Duck! (Avian Shifters Book 1) (11 page)

With glacial speed, the painful stretch morphed into a pleasure-filled ache that made Ori desperate to feel Raynard move inside him. Still frozen in place, there was nothing Ori could do.

Raynard made the decision for him. After slowly pulling back, he thrust forward again. Trapped beneath him, Ori had no chance of gaining enough purchase on the mattress to move in a way that might complement Raynard’s rhythm. All he could do was take him.

Robbed of his ability to do anything but accept, every detail of what Raynard offered him was magnified a hundredfold. Ori felt the pleasure rushing through Raynard’s body; he sensed the barely controlled strength in his every movement.

Adrenaline and endorphins pounded through Ori’s veins. His brain scrambled to process everything, to memorise every detail.

Arching his back as much as he could, Ori gave everything up to his master. Raynard’s breaths came faster, his heart raced almost as rapidly as Ori’s. His shaft seemed to swell inside Ori. Each thrust hit against his prostate, sending shockwaves to his cock and pre-cum leaking onto the sheet below him as he finally started to stiffen.

Another thrust—harder now. Raynard’s grip tightened around Ori’s wrists until Ori was sure there would be marks there when he woke the next morning. Raynard’s body pressed him more harshly into the mattress.

A yell split the air as his master pounded into Ori with a series of sharp thrusts and spilled inside him. The room fell perfectly still then, perfectly silent—perfectly perfect.

Ori let his eyes drift closed as Raynard moved just far enough away to collapse onto the sheet next to him. The whole world seemed to shimmer with a glorious rightness that Ori had never known existed.

He had to get up and go back down to the servants’ quarters, Ori knew that. But still… Just a few seconds, Ori thought to himself. He’d just rest for a few seconds…

* * * * *

Ori blinked open his eyes. Sunlight streamed into the room. For a minute, he didn’t fully register what that meant. The warmth from the morning rays caressed his skin as they fell across the bed. Arching his back, he felt the soreness in his muscles, and all his memories from the previous night came rushing back to the forefront of his mind.

His master’s hands on his skin, Raynard’s body pinning his down against the bed. Ori squirmed against the softness of the sheet as he remembered every single sensation and relished every moment that he’d locked into his memories.

Ori looked at his wrists. Just as he expected, there were faint marks there. He blinked again and peered at the sheet his arms rested on. His sheets were blue. This one was white. He opened his eyes wider. Details of the room he lay in flooded his mind. Tension poured into him.

He turned his head. His master lay stretched out on the other side of the bed, his eyes closed, his face turned away from the morning sun’s invasion of the room. He was glorious, more relaxed than Ori had ever seen him—his hair falling across his temple and his lips slightly parted.

Curse after curse scrolled through Ori’s mind. Gritting his teeth, he tried to extract himself silently from the tangle of sheets. The mattress wobbled underneath him. Raynard’s eyes sprang open. No trace of sleepiness lingered in his gaze. He immediately fixed in on Ori.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

Raynard raised an eyebrow.

“It won’t happen again…” Ori offered.

Raynard frowned, obviously far from impressed.

Ori let out a few more mental curses.

“What are you talking about?”

“I know I shouldn’t have fallen asleep here, sir.” Ori wasn’t sure if admitting that he was well aware of that fact would make his behaviour better or worse in a hawk’s eyes, but he couldn’t have lied either way—not to his master.

Raynard’s expression remained blank for a moment. Then a slight smile touched his lips before disappearing again. “You were asleep long before me. If I’d had a problem with you being here, I’d have woken you up and ordered you back to your room.”

Ori met his master’s eyes.

Even without a smile to soften his expression, Raynard looked more than a little amused. “As and when I choose to bring you to my bed, you may assume you have permission to stay here until I tell you otherwise.”

Ori hesitated for a moment, before shyly smiling his understanding.

Raynard ruffled his fingers through Ori’s hair, in that teasing way Ori was quickly falling in love with. “Go on.”

“Yes, sir.” Ori slipped from the bed and made his way down the stairs, but even when he reached the kitchen, he wasn’t quite able to wipe the glowing smile off his face.

As and when… The words swirled around and around inside his head. He was going to be invited back to his master’s bed again. Even another broken saucer having to be added to the increasingly long list of casualties to his clumsiness couldn’t dent his joy that day or for several days after.

Chapter Six

Ori hadn’t set himself a task that required him to lurk in the hallway so he could greet Raynard the moment he walked through the front door, the way he so often had over the previous weeks.

Raynard was sure that merely remembering those welcomes shouldn’t have been enough to make him smile, especially after a long day filled with more badly organised paperwork than should ever be allowed to exist in the world. If his uncle hadn’t already died a very natural, peaceful death at a ripe, old age, Raynard would have been inclined to think up some cruel and unusual way to kill off the cantankerous old sod—if only because he harboured a vague suspicion that the murderer wouldn’t inherit the victim’s bloody paperwork.

Leaving his briefcase and coat in the hallway, Raynard pushed all thoughts of his uncle aside and went to find out what task his fledgling had found so engrossing that he’d failed to notice the hours pass.

