title, every complication. His vision greyed at the edges as he emptied himself into her in a series of hot, pulsing jets, his body locked, his head thrown back against the chair.
Silence, heavy and thick.
Their breathing was loud in the lull. He was soft inside her but still there, a thick, spent weight. She was a puddle of heat and exhaustion on his lap, her slight frame boneless.
His thoughts, those crows, began a tentative return. Drifting back to roost in the ruin of his mind.
He felt himself stir again, an impossible twitch of renewed life deep within her warmth.
She felt it too, her abdomen a soft, trusting pressure against his. A tiny sound, a fractured little sob of exhausted wonder, escaped her lips.
Kerr hardly believed it himself. His body thrummed with a strange, hollowed-out energy, the emptiness after the storm drawing a new, less urgent need up in its place.
He flexed experimentally, and she gasped, a sharp, startled intake of breath.
“You can’t be—” she began.
He didn’t answer with words. He lifted her slightly, just enough to re-establish a fraction of control, and then sank her back down onto the impossible, returning hardness of him. He had no declaration of battle or destiny to make now. He wasn’t fighting anything but the creeping edges of the outside world. This was sanctuary.
The second wind found a rhythm, slower, deeper, less about frenzy and more about exploration. About impossible stamina. He watched her face in the firelight, slack with the previous abandon, now tightening again with a dawning, stupefied pleasure. Her eyes, when they opened, held a naked, bruising tenderness that threatened to unravel him more thoroughly than any orgasm had.
He moved in her, a steady, possessive tide.
She came undone again with a choked sob, this time quickly, her body instantly responsive, as if primed by everything that had come before. Her internal muscles milked him, a rhythmic, clutching plea for his own end.
He denied it. He grit his teeth, sweat dripping from his jaw onto her breast, and rode her through the storm, slowing only when her tremors subsided.
He leaned her back over the arm of the chair, changing the angle, moving deeper. The new position stole a sharp cry from her lips. The chair creaked ominously, a steady, wooden heartbeat under their bodies.
A second later, she spasmed again, this climax shorter, sharper, a shiver that traveled from her core out through her limbs, her feet curling against the fur rug.
His own control was a fraying rope, burning his hands. But he had to give her the third. His rhythm became punishing once more, driving toward it. His biceps ached, his back screamed, but the need was a lodestone in his gut.
He felt it happen, saw her face slacken into a mask of obliterated surprise just before her whole body went rigid, then limp as a rag doll. A silent scream was etched onto her features, too much spent breath left for sound.
That was the permission his own body was waiting for. His climax this time was less a detonation, more a massive, subsiding landslip, a groan that tore from the bottom of his lungs. He filled her again, the pulses feeling fainter, yet somehow deeper, as if it reached some unlit hollow that hadn’t been claimed before.
Dull sparks swam in his vision. Elspeth felt so tight, a scorching silken vice wringing every last drop from him.
Numbness set in. Sweet, heavy. The war drum in his chest finally slowed. The sweat cooling on their bodies felt like dew.
He blinked, sluggish, his thoughts like silt at the bottom of a still pond. He let his head fall forward, his lips brushing her throat.
A crackle from the hearth. A joint popped in the chair.
He felt the slow, inevitable throb start. The returning hardness. Her warmth. Her ruined, trusting emptiness.
He couldn’t. The thought was distant.
He couldn’t not.
With a grunt that was part agony, part pure, atavistic will, he began to move again. There was no rhythm now, no finesse. It was slow, and it was deep, and it was constant.
She made no sound, had no breath left to make one. She simply accepted it, her body a well-used instrument surrendering to the musician’s last, final, compulsive movement. He watched, from a great height, her eyes roll back and close.
The climb was a vast, featureless mountain. There were no landmarks, just the slow, grinding drag of flesh on wet flesh.
They faded in and out.Shared breaths. A twitch. The approaching tremor. It was her third of this round, or her sixth in total. It didn’t matter. Numbers had stopped. Meaning had stopped.
He felt a pulse deep within her, the pre-echo. The electricity passed from her to him.
He broke, they broke together. A quiet snap.
The white flash behind his eyes wasn’t pleasure, wasn’t release.
It was a silent, profound cessation. A cliff’s edge.
And then there was only the dark, velvet weight of nothing.