Radiance (Wraith Kings Book 1)(73)
For now though, he took advantage of his disadvantage by drawing invisible murals across his wife’s naked back and buttocks with his sensitive fingertips.
She lay on her stomach in his bed—their bed now—her head resting on her folded arms, her face partially shielded from his gaze by locks of red hair. He lay recumbent beside her, sketching looping designs along the graceful indention of her spine, down to the pair of dimples that decorated her lower back. Her skin pebbled under his touch, and a patch of muscle contracted involuntarily as his fingers glided over her body.
It was a sensual pleasure to touch her this way, a fine thing that sprang unexpectedly from brutality. She was in no danger of being scratched or lacerated, and Brishen had discovered that fingers with short nails could do things that ones with claws could not. Things that made Ildiko writhe in his arms and leave claw marks of her own on his shoulders. If he didn’t depend on the martial edge his claws gave him, Brishen would keep his short for that reason alone.
Ildiko pushed her hair away to look at him.
“What?” he asked. He’d stopped searching for revulsion in her gaze weeks ago. There was none to be found. Except for the sympathetic kisses she placed on his eyebrow and the flattened lid over his empty eye socket, she remained untroubled by his mutilated visage.
She watched him now with an expression softened by post-coital languor. “I think I fell in love with you during our wedding.”
Her statement sent a rush of euphoria through Brishen that left him lightheaded. His hand flattened on her back before sliding up between her shoulder blades to bury itself in her hair. Her every action, every laugh, every caress spoke of her great affection for him, but this was the first time she said she loved him. An upbringing in the Kai court had taught him to control his emotions. A good thing too or he would snatch his wife into a hard embrace and accidently break every bone in her body.
He settled for hooking an arm under her side and dragging her closer to him. “It took you that long?” he teased. “You are difficult to win. I tried very hard during our first meeting in the gardens.”
Ildiko sputtered. Her leg slid between his knees, riding higher to rest against his thigh. “Calling me a hag is not the best courtship gesture.”
“As I recall, you threatened to bash my skull in because of my appearance. And that was when I was magnificent to behold.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her.
His smile faded when she didn’t return it. She traced the bony ridge of his cheekbone, fissured by scars inflicted by a knife. “They took your eye, Brishen,” she said. “Not your character. You’re still magnificent.”
His control only went so far. Brishen groaned and rolled to his back, taking Ildiko with him. It was a long hour later before he peeled himself out of his wife’s embrace and kicked the blankets away from them both.
Ildiko grabbed for the closest sheet. “What are you doing?” Her skin glowed, washed a shade of pink similar to the bitter mollusk. Brishen curled his clawless hands into fists to keep from caressing her and losing yet another hour.
He sat up and swung his legs to the floor. “My mother will be here soon.”
Ildiko flopped back onto her pillow with a groan. “Don’t remind me. I’ve already warned Sinhue to check the bedding and clothes chests in both rooms once she’s gone.”
He hadn’t been any more thrilled than Ildiko when a messenger from Haradis had arrived a week earlier to warn them of Secmis’s visit. “At least she is only here for two nights.”
“Those will be the longest two nights of our lives.”
He couldn’t agree more.
They helped each other dress in the quiet of the chamber. The halls below them were a hornet’s nest of frantic activity in preparation for the queen’s visit. Brishen had wanted to tell his servants to leave Saggara and visit family, friends, anyone for a few days. Secmis could fend for herself. Ildiko had met that suggestion with an expression of nostril-flaring indignation.
“I will not be known as a rude, unwelcoming hostess,” she said in a voice that Anhuset told him later sounded exactly like when she ordered his captors’ executions.
Brishen had hidden his smile and backed quickly away from the idea.
He paused in lacing his tunic when Ildiko handed him the eye patch he wore outside their bedroom. “I thought you didn’t like it when I wore this.”
The first time he’d tied it on, Ildiko had stepped back, alarmed. “It makes you look vicious,” she said with a scowl.
He still hadn’t yet figured out how a mouth full of fangs or claw-tipped hands didn’t bother her anymore, but a harmless eyepatch did. But he wished to please her and wore it only if they hosted guests or visited the villages and townships.
She shrugged. “This is your mother. She’ll approve.”
While Brishen had acceded to Ildiko’s wishes of tearing the fortress apart and putting it back together again for the queen’s visit, he refused to plan a greeting of great fanfare when she arrived. If he didn’t think Secmis would try and take his other eye, he’d make her sleep in the stables. Instead, his soldiers lined up in two parallel rows and saluted the queen with their swords as she rode through the gates with a modest entourage.
Brishen waited at the end, Ildiko on one side of him, Anhuset on the other. His cousin spoke under her breath. “If you order a dance and command me to attend, I will gut you in your sleep.”