Chapter 32: The First King's Day
Blair woke on black sheets that smelled of cedar and him. The King's wing was colder than the Queen's, all dark marble and banked fire, and Lucien's bed was vast enough to get lost in. She lay still a moment, cataloguing the ache the Queen had left in her from the night before, the sweet soreness between her thighs, the faint bruise of a bite at her hip.
Her new heart beat once. Then twelve seconds of quiet. Then again.
The door to the dressing room opened and Lucien came through carrying a tray. He had thrown on a loose black robe, unbelted, his silver-streaked hair unbound past his shoulders. His eyes swept the bed and found her the way a wolf finds the one sheep that moved.
"There she is," he said. "Wife of the blood. My day."
"It's a King's day, then."
"Sunset to sunset. And I intend to spend every hour of it badly." He set the tray on the mattress beside her hip. Warm bread, honey, poached eggs, a small silver pot of blood with steam curling off its lid. He sat on the edge of the bed and tore a piece of bread with his fingers. "First, food. Vespera's law, not mine. She left instructions."
"She left instructions? In my King's day?"
"Seven lines. Sealed with wax. I read them aloud at dawn and obeyed six." He held the bread to Blair's lips. "Eat."
She ate from his fingers because her body had learned that hunger and him went together now. He fed her slowly, methodically, watching her mouth take each piece. When she licked honey from his thumb he went very still.
"Problem, Your Majesty?"
"Yes," he said, and his voice had dropped into that register she felt in her belly. "I am pent up. Aching to spend. I have been since the night you drank from both our wrists and said you loved us, and I have been pretending otherwise with the patience of a man four centuries old. The pretending is over."
Blair's throat went tight and warm. Her whole adult life she had darted glances at things she shouldn't want. Now the thing sat on the edge of her bed admitting its hunger plainly, and her body answered before her manners could, her thighs pressing together, her sex already stirring.
"You're the King," she managed. "You could have anyone."
"I have a wife." He set the tray on the floor. "Two, in the way that counts. And yesterday was hers. Tonight the moon comes up and it's mine until it isn't." He stood and pulled the robe off his shoulders and let it fall.
He was hard, heavy, the head of him dark and flushed, and he made no effort to hide it. Lucien had never once hidden anything from her. He bent and scooped her up off the sheets with one arm under her knees and one at her back, and carried her the length of the room like she weighed nothing, because to him she did.
The bed was taller than any in the palace, hung in black silk. He did not lay her on her back. He sat against the carved headboard, spread his knees, and arranged her face-down across his lap, her hips over his thigh, her cheek on the cool sheet, her breasts hanging and her ass lifted.
"Lucien."
"Look at you." His palm smoothed down the curve of her spine, over the mark of Vespera's nails still faint on her skin. "I have thought about this position for a month. Every time I closed my eyes in council. Every time Dante droned about grain."
"About spanking me?"
"About having you helpless across me. No." His hand slid lower, between her cheeks, and found her soaked. He made a low sound in his chest. "About opening you. Slowly. All the way. You were Made eleven days ago, little wife, and no one has taught your body patience yet. Vespera fills you and fucks you. I do too. But I have been starving to give you something slower, and I mean to give it now."
His fingers pressed at her entrance, two of them, and he worked them in without hurry, just to the first knuckle, then out, then in to the second. Blair gasped into the sheet. Her body, soft and made and insatiable, opened for him like it had been waiting all night.
"Gods," he muttered. "Listen to that. You're dripping on my leg."
"Then do something about it."
He laughed, low and wicked, and pushed deeper. "There's my rebel. Where's the girl who bowed her head in the scullery?"
"She died in this bed, probably."
"She was reborn in it." His fingers curled and found the front wall of her cunt and pressed, and Blair's whole body arched, her cry muffled by silk. He held the pressure there, patient as stone, rubbing slow circles while her hips began to grind against his thigh without her permission.
