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My forehead wrinkled in confusion. Had the occupants of the cottage just… vanished? Were they here, but invisible? I read enough sci-fi and fantasy to supply several different possible scenarios, none of them compatible with the dreary reality I had to inhabit — the one with grandfathers who could put a girl under house arrest, even if she was a real-life princess.
Because she's a real-life princess, I thought sourly, still approaching the table on tiptoe. I could see the contents of the bowls. My eyes widened a little, and my mouth started to water like a mountain cascade.
Risotto. Like, the best imaginable risotto, made with beef broth and gooey with really great cheese. I reached the table, barely even noticing my progress across the wide floorboards, my red running shoes making them creak only a little.
Three bowls of risotto, on three blue woven placemats, a fork and a spoon neatly set beside each. A lovely late lunch. Getting cold.
I looked around and saw in the big sink the evidence of the meal's preparation: a pot set to soak and a cutting board with a few specks of what had to be the parsley I could see garnishing each bowl.
Getting cold. They had clearly been called away, whoever they were.
Their chairs, I realized, sat in slight disarray, pulled back from the table. They had taken their places to eat, and then something had summoned them elsewhere, for God knew how long.
I noticed that the piles of risotto in each wide bowl rose in slightly different shapes. One took the shape of a perfect Mt.-Fuji-type volcano, the narrowest cone that you could make with the rice, really. One looked broader, more like a Hawaiian sort of volcano. The third hill of risotto seemed more like a mound — hardly a hill at all.
I sat down in front of the Mt. Fuji risotto. I didn't think about it. Part of me realized I wasn't doing much thinking at all, a thought that same part registered as very strange: I literally realized I had stopped thinking, but otherwise I just, well, ignored the realization.
My senses had taken over: hunger and the bodily part of horniness. I could feel my nipples poking into the front of my pink silk t-shirt. I had worn a bra to my meeting with my grandfather, obviously, but I'd taken it off in protest at the injustice of it all as soon as I'd gotten back to my suite, which was about two minutes before I'd gotten restless and headed out for the palace wood.
My chest is small enough that I can generally take or leave bras, depending on my mood and the occasion. These days, I have to have permission from Papa Bear to put one on, actually. Well, really I have to have permission from Papa Bear to put anything on — but we'll get to that part.
The feeling of the silk of my top against my stiff nipples seemed to combine itself, somehow, with the aroma of the risotto. When I sat down on the old-fashioned wooden kitchen chair, even the sensation of the barely cushioned seat against my backside sent a strange thrill through my body.
I think I picked up the fork and dug it into the risotto because I wanted to make sure attention would be paid. Even if no one walked in and found me in this unexpected little house, where I clearly didn't belong despite being the fucking princess of this fucking country, if I ate these unknown people's fucking food, they would know that Princess Susanna had been here, and that she was fucking pissed. Pissed enough to eat someone else's risotto, thank you very much and you can bring your complaints to the fucking crown prince if you don't like it.
It kind of served me right, I suppose, because I burned my fucking mouth on that bite. It was so hot inside Mt. Fuji that I let out a little cry of surprise and pain when I shoved the forkful of rice and cheese and peas onto my tongue. I'm not proud of the fact that I spat it out, but I'm not going to lie to you. Papa Bear is going to read this, and, well, you're going to hear soon enough what happens when I lie, or even omit an important detail, within Papa Bear's earshot. Suffice it to say I'm not interested in it. Not right now, anyway, when I'm already sitting on a pillow and trying unsuccessfully to get comfortable thanks to the sorry state of my bottom.
CHAPTER 3
Goldilocks
So, yes, I spat out that first, way-too-hot bite into the nice, clean blue napkin that lay crumpled as if tossed there when its owner had risen from the table. Rude, yes, but understandable, at least as far as I was concerned.
