Chapter 21: Liam grips the edge of the oak desk, knuckles white, as Briana's delicate fingers trace the vellum pages. Her scent—jasmine and something uniquely her—wraps around him like sin. 'This passage about royal succession is fascinating,' she murmurs, the tip of her pink tongue darting out to moisten her lips. Liam's throat goes dry. His eyes drop to where her crossed legs make the slit in her skirt fall open, revealing a tantalizing stretch of caramel thigh. When she shifts, the fabric rides higher. H
The library in the evening was a cathedral of silence, broken only by the soft crackle of the fire in the great marble hearth. Dust motes swam in the slanted, honey-colored light cutting through the stained glass. Briana sat at a broad oak table, an ancient tome on Cordonian succession laws open before her. Liam stood opposite, his pointer finger resting on a passage about consort inheritance, his voice a steady, professional murmur.
But his focus was fraying.
It was her perfume. Not the heavy, floral scents the court women wore. Something greener, with a hint of citrus. It cut through the library’s smell of old paper and beeswax, a fresh, vital wound in the stillness. She leaned forward to better see the text, and the neckline of her silk blouse—a deep emerald gift from the royal tailor—gaped. He saw the soft, caramel swell of her breast, the shadowed valley between them, the delicate lace edge of a bra he had no business imagining.
“So, the third consort’s offspring would have precedence over the second if the mother’s familial land holdings were greater?” she asked, her brow furrowed in concentration. She bit her plush lower lip, a flash of white teeth on pink flesh.
Liam’s cock, traitorous and insistent, hardened against the fly of his impeccably tailored trousers. The sensation was a sharp, painful throb. He shifted his weight, hoping the fall of his jacket would conceal it. “In theory, yes. Though that precedent was set during a grain famine, so the value of arable land was artificially inflated.”
“Politics and loopholes,” she sighed, leaning back. The silk stretched across her chest, outlining the gentle curve of her nipples. She seemed utterly unaware of the effect she was having. Or perhaps she wasn’t. The memory of her whispered confessions through the door, the raw want in her voice, hung between them like a ghost.
“It’s all loopholes,” Liam said, his voice tighter than he intended. He cleared his throat. “The trick is finding the one that benefits you.”
She looked up at him then, her hazel-green eyes holding his. The firelight caught in them, turning them gold. “And which loophole benefits you, Liam?”
The question was a door swinging open into a dark room. He was the King’s man. His loyalty was to the Crown, to order, to the smooth functioning of the machine. But the King’s command was also to protect her. Those two duties had felt aligned until this moment, right now, with her scent in his nose and her gaze stripping him bare.
“My benefit is a stable Cordonia,” he said, the official answer.
She held his stare for a beat too long, then looked back at the book, her finger tracing a line of Gothic script. “Stable. Right.” A pause. “It’s warm in here.”
She stood, pushing her chair back. She walked over to the long window, her silhouette framed against the dying light. She unbuttoned the cuffs of her blouse, rolling the sleeves up to her elbows in a practical, graceful motion. The skin of her forearms was smooth. Vulnerable.
Liam didn’t move. He watched her. The professional distance he’d maintained for a week was crumbling into dust. He remembered the feel of her trembling arm in his in the archives, the sheer fucking relief on her face when he’d interrupted Tamia. She was a problem to be solved, but she was also a woman breathing, yearning, trapped.
“Do you ever get to stop?” she asked, her back still to him. “Stop strategizing, stop guarding, stop… solving?”
“No.”
She turned. Her expression was unguarded, weary. “Neither do I. Not anymore. I have to learn, I have to watch, I have to be the perfect asset. I can’t just… feel something.” Her eyes dropped, then lifted again, a challenge in them. “You heard. The other night. Through the door.”
He didn’t insult her by pretending otherwise. “The walls in the old wing are thin.”
“It was the only thing that felt real since I got here,” she said, taking a step toward him. “That and… the fear. When your aunt…” She stopped, hugging herself. “I need something that’s mine. Not a lesson. Not a strategy.”
“Briana,” he said, a warning. It came out hoarse.
“You want me,” she stated, simple and devastating. “I can see it. I can feel it in the room right now. That tense, quiet way you have of wanting something.”
He should deny it. He should cite his duty, the King’s trust, the catastrophic political risk. But the words died. He just looked at her, his control a thin, fraying wire.
