Lover Enshrined (16 page)

“No.” But she was glad he didn’t know how she’d touched the naked one. “I think they’re beautiful no matter whether they are covered or not. And I don’t care if they are imperfect.”

“They remind me of where I grew up.”

She waited, acutely aware of how much she wanted him to finish the thought. “How so?”

“We had a statuary.” He frowned. “It was covered in vines, though. The gardens all were. Vines everywhere.”

The Primale resumed walking.

“Where did you grow up?” she asked.

“In the Old Country.”

“Are your parents—”

“These statues were bought in the forties and fifties. Darius went through a three-dimensional stage, and as he’d always hated modern art, this was what he bought.”

As they came to the end of the corridor, he stopped in front of the door into one of the bedrooms and stared at it. “I’m tired.”

Bella was in that room, she thought. It was obvious from his expression. “Have you eaten?” she asked, thinking it would be lovely to head him in the opposite direction.

“I don’t remember.” He looked down at his feet, which were in heavy boots. “Good . . . God. I haven’t changed, have I?”There was an odd hollowness to his voice, as if the realization had emptied him out. “I should have changed. Before we did this.”

Reach out
, she told herself.
Reach out and take his hand. Just as he reached out for yours.

“I should change,” the Primale said quietly. “I need to change.”

Cormia took a deep breath, and, extending her arm, she clasped his hand. It was cold to the touch. Alarmingly so.

“Let us go back to your room,” she told him. “Let us go back there.”

He nodded but didn’t move, and before she knew it, she was leading him. Or his body, at any rate. She sensed his mind had gone off somewhere else.

She took him into his room, to the marble confines of his bath, and when she stopped him, he stood where she left him, in front of the two sinks and the wide mirror. While she turned on the spray chamber they called a shower, he waited not so much patiently as with unawareness.

When the rush of water was warm enough under her hand, she turned back to him. “Your grace, it is all set for you. You may wash.”

His yellow eyes stared straight ahead into one of the mirrors, but there was no recognition of his reflection in his handsome face. It was as if a stranger confronted him in the glass, a stranger he didn’t trust or approve of.

“Your grace?” she said. The stillness in him was alarming, and had he not been upright, she would have checked the beating of his heart. “Your grace, the shower.”

You can do this
, she told herself.

“May I disrobe you, your grace?”

After he nodded a little, she stepped in front of him and raised tentative hands to the buttons on his shirt. One by one she freed them, the black cloth gradually parting open to expose his broad chest. When she got down to his belly button, she tugged the tails free of his leathers and kept going. All the while, he stayed still and unresisting with his eyes locked on the mirror, even as she parted the two halves of the shirt and pushed them off his shoulders.

He was magnificent in the dim light of the bath, putting all the statues to shame. His chest was enormous, the width of his shoulders nearly three times that of her own. The star-shaped scar on his left pectoral looked as if it had been engraved on his otherwise smooth, hairless skin, and she wanted to touch that place, to trace the spokes that radiated out from the center of the marking.

She wanted to press her lips to him there, she thought, press them over his heart. Over the flesh badge of the Brotherhood.

Laying his shirt out on the edge of the deep-bellied bath, she waited for the Primale to take over the undressing. He did nothing of the sort.

“Shall I . . . remove your pants?”

His head nodded.

Her fingers trembled as she worked loose his belt’s buckle, then freed the button of his leathers. His body eased back and forth under her tugging, but not by much, and she was struck by how solid he was.

Dearest Virgin Scribe, he smelled fantastic.

The copper zipper went down slowly, and she had to hold the two halves of the waistband together because of the angle she was working from. When she let go, the front burst open. Beneath the leathers, he wore a tight loin cover in black, which was a relief.

Of sorts.

The bulge of his sex in it made her swallow hard.

She was about to ask him if she should continue when she looked up and realized he was gone, for all intents and purposes. Either she kept at what she was doing, or he was going under the water partially dressed.