The library was the obvious place to start. The duckling’s pet project, cataloguing all the books in there, seemed to be coming along well. Raynard took care and made no sound when he nudged the door open. He fully expected to catch Ori with his head buried in an ancient volume he’d unearthed from one of the crammed shelves.

No such luck. The room lay deserted. The fire wasn’t even lit.

The study proved to be equally cold and empty.

Raynard stopped in the middle of the hallway, wondering if his next course of action should be to go up the stairs to those rooms that still harboured dustsheets or down to the servants’ quarters.

The bell pull called to him. Ori would hurry quickly to his master’s side when summoned. But then Raynard would miss the startled look and all the blushing that would ensue when he caught Ori doing whatever it was that he’d become so distracted by. A door on the other side of the hallway led, if Raynard remembered correctly, to a formal dining room that hadn’t yet received Ori’s attention. The door was slightly ajar.

Raynard strode across the hall. The last time he’d set foot in the room it had still been shrouded in dustsheets, but a day’s hard work from Ori would have transformed it. The yards of moth-eaten fabric would be gone and the dust cleared away. The furniture would be shining, the scent of furniture polish hanging in the air. And Ori would be standing in the middle of it all, dirt clinging to his skin, his body exhausted, but his eyes shining with achievement.

Raynard had seen Ori look that way so many times now, but he doubted he’d ever get tired of seeing Ori turn toward him, tentatively hoping for some hint of approval or praise.

Raynard pushed the door leading into the dining room. It swung open on beautifully well-oiled hinges.

Blood.

The thick, metallic smell hit Raynard, even before the scene before him registered in his mind. He stopped short, his breath catching in his throat. A mahogany table filled the centre of the space. A matching cabinet stood beyond it, set between the windows on the far side of the room.

The cabinet doors hung open. The glass in one was cracked.

The floor at the cabinet’s base was hidden from Raynard’s line of sight by the oversized table.

Raynard’s hand convulsed around the door handle. He couldn’t release it, couldn’t take a step forward. His whole body remained locked in place as eons passed and horrors rushed through his imagination. Finally, his lungs kicked into action. He managed to both breathe and release the door handle. He stepped forward, circling around the table.

Shards of glass led his eye to a broken footstool. A chair lay toppled over next to it. Then blood. So much blood—it pooled on the expensive carpet, so dark it looked almost black. As Raynard stared at it, the blood became his only solid point of reference.

Eventually, he managed to take another step forward. With glacial speed, the part of the floor that had been blocked from his view came into sight. The side of the blood pool was smeared, but there was no broken body laying at the edge of it, still bleeding—or worse, no longer able to bleed.

Ori was gone.

Raynard backed toward the door. A drop of blood on the richly patterned carpet caught his eye. Raynard spun around. His eyes scanned the carpet. Another drop of blood. Then another. He raced out of the room. Droplets of deep red led toward a larger smudge of blood on the door leading down to the kitchen. Raynard raced down the stairs, almost tripping in the darkness—far too frantic to think about the light switch until the door at the top of the stairs had swung closed behind him.

The bright sunlight flooding into the kitchen dazzled him. He lifted a hand to shield his eyes.

More blood. That was the first thing he saw as he turned toward the kitchen table. More blood.

Raynard focused on pushing the sickening scent out of his head, praying that would enable his brain to work. A bowl of blood-stained water rested on top of the pine boards. Lengths of bandage littered the well-scrubbed surface, some stained with red, others still pristine.

A sound on the other side of the room pulled Raynard’s attention away from the carnage before him.

Ori stepped into the kitchen from the corridor leading toward his bedroom. He obviously hadn’t heard a maniac race down the stairs. He stopped short when he saw Raynard.

“What the hell did you do?”

Ori’s eyes opened very wide, but Raynard couldn’t have kept the words serene if his life had depended on it.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Ori whispered. “I’m on my way to clean it up now.”

He hurried forward, his face deathly pale. When he reached out to pick up the bowl of blood-stained water, his hands were shaking.

Raynard caught Ori’s shoulder and pushed him roughly toward one of the kitchen chairs before he collapsed all over his nicely mopped floor. One of Ori’s arms was heavily bandaged. Raynard couldn’t take his eyes off the lengths of white material binding the limb, couldn’t force the image of glass cutting into Ori’s skin out of his head.

He could have been killed.

For a long time, silence reigned over the room. Several minutes passed before Raynard dragged his gaze up to Ori’s face.

“What happened?” Even to his own ears, he sounded completely calm now—in the way a man only could manage if he’d gone straight through panic and emerged on the other side.

“I was cleaning the cabinet in the dining room, sir. I slipped and…”

Raynard’s mind flashed back to the view in the upstairs room. He’d been standing on top of the stool, which he’d balanced on top of the chair, and he probably still hadn’t been tall enough to reach the top of the ancient monstrosity. He’d have had to have gone up on his toes, leaning and stretching to reach the corners of the cabinet.

“What possessed you to be so…?” Raynard shook his head as he spun away from Ori and paced toward the other side of the room.

He could have been killed.