She walked toward the table, not stopping until she was on his side of it. She stood close enough that her perfume was all he could smell, close enough to feel the heat coming off her body. She looked up at him, her gaze dropping to his mouth, then lower, to the obvious, straining bulge in his trousers.
“The King told you to protect me,” she whispered. “To see to my needs. My well-being.”
“This is not what he meant.”
“Isn’t it?” Her hand came up, not touching him, but hovering near his chest. “What if my well-being needs this? What if I need to feel something other than scared or studied? What if I need to choose who touches me?”
Her fingertips brushed the lapel of his jacket. A spark shot straight to his groin. His hands, which had been clenched at his sides, twitched.
“It’s a complication,” he forced out. “A dangerous one.”
“Everything here is dangerous.” Her hand flattened against his chest. He could feel her pulse through her palm. “I’m tired of being the only one naked in that danger.”
That was the shattering point. The image of her, exposed and trembling before Tamia, fused with the woman before him now, boldly reclaiming her own desire. His hands came up, cupping her face, his thumbs stroking her cheekbones. Her skin was impossibly soft.
He kissed her.
It wasn’t gentle. It was a collapse. A release of a week’s worth of coiled vigilance and forbidden attraction. His mouth slanted over hers, demanding, and she opened for him with a desperate gasp. Her taste was like her scent—vital, faintly sweet, utterly consuming. Her arms wound around his neck, pulling him down to her, her body plastering against his. He could feel every curve through the thin silk.
He walked her back until her hips met the edge of the heavy oak table. Ancient manuscripts whispered in protest as he swept them aside with his arm, the sound of sliding vellum and thumping books obscenely loud. He lifted her, his hands gripping the backs of her thighs, and sat her on the cleared surface. She wrapped her legs around his waist, locking her ankles, grinding the hot, soft cradle of her pelvis against the rigid outline of his cock.
“Fuck,” he groaned into her mouth, his hands pushing her blouse from her shoulders. It pooled at her elbows, trapping her arms slightly, exposing the lace of her bra. He ducked his head, his mouth hot and wet through the lace, sucking her nipple. She cried out, her head falling back, a column of throat he wanted to bite.
“Liam, please.”
He tore at the buttons of his own shirt, shucking his jacket, never breaking the seal of their mouths. Her hands were on his belt, fumbling with the buckle. He helped her, the leather sliding free with a hiss. His zpper went down. He sprang free, thick and flushed, into her cool, waiting hand.
Her fingers wrapped around him, a tight, tentative stroke that made his vision spark. “God, yes,” he breathed.
He pushed her skirt up her thighs, his fingers finding the damp silk of her panties. He rubbed the soaked fabric, feeling her heat, her swollen flesh beneath. She bucked against his hand, a whimpering, urgent sound in her throat.
“Tell me,” he commanded, his voice gravel. “Tell me what you need.”
“You. Inside. Now.”
He hooked his fingers in the silk and lace and ripped. The sound was vicious, final. He shoved the torn fabric aside, his fingers delving into her. She was drenched, hot, clenching around nothing. He pressed two fingers deep, crooking them, and her whole body bowed off the table, a shattered cry echoing off the high ceiling.
“Quieter,” he murmured, though he didn’t care. He added a third finger, stretching her, feeling her tight, velvety walls flutter. “Or they’ll send a guard.”
“Let them,” she panted, her hips pistoning on his hand. “I don’t care.”
He withdrew his fingers, shiny with her arousal. He positioned himself at her entrance, the broad head nudging against her. Her eyes were wild, locked on his.
“This changes everything,” he said, a final, futile anchor to reason.
“Good,” she snarled, and drove her hips down, impaling herself on him in one fierce, deep stroke.
They both gasped, a shared, gut-punched sound. He was buried to the hilt, sheathed in an almost unbearable, slick heat. She was so tight, so deep. He braced his hands on the table on either side of her, his head dropping to her shoulder, breathing her in. For a second, they were frozen, fused, the magnitude of the breach crashing over them.
Then she moved. A roll of her hips. A clench.
He was lost.
He pulled back and slammed home. The table scraped against the stone floor with a jarring screech. He didn’t stop. He set a brutal, driving rhythm, each thrust rocking her body, her breasts straining against the lace of her bra. Her legs locked tighter around him, her heels digging into the small of his back, urging him deeper, harder.
“Yes… like that… fuck, Liam, just like that,” she chanted, her words breaking into moans. Her nails scored his back through his shirt.
