“Oh, yes, hundreds of them,” he said, moving over to cup one of her breasts through her nightdress.
“Hundreds,” she repeated. “They likely found you impossibly handsome, with your elfin features.”
“Mmm,” he agreed. “Yes, they would line up outside my hovel.”
“Your hovel?”
“Obviously. We all live in hovels in Arzakh.” He teased her nipple through her nightdress.
It had been a very long time since he’d done that to her, and she had forgotten how nice it could be to have another person’s fingers on her sensitive places. She sighed. “Lines of hundreds of orc women, just waiting for the chance to feel the stretch of you in them?”
“I could only make it through five a day before I was entirely spent.” He touched her other nipple.
She opened her eyes. “So, you have not touched anyone either, then?”
“No,” he said. “But you have been kissing Celedin, I warrant.”
She shut her eyes again, letting out a groan. “Oh, more than kissing, really, but I didn’t want to.”
His fingers stilled. “What are you saying?”
“After you left, he made me use my hands on him. If I tried to resist, he hit me until I complied.”
He stopped touching her.
She opened her eyes to see he had clenched his hands intofists.
Celedin had sort of protected her from the steward while the steward was still alive. He had been firm with his father, unwilling to sell her to some other man for money, to force her to play games for other men, though she did not know if it would have been worse—that life—or the life with Celedin.
Celedin did not force her to stroke him after that. Indeed, he was a well-behaved elf lord, who did not come to her alone without a chaperone. He was amenable to all of her excuses to put off the wedding, even after the steward died, even after they were past the ages that they had been meant to be when the marriage was to occur. He would shrug at her and say, “Who do you belong to, Aerhril?”
She would have to choke out that she was his.
And then he would say, “We can put off the wedding as long as you like.”
It wasn’t about sex for him. It was about possession, she supposed. He had used his cock to take possession of her that day, but it had only been a tool. He didn’t much care about sex with her beyond that, though sometimes, he would say to her, “If you keep putting off the wedding, I’m going to have to take you by force and get an heir on you, I suppose, and then we’ll have to be wed if you wish to avoid shame.”
But he never did.
“I want to kill him again,” Dathor growled.
“Yes, but Dathor, you used me as fodder in your invasion. You sacrificed our first time together to your revenge and this war, and you are not really better than he is.”
Dathor looked down at her, his nostrils flaring. “Of course I am. Celedin is a miserable wretch. Was. He was a miserable wretch.”
Yes, here she was talking about him in present tense. She scolded herself.
Celedin had accepted Raclahad when her mother sent her sister to live with them at Foxglove Peak. And he liked goingplaces with her, to events like dances and other social functions. He liked to buy her pretty dresses and parade around with her on his arm. He would be nearly affectionate with her in those sorts of situations.
She remembered once, sitting in the carriage as they came home from a dinner party and he smiled at her in the scant light and breathed out that she was a vision, the most beautiful woman in the entire room that night, that he didn’t deserve to have a woman like her on his arm.
He did not. He had her there by coercion and force and by her own misfortunes.
But it still warmed her.
Maybe if she was honest, there was some affection on her part for Celedin, only because of there having been so much time with them together, having known each other since they were children, having been engaged to be married for nearly half of their lives. Sometimes, she had to admit, when he kissed her, she kissed him back.
Now, she said to Dathor, “You are a miserable wretch, too.”
