I draw her hand from the sphere.
"Miss Merris." Quiet. Conversational.
She says nothing. A wise choice.
I press her palm flat against the front of my breeches, over the upper cock.
The warmth of her hand soaks through the cloth. Both shafts throb with it. I watch her face and the cover cracks—two full seconds, unguarded, something behind Clara's pleasant expression going wide—and then I press her palm down further, so she feels the lower shaft as well, distinct and separate beneath, and her exhale breaks. A real sound. Unmanaged. Her scent floods the room sharply enough that I feel it settle at the back of my throat.
Her fingers twitch against the cloth. She stops them.
"An omega," I say pleasantly, "would know exactly what to do with this."
She swallows. I watch it go down her throat.
"I'm sure I couldn't say, my lord." Clara's voice. Barely.
"No," I agree. "You couldn't."
I hold her there another moment—both shafts pulsing slow and hard against her palm, the upper running its involuntary vibration because I am wound up and not bothering to suppress it—and watch the fury in her jaw and the want she cannot extinguish and the specific self-loathing of a woman who came here to be professional and is failing at it in a way she will be thinking about at two in the morning. I think:good.I want to be the thing that keeps her awake. I stopped being overly concerned with kindness sometime in the fourth century and I am not going to start now on her account.
I release her hand and step away.
I find her extraordinary—that's the honest answer I have no intention of giving. The way she holds the seam even now, her performance sitting thinner but intact, not a crack she'll let me see. Most people fold. She has been folding for weeks without allowing herself to fall and I want her with an attention I am not accustomed to and don't particularly trust.
But I have time. The pre-heat is building. She keeps coming back.
"Your shoulders are too high," I say. "Breathe down."
The smallest pause. She needs it, and she takes it, and I let her have it without making anything of it. She breathes down. Her scent fills the room and I breathe it in with my eyes on the sphere, and both shafts ache with the warmth she left on the cloth, and I let them ache because I am very old and very patient and this is going to end precisely one way and I am in no hurry to get there before she arrives.
That moment is coming. I can feel the shape of it the way I feel weather through the manor walls—still some days off but as certain as winter. The pre-heat building, the magic running, the lessons pulling her back into this room where the proximity does its quiet accumulated work. She will hold it until she can't and then she won't, and I intend to be paying close attention when it happens.
The sphere shimmers.
I lean close enough that my lips almost brush her hair and breathe her in—all of it, the want and the fury and the slick heat of her—and feel my cocks throb once, heavy and untouched, and say nothing.
"Good," I say. Quiet, close, right against her ear. "There it is."
I straighten and look at the sphere as though that's what I meant.
Neither of us mentions the rest of it.
7
CLAIRE
Iwake at half past five with fever skin and his name already in my mouth and slick soaking through my underthings, and I lie there for thirty seconds trying to remember who I am.
Claire Whitmore. Twenty-one. Three years in the field. Intelligence operative. Currently in Mist Court manor with eight days remaining on a mission that has objectively gone sideways in ways they did not cover in the briefing.
The eight days doesn't mean anything. Some part of me has known that since the lesson. I'm trying to convince the professional part of me otherwise and failing, because the pre-heat is not a low background problem anymore. It is the entire foreground. All of it, all at once: fever-hot skin and slick pooling between my thighs and my clit throbbing with a slow, insistent pulse that has been waking me up for three nights now and doesn't care at all about my professional situation. I shift and my underthings are soaked through, and there is a specific ache in the core of me, an emptiness I am very aware of and trying veryhard not to think about, and my nipples are so sensitive that the sheet moving over them when I sat up was briefly a problem.
I am cataloguing this because cataloguing is the only professional activity currently available to me.
I get up. I change my underthings. They're soaked again before I finish dressing and I press my jaw tight, note this as information, and go down the back stairs.
The eastern grounds.I come here every morning because the mist and the cold are the closest things to relief I've found, and I walk to the far edge where the grounds meet the tree line and stand there and try to think.
