We both know I am not an authority on how to hold a duster.
“How should I hold it, Your Majesty?” she questions with a crook of an eyebrow.
“With competence,” I mutter.
Her jaw tightens and she quietly continues her work.
I grip my pen until my knuckles ache. Will this torture ever end? I feel compelled to speak to her, about any topic, no matter how ridiculous. “The spine of that book should face outward.”
She purses her perfect lips. “Itisfacing outward, Your Majesty.”
“It is upside down.”
She turns the book around. It looks exactly the same. I’m nitpicking a maid’s cleaning technique because the alternative is crossing this room and putting my mouth on her throat.
Her scent intensifies with every minute she spends in my study. My fangs ache, wanting to extend and sink into her skin while I cover her with my body. I have to consciously keep them retracted. Jaws clench so hard my teeth hurt. My shaft has been half-hard since she walked through the door, and I’m grateful the desk hides my lap from view.
The Blood Calling is screaming at me. I am unable to focus on my work.
I track her every movement like a predator tracking prey. The curve of her neck as she reaches for a higher shelf. The way her uniform pulls across her hips when she stretches. The golden hair escaping from its pins, wisping around her flushed face. That perfect ass. I want her bent over while I take her from behind and sink my teeth in her shoulder to keep her still.
Last night I lay awake for hours, her scent still lingering on my sheets from where she’d made my bed. Sleep was impossiblebecause my body refused to calm. The hardening of my cock would not ease no matter how I shifted or what I tried to think about instead.
I have never experienced anything like this. In thirty-two years, I have never once felt desire. Never been hard. Never understood what the Korvenian poets meant when they wrote of sexual passion and the triggering scent of a mate’s blood.
Krovenians do not pleasure mate. We do not feel arousal until the Blood Calling chooses our mate. This is how it has always been. I assumed I would feel nothing until I took the elixir with Serina. We would be breeders and nothing else.
Now my body is awakening in ways I don’t fully understand, and I have no idea how to make it stop. I remain half-hard beneath this desk. It doesn’t seem to matter whether she’s in the room or not.
I need to speak with my brothers and my cousin. Viktor went through with an arranged marriage with his late wife and did not find it terrible, because they became good friends. They were never passionately in love but found their match highly tolerable. Sebastian and Maxim are next in line if I am removed from the throne. We are meant to meet this afternoon to discuss Council matters, but perhaps I will tell them the truth instead.
“Those books are meant to remain in that pile on the table,” I tell her.
“I’ll leave it, Your Majesty.”
Is that a smirk on her face? Is she laughing at me?
“See that you do.”
The anger burns beneath my skin. I’m not even sure who I’m angry at anymore. Myself, for being so weak and requesting her presence instead of her absence. For wanting her so badly I can barely think. Her, for existing, being human and completely, utterly inappropriate in every possible way. Or do I blame the gods, for their cruel timing.
The Council announced my engagement this morning to Princess Serina.
And simultaneously, the Blood Calling finally arrived, not for the princess, but for a human servant who was caught going through my desk.
Why now, after thirty-two years of nothing? I had made peace with duty and accepted that passion wasn’t meant for me.
“The angle of your wrist is wrong.”
She stops dusting. Her restraint must be fraying. I can see the tension of her shoulders and hear her quickening heartbeat.
Do it. Get angry. Call me an asshole again. Give me a reason to fire you.
But she just adjusts her wrist and keeps working.
If I wanted to design the most inappropriate mate possible, I couldn’t have done better. A human foreigner with no status, no connections, no understanding of Krovenian politics. Possibly a spy who was clearly looking for something in my study yesterday, no matter what pathetic excuse she offered.
And yet my blood chose her. And I’ve been taught my whole life that the Blood Calling is never wrong. So why would it choose someone so impossible?