As she tugged the leather down his thighs to his knees, her eyes stuck to the male flesh that was cradled in soft cotton. She remembered what it had felt like when he had come up against her body in his sleep. What she was looking at now had seemed much larger then, and it had been stiff as it pressed into her hip.

That was the change of arousal, wasn’t it. The previous Directrix’s stern lecture on the mating ritual had detailed all about what happened when males grew ready for sex.

Had detailed too the pain females bore from that hardened staff.

Forcing herself to stop thinking along those lines, she sank into a kneeling position to do away with the pants and realized she should have taken the boots from his feet first. Fighting her way through the folds of leather at his ankles, she managed to get one boot off by leaning into his legs and forcing him to shift his weight. She went to work on the other side . . . and found the foot that wasn’t real.

She kept going, not pausing even a moment. His infirmity didn’t matter to her, although she wished she knew how he had been injured so badly. It must have been in fighting. To sacrifice so much for the race . . .

The leathers came off the same way the boots did: with an awkward series of pulls that the Primale didn’t seem to notice. He simply stood on whichever foot she let him have on the marble, as steady as an oak. When she finally glanced up again, there were but two adornments on his body: his loin cover, which had the words
Calvin Klein
around the waistband, and the metal rods and foot that filled the gap between his right knee and the floor.

She went over and opened the door to the spray chamber. “Your grace, the falling bath is ready for you.”

His head swiveled to her. “Thank you.”

In a quick surge he swept the loin cover off and walked toward her, naked.

Cormia’s breath stopped. His massive sex hung soft and long from its base, the blunt head swinging slightly.

“Will you stay while I shower?” he said.

“Wha . . . ah, is that what you wish?”

“Yes.”

"Then I . . .Yes, I shall stay.”

Chapter Eleven

The primale disappeared behind the glass, and Cormia watched him back up to the spray, his magni ficent hair flattening down as it grew wet. With a groan, he arched his back and lifted his hands to his head, his body forming an elegant, powerful curve as the water ran through his hair and over his chest.

Cormia bit her lower lip as he reached to the side and picked up a bottle. There was a sucking noise as he squeezed it over his palm once . . . twice. . . . He returned it to its resting place, then brought his hands to his hair to massage his locks. Foaming clumps ran down his forearms and dropped off his elbows onto the tile at his feet. The spicy scent wafting up reminded her of the outdoor air.

With her knees feeling unreliable, and her skin warm as the water he was in, Cormia sat down on the marble edge of the Jacuzzi.

The Primale took a bar of soap, worked it between his palms, and washed his arms and his shoulders. The scent told her it was the same kind she used and it mingled beautifully with whatever he’d washed his hair with.

To her chagrin, she found the suds running down his torso and his hips and his heavy, smooth thighs were worthy of jealousy, and she wondered if he would have let her join him. There was no way of knowing for sure. Unlike some of her sisters, she couldn’t read the thoughts of others.

But really, could she imagine standing before him with her hands on his skin under that warm spray . . . ?

Yes. Yes, she could.

The Primale went lower with the soap, down his chest and stomach. Then he cupped what was between his thighs, swiping his hands over and under his sex. As with the rest of his ministrations, he moved with disappointing economy.

It was a strange torture, a pleasurable pain to watch him in his private moment. She wanted this to last forever, but knew she would have to make do with her memories.

When he turned off the water and stepped out, she handed him a towel as quickly as she could to shield that heavy, dangling male flesh from her eyes.

As he dried off, his muscles flexed under his golden skin, tightening up hard, then stretching out lean. After he wrapped the towel around his hips, he reached for another and dried his hair off by rubbing the dense, wet waves back and forth. The flapping of the terry cloth seemed loud in the marble room.

Or maybe that was the pounding of her heart.

His hair was tangled when he was finished, but he didn’t seem to notice as he looked over at her. “I should go to bed now. I have four hours to fill, and maybe I can start going through them now.”

She didn’t know what that meant, but nodded. “All right, but your hair . . .”

