Tempted By Him: A BL collection of romantic stories のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 71 - チャプター 77

Soren's povI lasted one full day of pouring with a king’s spend still ghosting out of me when I moved too fast. Herbs at dawn. High collar. Eyes down. Alaric took every cup as if the feast had never ended and did not send for me until I had started to believe the solar had been a heat-dream.Then the summons came as wine.A page at my elbow before the midday bell. “His Grace wants the reserve from the east cellar. You are to carry it yourself. The solar.”A letter would have been cleaner. Wine was a joke I had to swallow. I took the bottle because refusing a page in a corridor was how rumors grew teeth.Heat was not gone. It had gone low and mean, a coal under the herbs. The bite under my collar itched. Every stair behind the dais smelled like pine and iron.Alaric was not at the table. He was at the window seat, circlet off, shirt open at the throat, looking at the garden like it had offended him. The bottle left my hands. His did not reach for it.The lock turned behind me.“There

Soren's povNo page came. I went at the hour he had named because waiting on a pallet would have been another kind of herb.The hall was dead when I walked it.Midsummer’s fires were ash. Vessa’s banner still hung, a wolf in the dark. My high collar was a lie I had not bothered to pin. Heat paced under my skin, no herbs, as he had asked. The dais steps were the same stone I had climbed with pitchers. Tonight I climbed them with empty hands.Alaric sat the throne in the circlet and nothing else that mattered, shirt open, waiting like a hunt that had already chosen the throat. A thin band of gold lay on the arm beside his fist. Not his crown. Smaller. Meant for a brow that had only ever sweated over wine.“Come here,” he said.Not present. Not cup. Here.I went. He pulled me into his lap facing him, thighs either side of the carved seat, and I felt how hard he already was through my linen. The hall smelled of cold wax and him.“If they send me out after this,” I said, because the spine

Levi's povThe three days before Thursday I worked like a man who was not married to his problem. I was. The tin caught on my drafting pencil. A junior asked if I’d gotten engaged. I said it was complicated. She grinned like complicated was cute. It was not cute. It was Cade Voss in my inbox with tracked changes.Thursday I wore the ring and a shirt that buttoned all the way up over the bite I still could not date.The client had a glass conference room and opinions about daylight. Cade sat across from me like Vegas had been a footnote. His ring was on. Of course it was. His knee found mine under the table once, a bastard’s hello, and I knocked a pen off the edge so I would have an excuse to look away.The meeting ran long. Cade took the massing; I took the skin. Twice we talked over each other and the client smiled like we had practiced it. We had not. We had practiced something else against a hotel door. When I reached for the pointer our rings clicked. Cade did not apologize. I did