"That's it. Ride it. I've got all day and you're not going anywhere." His free hand spread her ass wider, exposing her completely to the room's cold air and his hot gaze, and he pulled his fingers out to the tips and pushed back in with three, slow, inexorable, stretching her around them until she felt every ridge of his knuckles.
"Lucien, oh, oh gods, that's so much."
"Too much?"
"No. No, don't stop, don't you dare stop."
"I wasn't going to. I've waited eleven days to feel how deep you can take me and I'll be damned if I rush it." He fucked her with his fingers at a maddening pace, drawing out each stroke, twisting at the deepest point, while his thumb came up to rest against her other entrance and simply stayed there, a promise. Her pussy clenched around him and he groaned. "Again. Do that again."
She did, deliberately now, squeezing around his fingers, and his hips jerked under her, his cock dragging a slick line against her belly. Blair turned her head and looked back at him over her shoulder. His golden eyes were half-lidded, dark, feverish.
"You said you were aching to spend," she said. "You're not spending. You're torturing."
"Torture is the pleasure. The spending is the end of it." He leaned down and bit the meat of her ass, a quick possessive sting, then soothed it with his tongue. "I will spend in you. Deep. More than once. But first, four hundred years, Blair. Do you know what four hundred years of restraint does to a man? Do you know what it does when it finally finds a wife who can take it?"
Her answer came out wrecked. "Show me."
"I intend to. Breath."
She breathed. He withdrew his three fingers to the tips, added a fourth, and pressed in with a slow steady force that made her whine, her cunt spreading around the width of his hand until his knuckles slipped past and his fingers curled inside her, all four, deep.
"Fuck." Her voice broke on the word. "Fuck, Lucien."
"That's my wife's cunt learning a new shape." He worked gently, rocking his fingers, dragging his fingertips over the place that made her shake. "Breathe through it. Your body refines, it doesn't break. Made flesh, little one. Built to be ruined by us and perfect again by morning."
She came like that, on his hand, her climax rolling through her in long pulses, her arousal running down over his wrist, and he held her through it with his free arm across her back and never once stopped the slow curl of his fingers inside her.
"Another," he ordered softly.
"I just..."
"Another. You spent without permission on my last lesson and got marked for it, and now I'm telling you to spend. Take the gift."
She took it. The second orgasm hit while the first was still fading, sharper, and she sobbed into the sheet, her fingers twisting in the black silk. He withdrew his hand slowly, agonizingly, wiping the four fingers clean on her inner thigh, and smoothed both palms over her hips.
"Now," he said, and his voice was rough, wrecked. "Now I spend."
He shifted under her, lifted her off his lap like she weighed nothing, and turned her onto her back among the pillows. His cock stood flushed and heavy against his stomach, and he crawled over her, taking her wrists and pinning them above her head with one hand, settling the thick head of himself against her entrance, against all that slow stretching he had just done.
"Look at me," he said. "While I ruin you, look at me."
She looked. He pressed in, one long continuous inch after another, her freshly opened body taking him deep, her walls clinging to every part of him, until his hips met hers and he was seated to the root and Blair's back arched clean off the mattress.
"There," he breathed, his forehead dropping to hers, his control fraying audibly. "There it is. Four hundred years." He pulled back almost all the way and drove in again, hard, and began to move, each stroke deep and deliberate, his name falling out of her mouth in pieces. "Say it again."
"Lucien. Lucien, please, harder."
"Greedy little wife." He hooked her knee over his elbow and fucked her deeper, the headboard knocking the wall, his teeth finding her throat. "I'm going to fill you. Then I'm going to fill you again. Then I'm going to carry you to the bath and feed you supper by hand and start over at moonrise. Vespera gets three days and I get three days, and I've been starving since the day you signed."
Blair wrapped her other leg around him and pulled, taking him deeper, meeting every stroke with her hips. "Then stop talking," she said, and bit his jaw, "and spend in your wife."
He did.