“It’s me,” she answered.
“Come,” he said.
She swung the door open and stepped inside. She was wearing a long flowing nightgown in a shade of pink, with an equally flowing robe over top of it. She looked lovely, a vision of beauty.
His mouth felt dry.
She shut the door behind herself. “I am here tonight, but if you think you will take any liberties on my person, you are sorely mistaken.”
He smiled at her. “Ah, noted. So, no kissing, then.”
She glared at him.
“I’m remembering there was a kiss today, and I didn’t initiate it.”
She did not answer him. She walked around him and went into the bedchamber and let out a little noise.
He followed her. “Yes, here he was with all this, all this time. How large is your bedchamber now, as the stewardess?”
“I am not the stewardess.”
“You have the stewardess’s chambers, though.”
“It’s much smaller,” she said. “I wonder that Celedin didn’t take these over.” She sighed.
“I wonder that, too,” he said. “Why wouldn’t he have?”
“He had weaknesses,” she said, wandering around to run her fingers over the coverlet of the bed. “Insecurities. He was cruel when they were exposed, hoping that he would be so cruel that no one would expose them again, and I did not expose them on a whim, but they were weapons in my arsenal. I took note of every single thing I could use against him. His father was one of his weaknesses.”
Dathor knew this was true, that the old steward had been hard on Celedin.
“I sometimes wonder if the old steward loved his bride. If he was so heartbroken over her death that he wished there was someone to blame.”
“And he blamed Celedin?” he said.
“You have said this to me before,” she said, turning to him. She touched her temple. “That you can not think you’re doing something here, with your conscious mind, but still be doing it, even though you swear you are not.”
He shook his head. “Do not attempt to justify him. You know what that man did to me. You know how many times he had me beaten bloody.”
“It was not justification,” she said. She tugged aside the covers. “Perhaps we don’t talk. I find I’m very tired. It’s been a truly horrific day.”
He sighed.
She turned her back on him and removed her robe, hanging it on a hook by the bed which must have been made for the purpose, not that he was used to having hooks by beds or anything of that nature. She got into the bed, pulled the blankets over her, and turned her back to the middle of the bed, yawning pointedly. “Can you turn down the lamps?”
He stripped off his own clothes. He’d never been one for small clothes, deeming them something for pansies and weak, overly stuffy men. He slept only in a night shirt. Usually, he would wear the undershirt he had worn all day, but the uniforms did not have undershirts. He went into the steward’s closet and selected one.
It was a bit snug on his upper chest region, but it would serve, at least until he could find something else or have these altered. He came back to the bedchamber, turned down the lamps and got in bed with her.
He turned on his side to face her back. He gazed at her blond curls in the scant light, at the curve of her spine. “Did I hurt you?” he breathed.
“What do you think? You said my cunt was dry.”
“That is why I tried to use—”
“Yes, I remember you rubbing that on yourself,” she said.
It had been a bit of oil, and he’d done it surreptitiously, for he knew that there should be no thought seen to the elves’s comfort, not when they were being conquered.
