Page 115 of The Court of Venus

I pulled back, studying his face. Turning it from side to side. “Your nose was broken.”

“Already set it.” He grinned, bewildered it had all gone according to plan. “Oliver was sent to fetch me, so I suppose we have about—an hour, two?—before I should return to court. You brilliant, miraculous—”

I kissed him again before my flush would be too obvious. “It is not finished yet.”

“You’re right. I am not nearly finished.” He tore off my stolen doublet, his lips falling to my breasts, murmuring how beautiful they were, how soft for him, as he circled each nipple with his tongue.

“You want this so badly.” He kissed and nipped his way down my body, dragging my hose down to my ankles with his teeth. “Don’t you?”

My head fell back. “Yes.”

With him, I was transformed—I became someone else, someone unafraid to be naked. When I was bare before him, his mouth brushed against my knee.

“If I use my magic to read your desires,” he said, his lips trailing higher, higher still, “you must agree to it first. I don’t want to be in your head unless you want me there.” My thighs trembled in his hands. He was stroking me now. Drawing more circles. “Agreed?”

I nodded, unsure if I could speak.

“Tell me at any point if you want me to stop, or if it doesn’t feel—”

I sank my hands into his hair. “I agree. Do not disappoint me. Your reputation precedes you.”

“My reputation is accurate,” he breathed against me. In proof, a slow, languid kiss where I craved his mouth most. His tongue followed, moving across me, inside of me, gentle at first, until he sensed I wanted more. He slid a finger in me, then a second. Those hands. How often I’d studied them. As they plucked the strings of an instrument, gripped a sword, hooked hair behind his ear. And now—

I had always been a quiet person. But as he led me to the edge of myself, I had to cover my mouth to stifle my cries. When I thought faster, harder, he knew; he answered all of my body’s questions. “Not so soon,” he murmured, kissing my inner thigh. “Not yet. Shh, Bianca.”

He lifted me up and laid me across the council table, scattering stacks of the king’s petitions to the ground. “I saw this fantasy in your mind.” Then the pressure returned, more urgent than before. His fingers moved inside me, his tongue flicked exactly where I longed for it, and we passed emotion back and forth—joy and disbelief and complete and total bliss.

He moaned when he sensed how close I was to my pleasure, peering up at me from between my legs, wide-eyed with lust. “You want to. Now. I can feel it.”

I nodded desperately as his head dropped again. I bit into my palm. “You are so precious to me,” he said softly. “I love, I love, giving you what you want.”

And finally, at last, he pressed where he knew my body would break. I lay trembling on the council table for a long while, blinking up at the ceiling. He held my knees, waited patiently for my heartbeat to recover.

I sat up. My thoughts scrambled into coherency.

I was forever ruined for mortal men, and I told him so. Roland ran the pad of his thumb across my lips and smiled. His fingers were slick with me.

So was his signet ring, the mark of the king.

“I agree,” he said. “No more mortal men for you. Only this.”

I allowed myself to sink into his loveliness. I had never indulged so openly. He was beautiful. Breathtaking. Every feature refined: the thin ridge of his nose, the cut of his cheekbones and jaw, the swell of his lips.

“I have a job to finish,” I said, tearing myself away. “As do you.”

He buried his face in my neck. I wrapped my legs around his waist and he hoisted me up, his hands cupping my backside. “Very true.” A low groan as he carried me to the wall, pressed me against it. “Or else I would stay here all day. And what do you suppose we would—”

There was a pounding on the door. We both turned to it.

“Fuck,” he mouthed, but his eyes were shining.

“One moment!” I called.

“What are you two doing in there?” Oliver hissed.

Roland dropped a kiss onto my brow and set me down. Once we were dressed again—and Roland had straightened his doublet to his liking—we cracked open the door.

“You told me to meet you here,” said Oliver dully, his eyes traveling over our disheveled hair, our bloody livery. “Did you not?”