He captured her mouth again, swallowing her cries. This was raw, devoid of ceremony or courtly pretense. It was the grind of hips, the slap of skin, the wet, filthy sound of their joining. It was her whispering “more” against his lips, him grunting “take it” into her hair. It was reclamation. It was mutiny. It was two people stealing a moment of pure, desperate feeling from a gilded cage.
He felt her climax building, her inner muscles beginning a frantic, rhythmic squeeze around his length. Her breath hitched, her eyes screwing shut. “I’m… I’m coming…”
“Come,” he ordered, pounding into her, his own control unraveling. “Come on my cock. Let go.”
She shattered with a choked scream, her body convulsing, her cunt milking him in violent, exquisite pulses. The sight, the feel of it, tore his own release from him. He drove into her one last, devastating time and stilled, buried deep as he came, a hot, endless rush spilling into her, his groan a raw, animal thing muffled against her neck.
For long minutes, the only sounds were their ragged breaths and the crackling fire. The world outside the library—the scheming, the decrees, the waiting threats—seemed a million miles away. He was still inside her, softening, his forehead resting against hers. Her legs slid from his back, trembling.
Slowly, carefully, he withdrew. The reality of what they’d done seeped back in with the cool air. Her torn underwear. The displaced, priceless books. The scent of sex now layered over dust and perfume.
He helped her sit up, his hands gentle now where they had been demanding. She pulled her blouse back over her shoulders, but the damage was done; a button was missing, the silk wrinkled beyond repair. She looked ravaged, beautiful, and utterly calm.
He fastened his trousers with clumsy fingers, his mind already clicking through the consequences, the security gaps, the necessary lies.
“This stays here,” he said, his voice back to its usual calm, though it felt like a lie.
“Of course,” she said, sliding off the table. Her legs wobbled, and she steadied herself on the edge. She looked at the torn lace in her hand, then tucked it into the pocket of her ruined skirt. A souvenir. “A loophole.”
He handed her his jacket. “Wear this. The corridors are drafty.”
She slipped it on. It engulfed her, the wool carrying his warmth and scent. She looked up at him, her gaze clear. “Thank you.”
He didn’t ask what for. For the interruption in the archives. For the lesson. For the oblivion. He simply nodded.
He escorted her back to her rooms in silence. The castle felt different around him, the shadows holding new potential, the silence humming with a secret. At her door, she handed back his jacket. Their fingers brushed.
“My lesson tomorrow?” she asked, as if discussing the weather.
“Ten a.m. The Treaty of Westphalia and its influence on Cordonian border disputes,” he replied, the script flawless.
“I’ll be ready.”
She went inside. Liam took up his post, his body still humming, the taste of her still on his tongue. The problem had just become infinitely more complex. And for the first time in his meticulously ordered life, he found he didn’t care about the solution. He only cared about keeping her safe, and keeping whatever this was alive.
Down in the darker, colder reaches of the palace, Camilla knelt before a rusted gate in the sub-basement. The lock was old, but her tools were modern and precise. With a final, satisfying click, the gate swung open on protesting hinges. The room beyond was a forgotten storage space for obsolete surveillance equipment—reel-to-reel tapes from a bygone era.
She’d heard rumors. Of Tamia’s… proclivities. Of a previous adjutant, a handsome young man who had disappeared after being a little too attentive to the King’s sister twenty years ago. The official logs were scrubbed. But the palace, Camilla knew, never truly forgot.
She shone her flashlight. Dusty boxes were labeled by year. Her light settled on one: 35th Year of Reign – Private Security Audits. Wing 3.
Wing 3 was Tamia’s private residence.
Camilla’s smile was a knife-slash in the gloom. She lifted the box. It was heavy. The leverage she needed was here, in the dust and the dark. She just had to find it.r
The metallic taste of old dust coated Camilla’s tongue as she lowered the box onto a crate. Her fingers, usually so steady, fumbled with the brittle tape. Inside, nestled in yellowed padding, were three unmarked reel-to-reel tapes. No dates. No labels. Just potential.
She pocketed them, her heart a hard, cold thing in her chest. The ghost of the missing adjutant seemed to breathe in the dark with her. This was it. The shape of her aunt’s ruin.
Across the palace, in the opulent living quarters of the royal wing, the air was thick with a different tension. Hannah paced before the fireplace, its flames doing nothing to melt the ice in her veins. Kiara was curled into the corner of a vast velvet sofa, restlessly sketching nothing in particular on a pad. The two consorts present, Elara and Sophie, sat with practiced calm in armchairs, sipping tea that had gone cold.
