She giggled behind her hand. “But… the High Chieftain?”
He put his thumb to her clitoris. “Come for me, Aerhril,” he intoned, stroking her. “Come just like this. Come on my cock.” He was going to feel it, feel the way it felt to have her sweet little quim clenching around him. He was determined.
She kept her hand over her face, but she let out an encouraging little sigh.
So, he kept stroking her.
And his strokes pulled sighs and gasps from her lips, and then she began to let out tiny, breathy moans, and then she rewarded him with the sweetest little butterfly-wing flutters around the base of him.
“Good elf wife,” he rasped, kissing her thoroughly. And then, he pulled out of her and got out of bed.
“What about you?” she said, gazing at his still-very-erect cock.
“Duty calls,” he said, fished his trousers off the floor, and buttoned himself away.
When he got into the hallway with the soldier, he had his trousers on but his shirt was unbuttoned over his chest.
The soldier handed over the letter right away.
Dathor read it, and the first thing he wanted to do was to go back into the bedchamber and discuss how to deal with this with Aerhril. But he could not do that. He could not appear to be taking advice from her or consulting with her. He was in charge. He needed to look that way.
Not that there weren’t rumors already, anyway. Her various comments to his men, the way they talked to each other, and this, what had happened this morning, all of it was a recipe to undermine him.
But, well, with this letter, maybe none of that mattered, not anymore.
Dathor tucked the letter into the upper breast pocket of his shirt and began to swiftly button it. “I wish to see Ashreg Lashrud in the main hall. Fetch him. And have someone fetch Lady Aerhril as well there. Knock first. See that she’s dressed.”
“Yes, sir,” said the soldier.
Aerhril wouldn’t like hearing the news at the same time as his second-in-command (ashreg translated literally as ‘hawk,’ but then all of the names of rank in the orc army were called after animals), but there wasn’t much to be done about it at this point.
28
AERHRIL WAS THINKINGabout how she was going to explain being found with Dathor to the other women at breakfast, because she had absolutely no illusions that the information had not spread to everyone at Foxglove Peak since the soldier had first opened the door.
She did not think she could hide the fact that she was in Dathor’s bed willingly. She would not put it past him to call her his wife in front of other people or to demand she call him husband, even though they weren’t married, and likely could never evenbemarried. She could not think of anyone who would perform a ceremony between an elf and an orc. Both elf and orc clergy would be horrified by it.
That would make it all the more perverse and it would be why he would demand it.
Perhaps there was some element of that to her attraction to him. The attraction to the forbidden, to the perverse, but it was also so mortifying.
She could, of course, say that she was doing it to spy on him. That had been what she had said thus far. But if people saw them together, they would know it was all a ruse.
She was wondering if it wouldn’t be easier to come clean now. If she was moving to his side, to their side, why not simply allow everyone to know that?
It would not be easy, but it would have to happen eventually. If their plan was to be the lord and lady of thiskeep together, they would have to let people know about their feelings for each other eventually.
She could bear the embarrassment of it.
She was not actually embarrassed by Dathor, anyway.
Maybe, if she thought about it, she was not embarrassed at all.
They wouldwishher to be embarrassed, but she wasn’t.
There was a knock at the door, shattering her thoughts. “Yes?” she called.
“The commander asks your presence in the main hall,” came an orc’s voice from without.
