She had to smile.“Always the idealist and iconoclast.”
He picked up her hand in his and raised it to kiss her fingers.The sensual brush of his lips gave her a shiver as he spoke against her skin.“I may have ulterior motives.For a tame and safe visit to the high house of archivists and librarians, we can leave our darling daughter contently at home.”
With her fingers still caressed by his clever lips, Nic’s blood heated and her breath caught.They hadn’t had sex since Bria was born, Gabriel solicitously insisting that her body health.“What ulterior motives?”she asked breathlessly.
“I’m thinking about some time with my favorite lover,” he murmured.“How are you feeling?”
“Asa says I’m healed.”The wizard healer had pronounced her fit for “any and all activities” some time before, but Gabriel had wanted to wait a few more, just to be sure, and wouldn’t be swayed—to her great frustration.
“Yes, I know.But how are youfeeling?”
She tamped down her impatience with his obdurate ways.Once Gabriel had fixed on a direction, he couldn’t be swayed.“Ready to spend some time with my favorite lover,” she replied huskily.
“Good,” he rumbled, passion making his voice deeper.The clouds outside had cleared, she realized, the spiky silver motes in the air vanishing back into formless moon magic.“Let’s begin the competition for who gets to take care of Bria while we’re away.It’s going to be a feeding frenzy.”
“So true.But it should be your parents.They wouldn’t forgive us otherwise.”
“All right, but they have to move into the manse, where they’ll have the best protection.”
“I’ll let you tell them that,” she said with feeling.
“Coward.”
“Guilty.”She cuddled Bria closer.“It’s going to be hard to leave her.”
“Changing your mind?”
“No.”She needed a chance to step out and be someone besides a mother again.Taking steps to help Alise and attack their many problems was a great way to start.“Let’s leave today.”
~4~
Lord Jadren El-Adrelshifted on the big, iron chair in the receiving hall and suppressed a yawn.He didn’t like to call the monstrosity of a chair a “throne,” though it looked like one, and Seliah delighted in calling it that, just to poke at him.He’d tried to get rid of the cursed thing, a relic of his vicious mother’s reign as Lady El-Adrel.She’d loved playing queen of her captive realm and had relished all the little perks that set her above her inferiors, which included everyone else in the world.In truth, though, it was just a hard, uncomfortable, and ugly oversized chair.The house, however, seemed to like it and resisted every effort he made to remove or replace it.
And dealing with the complaints of the various minions House El-Adrel was enough to put him to sleep.He supposed if the ass-numbing chair was even slightly more comfortable, he would fall into a stupor, so there was that.Still, was it a bad sign if you couldn’t feel your legs?He shifted again, bouncing one knee to see if that would encourage blood flow, which pinched his balls uncomfortably.The prickling sensation in his scrotum gave him a stab of alarm.What if he became unmanned from sitting for so long?He’d heal from it, as he healed from every cursed thing he’d so far encountered, but a chronic case of genital gangrene might prove to be the one thing that could destroy him.
Jadren El-Adrel: struck down by penis rot.What a pitiful epitaph that would be.
“Stop squirming,” Seliah hissed at him from where she sat beside him in a far more comfortable chair.“Are you even listening?”
“I think I have penis rot,” he whispered back.
She didn’t even pause.“You do not.”
“My ass fell asleep an hour ago.Anything could be going on down there.Maybe you should check it.”
Seliah slid him a sideways look, her catlike eyes canny.“You’re not funny.Put on your big boy panties,Lord El-Adrel, and pay attention.The debate is almost over and you’ll have to make your judgement.”
Since he had not, in fact, been paying attention, that came as mostly welcome news.The almost over part anyway, not the decision aspect.“What should I decide?”
“Really?”she hissed at him.“How do you look at yourself in the mirror?”
“I don’t,” he shot back with a sly smile.“I look at my beautiful familiar.”
She rolled those beautiful amber eyes, wrinkling her nose in a charming, but decidedly unbeautiful fashion.“You are responsible for this house, Jadren.”
“I never wanted to be Lord El-Adrel,” he griped, shifting his butt again.He definitely had never wanted to sit in this chair.He did not share his late mother’s affinity for discomfort.He’d had enough pain to last him several lifetimes, which—given his quasi-immortality—might be an infinite number.The upside was, he’d also inherited none of her sadism.
“Yes, well, I never wanted to be a latent familiar and shackled to a wizard who thinks I look like a stick insect,” she retorted, “but look at me now.”