“She’s safe,” Elara said, her voice soothing. A diplomat’s daughter, her utility was in her calming presence. “Liam is meticulous. He hasn’t left his post outside her door except for his scheduled patrols.”
“It’s not just physical safety,” Kiara muttered, her pencil snapping under the pressure. “It’s that… creature. Festering in her rooms. Scheming.”
“She hasn’t approached Briana directly since the archives,” Sophie offered. A financial strategist, her mind was a ledger of risks and advantages. “The King’s warning, and Liam’s constant presence, have created an effective deterrent. For now.”
Hannah stopped pacing. “For now.” The words were brittle. She looked at the connecting door to Briana’s empty suite, a fresh agony every time. “I can still smell her perfume in this room. I can still hear her. And we’re in here, drinking tea.”
“We are respecting the rules,” Camilla’s voice cut through from the doorway. They hadn’t heard her return. She stepped in, closing the door softly behind her. A fine layer of basement grime dusted the hem of her trousers. Her eyes were alive with a dark, feverish light. “Because Liam is there. And because we must look compliant, obedient, while the real work is done elsewhere.”
Kiara sat up. “What did you find?”
Camilla didn’t answer immediately. She walked to the sideboard, poured a finger of amber whiskey, and knocked it back. The burn seemed to focus her. She turned, leaning against the polished wood. “Our aunt has a taste for destroying beautiful things. It’s not a whim. It’s a pattern. And she records her… triumphs.”
A sharp silence fell. The fire popped.
“Records?” Hannah whispered, horror dawning.
“Visual records. From before digital storage was common.” Camilla’s lip curled. “She likes souvenirs. I have three reels. The contents are unknown, but the year and the location are not. They correspond to the disappearance of a young man from father’s personal guard. And to two serving maids who left the palace under a cloud of ‘scandal’ and were never heard from again.”
Elara set her cup down with a sharp click. “You’re saying she…?”
“I’m saying she has urges. And she satisfies them without care for consequence.” Camilla’s gaze swept over her sisters. “She views Briana as her next prize. But now we have the ledger of her debts. We wait. We let Liam do his job. And the moment she makes a move, we don’t appeal to father. We show her the box. We tell her we’ll play the tapes for the entire Privy Council. We watch her break.”
The plan was elegant in its cruelty. A perfect, silent trap.
Kiara stood, a restless energy finally finding direction. “So we just sit? We just wait while she’s out there, hungry?”
“We endure,” Camilla said. “Like we always have. But now we have teeth.”
Hannah walked to the window, looking out at the dark grounds. Somewhere out there, in a room guarded by a man whose control had shattered over her, was the woman she ached for. The rules were a straitjacket. But Camilla’s cold vengeance was a key. “We miss her,” Hannah said, the admission raw in the elegant room.
“Every second,” Kiara echoed, joining her at the window.
The consorts exchanged a glance—a mixture of sympathy and sharp understanding. They were assets, companions, but in this, they were witnesses to a love that was as much a fortress as a feeling.
In Briana’s suite, the memory of the library was a live wire under her skin. She had showered, the hot water sluicing away the physical evidence but not the phantom feeling of Liam buried inside her, the brutal, perfect fullness. She wore another silk nightdress, this one the color of wine. She was supposed to be reading a treatise on trade agreements.
Instead, she stood before the full-length mirror, her hands tracing her own body. Where his hands had been. Where his mouth had burned. A reckless, powerful heat bloomed low in her belly. The fear was still there, a cold undercurrent, but layered over it now was a defiant ownership. She had taken something for herself. She had made a choice in a world of mandates.
She let her hands slide down, over her stomach, into the warmth between her thighs. She was still sensitive, swollen. A soft gasp escaped her as her fingers brushed her clit. She thought of the torn underwear in her pocket. She thought of the animal sound he’d made when he came.
Her door clicked open.
She froze, her hand stilling. Only one person had the key besides her.
Liam stepped inside, locking the door behind him. He had changed into a black turtleneck and dark trousers, moving like shadow itself. His eyes found her in the mirror, her hand trapped between her legs, her face flushed with interrupted desire. His gaze was no longer that of a detached adjutant. It was hungry, possessive, and starkly honest.
“I finished my patrol,” he said, his voice low. “The halls are clear.”
“I was just…” she started, but the lie died. She didn’t remove her hand.