He touched it as if only just realizing now that it was attached to his head.

“Would you like me to brush it?” she asked.

An odd expression hit his face. “If you’d like to. Someone . . . someone once told me I’m too rough with it.”

Bella, she thought. Bella had told him that.

She wasn’t sure how she knew it, but she was dead certain—

Oh, who was she fooling? He had an ache in his voice. That was how she knew. The tone was the verbal equivalent to what was in his eyes when he sat across the dining room table from the female.

And although it seemed petty, Cormia wanted to brush his locks in order to replace Bella with herself. She wanted to imprint a memory of herself over the one he had of the other female.

The possessiveness was a problem, but she couldn’t change the way she felt.

The Primale handed her a brush, and though she expected him to sit on the edge of the deep bath, he went out to the chaise by the bed and sat down. As he put his palms atop his knees, he bent his head and waited for her.

As she approached him, she thought of the hundreds of times she had brushed the hair of her sisters in the bath. In this moment, though, the thing in her hand with all the bristles, was a tool she wasn’t sure how to use.

“Tell me if I hurt you,” she said.

“You won’t.” He reached over and picked up a remote unit. When he hit a button, that music he always played, the opera, swelled in the room.

“How lovely,” she said, letting the sounds of the male tenor seep into her. “What is the language?”

“Italian. It’s Puccini. A love song. This is about a man, a poet, who meets a woman whose eyes steal the only wealth he has. . . . One look into her eyes and his dreams and visions and castles in the air are stolen by her and replaced by hope. He’s telling her who he is now . . . and will ask who she is at the end of the solo.”

“What is the song called?”

“ ‘
Che Gelida Manina
.’ ”

“You play it often, do you not?”

“It is my favorite among all solos. Zsadist . . .”

“Zsadist what?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head. “Nothing . . .”

As the tenor’s voice soared, she fanned his locks out across his shoulders and started at the ends, taking the brush to the waves in careful, gentle sweeps. The rasping noise from the bristles joined the opera, and the Primale must have been comforted by both, because his rib cage expanded as he drew in a long, slow breath.

Even when all the tangles were gone, she kept on going, continuing to smooth the wake of the brush with her free hand. As his hair dried, the colors came out and its thickness returned, the waves re-forming after each pass, the mane she knew as his emerging.

She couldn’t keep this up forever. And what a pity. “I believe I am finished.”

“You haven’t done the front.”

Actually, she mostly had. “All right.”

She walked around to stand before him, and there was no ignoring the way he opened his thighs wide, as if he wanted her to come between them.

Cormia stepped into the space he made for her with his legs. His eyes were closed, his golden lashes down on his high cheekbones, his lips slightly open. His head lifted to her with the same kind of invitation offered by his mouth and his knees.

She took it.

Sweeping the brush back through his hair, she followed the loose center part that had formed. With each pull, his neck muscles corded to keep his head in place.

Cormia’s fangs sprang out of the roof of her mouth.

The instant they did his eyes flashed open. Brilliant yellow met her stare.

“You’re hungry,” he said in a strangely guttural tone.

She let her hand with the brush fall to her side. Her voice gone, she simply nodded. In the Sanctuary, the Chosen didn’t need to feed. Here on this side, however, her body demanded blood. Which was why she’d been struggling with lethargy.

“Why didn’t you tell me before now?” His head tilted to the side. “Although if it’s because you don’t want me, that’s okay. We can find someone else for you to use”

“Why . . . why wouldn’t I want you?”

He tapped the artificial leg. “I am not whole.”

True, she thought sadly. He was not whole, although it had nothing to do with him missing part of a limb.

“I didn’t want to impose,” she said. “That is the only why of it. You are comely to me with or without your lower leg.”

Surprise flickered over his features, and then an odd pumping sound came out of him . . . a purr. “It’s no imposition. If you want to take my vein, I’ll give it you.”

She stood motionless, held still by the look in his eyes and the way the features of his face changed as something came into his expression that she’d never seen on anyone’s face before.