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Oh.
I’d always been relieved that Marquise and Scourge hadn’t gone any farther than they had. That they’d always stopped at a certain point, no matter that I was their naked and helpless slave, at some points so desperate to please them that I would have done anything for them. Nothing had been beyond me.
“Don’t weep, lovely Gwynn.” Rogue brushed the tears from my cheek and, after studying the fluid gleaming on his fingertips, tasted them. “I meant to reassure you.”
“How do my tears taste to you?” The question came out of me from somewhere else, in the surreality of the moment. Of so many things to say to him, I asked this.
He smiled, a sorrowful twist of his perfect mouth. “Bitter.”
I had no reply to that.
The silence between us spun and grew, fragile threads of unspoken thoughts. I could nearly sense the drift of his mind, the scent of a night-blooming flower, so faint you lost it with the next breeze.
“Finish the lesson,” I finally said.
Rogue inclined his head, noblesse oblige. “Yes, bitter Gwynn. Sex is magic and vice-versa. As your passion waxes, so does your power.”
“So sexual frustration is actually good for me, sorceress-wise. I knew that from experience.”
He laughed. “It’s not a direct relationship. An exchange of sex will not drain you. Rather the reverse.”
“So why did that one drain me?”
“Because you took all that lovely energy that I stoked in you and made a lightning bolt from it.”
Whoa. “That was all me?”
“Some from me too. It took me time to recover.”
“But you were able to heal the tree.”
“This is one of the things you must learn. I have resources outside myself. You do not.”
“How do I get more resources?”
He held out a hand. “That will be a future lesson. For now, you are tired. It’s time for bed.”
In answer to some unheard call, Larch trooped in then, followed by a parade of cronies. He bowed to us both, but mainly to Rogue, and they cleared the table away. Others carried in pieces of what turned out to be a large four-poster bed, as they assembled it.
“I’m going to need a bigger tent,” I observed, watching the thing came together. I recognized it from my dreams—alluring, dark fantasies of Rogue tying me to this bed with those green silk cords. The bedding they carried in, all of it gleamed black, though with various colored highlights from my lamp-pillows, like the rainbow shine on an oil slick.
“I don’t care to sleep on that pad you call a bed.”
“No problem. I’ll sleep on my futon by myself.”
He captured my hand in his and pulled me to his side, leaning in so his lips nearly brushed my temple. “No.”
The simple word carried such menacing promise that I shuddered. Impossible the ways I responded to this so-alien man. And yet, he’d reminded me that he knew my secret terrors likely better than I did, since I could hardly bear to touch on some of them.
The Brownies left. I busied myself with slapping the pillows into dark mode. It felt oddly domestic to be preparing for bed with him there. I brushed out my hair, the nighttime ritual steadying me. I turned to find Rogue had unbound his own hair and taken off his shirt and was unlacing his boots.
His hair rained around him, a spill of ink across his golden skin. The lean muscles of his arms flexed as he pulled off the boot, leaving his long foot bare. The black pattern that dominated the left side of his face wound down that side of his body, forking over his pectoral muscles and flat abdomen, disappearing below the waist of his pants. He had no belly button, something simultaneously creepy and intriguing. I’d seen images of him as a boy—had he fruited on a vine? No, even that left a navel scar.
His skin gleamed, hairless and velvet smooth in the glow of the few pillows on his side of the tent. My fingers itched to touch him, to feel the contours of that body I’d experienced only in dreamscapes. His hands went to unfasten the clasp of his pants.
“Wait!”
He cocked an eyebrow at me.