“I see what you were doing.” He walked toward her, his footsteps silent on the carpet. He stopped behind her, his reflection looming over hers in the glass. His hands came to rest on her shoulders, his thumbs stroking the base of her neck. “Did you think of me? When you touched yourself?”
“Yes.” The word was a whisper.
“Tell me.” His fingers slid the thin silk straps of her nightdress down her arms. The fabric pooled at her waist, baring her breasts in the mirror. She watched, mesmerized, as his large, capable hands covered them, his palms rough against her soft skin. He squeezed, his thumbs rubbing her nipples into tight, aching points.
“I thought of your cock,” she breathed, her head falling back against his chest. “How hard you were. How you filled me up on that table.”
“And?” He pinched a nipple, gently, then not so gently. A jolt of pure pleasure-pain shot to her core.
“And I thought of your face,” she admitted, her eyes meeting his in the reflection. “When you came. How you looked like you were breaking apart.”
A low growl rumbled in his chest. One of his hands left her breast, sliding down over her stomach, pushing beneath the silk at her waist. His fingers pushed hers aside, taking over. He found her clit, wet and throbbing, and circled it with a ruthless, knowing pressure.
“Look,” he commanded, his mouth at her ear. “Watch my hand on your cunt. Watch how wet you are for me. Already.”
She moaned, her eyes fluttering shut.
“Open them. Watch.”
She forced them open. The sight was obscenely erotic: his tanned, strong hand working between her thighs, her body arching into his touch, her breasts peaked and desperate in his other hand. She was completely exposed, utterly possessed in the mirror’s frame.
“I’m going to fuck you again,” he whispered, his voice rough with need. “But not like before. Not with you in charge. Tonight, you take what I give you. You understand?”
She nodded, frantic. “Yes.”
He spun her around, away from the mirror, and pushed her backwards until her knees hit the bed. She fell onto the silken duvet. He followed her down, his body a heavy, welcome weight. He kissed her, devouring her whimpers, as his fingers plunged inside her, fucking her with short, brutal strokes.
“You’re so tight,” he grunted against her mouth. “Still stretched from me. Still mine.”
He freed himself from his trousers, his cock springing out, thick and already leaking. He nudged her thighs wider with his knee. He didn’t enter her. Instead, he rubbed the swollen head through her slick folds, coating himself in her arousal, teasing her entrance until she was sobbing with frustration.
“Please, Liam. Please, I need it.”
“What do you need?”
“Your cock. I need your cock in my pussy. Now.”
He drove into her in one deep, punishing thrust. She cried out, her nails digging into his shoulders. He set a relentless pace, each slam of his hips jolting her up the bed. This was different from the library. This was darker, more consuming. There was no pretense of mutual exploration. This was him claiming, marking, answering a need in himself as primal as her own.
The room filled with the sounds of it: the wet slap of skin, the groan of the bedframe, their ragged, shared breaths. He fucked her with a focused intensity that bordered on violence, his eyes locked on hers, refusing to let her look away.
“This is the loophole,” he gritted out, his rhythm never faltering. “Right here. My cock in your cunt. This is where we live now. In the space between his rules and her schemes.”
She was hurtling toward the edge, her second climax coiling tighter, fiercer than the first. “I’m close… oh god, don’t stop…”
He slid a hand between them, his thumb finding her clit again, rubbing in rough, quick circles. “Come for me. Come all over my fucking dick.”
The orgasm detonated, a white-hot shockwave that ripped a scream from her throat. Her body clamped around him, milking him, and with a final, deep grind, he followed her over, his own release hot and endless inside her. He collapsed onto her, his weight solid and real, his face buried in her hair.
For a long time, they stayed like that, entangled, spent. The outside world was a distant murmur. Here, in the scent of sex and sweat, was a temporary kingdom.
Finally, he shifted, pulling out of her gently. He went to the ensuite, returning with a warm, damp cloth. He cleaned her with a tenderness that contrasted starkly with the roughness of their coupling. He dressed silently, his adjutant’s mask settling back over his features, but his eyes remained soft on her.
“Sleep,” he said, pulling the duvet over her. “I’ll be outside.”
“Liam?” Her voice was sleep-slurred.
He paused at the door.
“The princesses… they miss me.”
He nodded once, a sharp movement. “I know. And Camilla knows something. She has a… look. Tell them to hold fast. The calculus has changed.”He slipped out, the lock turning with a soft, definitive click. Briana curled onto her side, her body humming, her mind quiet. The calculus had changed. She drifted into sleep, the torn silk from the library a secret knot under her pillow.