Raynard reached the far wall and swung back around to face Ori. The bandage on his arm extended all the way down to his wrist. How close had the shards of glass come to his veins? How close had he come to bleeding out before he’d managed to stem the flow? Questions ricocheted around in Raynard’s head. For the first time he could remember, true terror swirled inside him, and it was all about what could have happened, at the scene he could have walked in on when he came home.

His gaze snapped up. He met Ori’s eyes.

He could have lost him. Raynard had never known fear like it.

“I…” Ori’s words faded away. He dropped his gaze. “I’ll clean up the mess, sir.”

“You think that will fix everything?” Raynard demanded, striving to keep the volume down, but once more unable to make the words gentle.

Ori stared mutely at the table.

“Your behaviour today has been entirely unacceptable,” Raynard threw at him. “Clearing away the evidence will change nothing.”

Ori’s gaze dropped even lower, until it was impossible to tell if his eyes were open or closed.

Raynard parted his lips to make his views on the risks Ori had taken completely clear, but the harsh clang of a bell rang through the air before he even got started.

Ori’s attention went to the line of bells displayed next to the door leading up to the main house. Raynard followed his gaze to the label indicating that this particular summons came from the front door.

Ori rose unsteadily to his feet and stepped forward.

“Stay where you are.” Raynard’s words cracked like a whip, echoing off every hard surface in the kitchen.

Ori fell still.

Raynard looked to the bandaged arm, trying to push his anger aside to deal with the most pressing matters first. “The bleeding has stopped?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Completely?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir.”

Raynard nodded as he tried to force his mind back into some sort of working order. The doorbell rang again. Ori tensed as he barely resisted the urge to fulfil his duties.

“Go to your room.”

For the first time Raynard could remember, Ori hesitated to follow one of his commands. The moment was brief, but after so much instant obedience, it was a vivid and unmistakable deviation from normality. Another moment passed when Ori did nothing but stare at the floor in front of Raynard’s feet.

“Yes, sir.” He turned and went, his bare feet moving rapidly across the tiles as he scurried for cover.

Raynard stood in the kitchen for several long seconds, until the doorbell rang out for a third time and snapped him from his thoughts. Making his way upstairs, he answered the door and signed for the parcel the postman was so intent on delivering to him.

Back in his office, Raynard tossed the package onto his desk and sank into his chair. Resting his elbows on the table, he let his head fall forward into his hands as he took a deep breath and let it out very slowly.

What had happened that day couldn’t be changed. But it was never going to happen again. He could see to that. Raynard straightened his back. Several more deep breaths and some semblance of thought indicated the best way for him to ensure that it never happened again.

The idea of going down to the kitchen and seeing Ori’s blood turned Raynard’s stomach. Far better to call Ori upstairs and deal with the situation with what calm he’d been able to muster in those few quiet moments, than to go through the bloody kitchen and feel the anger pour back into his veins, hot and more uncontrollable than he’d ever believed possible.

He tugged the bell pull hanging down the wall behind his desk, knowing the sound would echo through to the butler’s room. It didn’t take Ori long to respond to the new summons. A gentle tap fell on the study door.

“Enter.”

Ori pushed open the door and slipped through the gap he’d created. Raynard directed him to stand before the desk with a glance.

He hadn’t thought it possible for Ori to become any paler than he had been in the kitchen. The fledgling looked terrified. Raynard couldn’t bring himself to believe that was entirely inappropriate.

The scene Raynard had arrived home to was never going to be repeated. He wanted that knowledge to have an important place inside Ori’s mind. If he ever thought of doing something so reckless again, Raynard wanted him to remember how it had felt to stand in front of his master, and he wanted him to think better of it.

For the first time in what felt like years, Ori wasn’t even vaguely hard in Raynard’s presence. Pushing aside his desire to run his hands all over Ori and ensure that he was truly fine, Raynard forced himself to remain in his seat and be content with merely scanning Ori’s body in as thorough a visual inspection as possible.

“Do you have any questions?” he bit out, making no attempt to gentle his voice.

Ori’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he seemed to struggle to get his words past his emotions.

Raynard waited.

“May I know if I’m permitted to return to the nest, sir?”

For a moment, Raynard thought he’d misheard the whispered words—or maybe he simply
wanted
to believe that he’d misheard them. Eventually, he had to admit, to himself at least, the syllables were what they were.

Ori was probably still in shock. It was silly to think that a fledgling could stand firm in the face of his master’s anger after everything he had gone through that day. Raynard still couldn’t help but be just a little disappointed with the realisation his little duckling would turn tail and fly away from his master so easily.

“Is there an explanation to go with that request?” Raynard asked, his voice somehow remaining level.

Ori swallowed again. His hands clenched into fists at his sides. The bandage moved around his left arm with the motion, but no red seeped through. He hadn’t opened the wound with his fidgeting.

“I…” Ori closed his eyes briefly, before trying again. “I only overheard part of your conversation with Mr. Hamilton, sir. But, I thought, perhaps even if I’m found unacceptable to serve you here, I might still be considered an acceptable servant at the nest.”

He thought he was being dismissed.

As Raynard stared across the desk at him, there wasn’t room for another thought inside his head. Ori thought he was being dismissed.