I didn't quite understand why I then switched seats to the almost flat sort of risotto mound one chair over. I did it, though, and I took a bite. As if I were someone else, I seemed to watch my face make a pout of disgust as I chewed. It tasted fine, but fine didn't represent the sensation I wanted. The cheese had congealed a little; whoever had squashed their risotto down clearly hadn't anticipated getting called away. No getting around it: it had cooled past the point of being as delicious as it had been ten minutes ago.
I switched seats again, because why not, and the Mauna Loa bowl obviously had precisely the right shape to retain exactly as much heat as necessary: not too much risotto on the outside, not too much on the inside. I left the fork in the second bowl, just as I had in the first. I almost giggled at that point, looking at the mess I'd made, but I'd gone past the point of no return — or the weird, hungry, horny girl sitting at the table had, the one who happened to share a body with me.
I dug the fork a centimeter into the mountain, and a little puff of steam — not a big puff — escaped.
Oh, yeah, I thought, feeling my eyes (her eyes?) light up. This is it.
And fuck yeah, did that bowl of risotto deliver. Flavor for days, although it took me about two minutes to eat the entire rather large bowl. The cheese had to be taleggio, I thought, maybe with a little romano sprinkled in somewhere. The beef broth lay underneath, present but not too present. The peas exploded on my tongue like tiny emeralds (if emeralds could… oh, whatever), sweetness balanced exquisitely with the salinity of the cheese and the broth.
And the arborio rice… well, from everything I've read and seen on cooking videos, "real" risotto — the kind you eat with osso bucco at 11pm, after you've seen La Traviata at La Scala in Milan — is supposed to taste a little chalky. Thank God whoever had made this risotto, which varied from the Milanese standard, obviously, by including cheese, liked chalky risotto just as much as I did, which is to say not at all.
Velvet, thought whoever had decided to eat up someone else's amazing bowl of risotto, who may or may not have been Her Royal Highness Susanna, Princess of Forthia, aka me. Velvet, velvet, velvet.
I looked down, and the risotto had vanished. I literally felt like crying, because despite representing one of the most amazing food experiences of my life, it had absolutely failed to satisfy me.
I don't have any memory of getting up and going to the living room. I do remember the chairs, because of course I remember the chairs, the ones my bears still sit in, when they call me on the carpet, which is a very different experience from being called on the carpet by the Crown Prince. I think the reason they stick in my mind, though, isn't the number of times I've gone over Papa's or Mama's knee, while they've sat in their chairs, which is the almost inevitable conclusion of a session on the carpet in front of the three of them.
No, I remember the chairs so well because Papa's wasn't too hard and Mama's too soft for sitting. I remember because as soon as I sat down on that first, hard one — a big leather armchair, I found that somehow, as part of the act of sitting down, I had thrust my right hand between my thighs and started to squeeze there, just a little, over my tight jeans.
I mentioned my attitude toward bras, earlier. At this point I should probably share that I had a similar attitude towards panties. Currently, I wasn't wearing any. It didn't usually make me feel any particular way, if I even remembered, that there was nothing between me and my jeans. At the moment, though, as I squirmed a bit in the strangely rigid chair that had looked so comfortable but turned out to be so not, I became hyperaware of how the hand I had for some reason put down there had not two layers of fabric but one, between it and the suddenly extremely sensitive bud of sensation right beneath the bottom of my zipper.
I exerted a little pressure with my middle finger, more as a kind of experiment than anything else. I had to bite my lower lip to keep from crying out at the electric shock of pleasure and desperate arousal that traveled directly from my urgently needy clit to my mortifyingly stiff nipples. From there it seemed to keep going, radiating outward along every nerve in my body: heat in my face, heat in my wayward fingertips, heat in my toes even.
I breathed in deeply through my nose. The smell of the chair's leather seemed to fill my senses, and I wondered if I could smell something else, too: something earthy and very masculine. Whatever it was, it made me furrow my brow as I exhaled and drew another whiff, suddenly needing more of it.
