Kings Rising (Captive Prince 3)

‘No. Listen to me.’ He felt Laurent’s hand firm on the back of his neck. ‘I’m not going to let my uncle hurt you.’

Laurent’s blue gaze was calm and steady, as if he had made a decision and wanted Damen to know it. ‘It’s what I came here last night to say. I’m going to take care of it.’

‘Promise me,’ Damen heard himself say. ‘Promise me we won’t let him—’

‘I promise.’

Laurent said it seriously, his voice honest; no game playing, just the truth. Damen nodded, his grip on Laurent tightening. The kissing this time had an echo of last night’s desperation, a need to block out the outside world and stay for a moment longer in this cocoon, Laurent’s arms winding around his neck. Damen rolled over him, body fitting against body. The sheet slipped away from them. Slow rocking began to turn kissing into something else.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Come in,’ said Laurent, turning his head towards the sound.

Damen said, ‘Laurent,’ shocked and on full display as the door swung open. Pallas entered. Laurent greeted him with no self-consciousness at all.

‘Yes?’ Laurent’s voice was matter-of-fact.

Pallas’s mouth opened. Damen saw what Pallas saw: Laurent like some dream of a newly fucked virgin, himself unmistakably above him, fully roused. He flushed all over. In Ios, he might have dallied with a lover while a household slave attended to some task in the room, but only because a slave was so far beneath him in status as not to signify. The idea of a soldier watching him make love to Laurent was breaking open his mind. Laurent had never even taken an acknowledged lover before, let alone—

Pallas forced his eyes to the floor.

‘My apologies, Exalted. I came to seek your orders for the morning.’

‘We’re busy currently. Have a servant prepare the baths and bring us food at mid-morning.’ Laurent spoke like an administrator glancing up from his desk.

‘Yes, Exalted.’

Pallas turned blindly, and made for the door.

‘What is it?’ Laurent looked at Damen, who had detached himself and was sitting with the sheet pulled up to where he had clutched it to cover himself. And then, with the burgeoning delight of discovery, ‘Are you shy?’

‘In Akielos we don’t,’ said Damen, ‘in front of other people.’

‘Not even the King?’

‘Especially not the King,’ said Damen, for whom the King still partly meant his father.

‘But how does the court know if the royal marriage has been consummated?’

‘The King knows whether or not it has been consummated!’ Horrified.

Laurent stared at him. Damen was surprised when Laurent dropped his head, and even more surprised when Laurent’s shoulders started shaking. Around the laughter emerged, ‘You wrestled him without any clothes on.’

‘That is sports,’ said Damen. He folded his arms, thinking that Veretians lacked any sense of dignity, even as Laurent sitting up and pressing a delighted kiss to his lips had him slightly mollified.

Later, ‘The King of Vere really consummates his marriage in front of the court?’

‘Not in front of the court,’ said Laurent, as if this were unspeakably foolish, ‘in front of the Council.’

‘Guion is on the Council!’ said Damen.

Later, they lay alongside one another, and Damen found himself tracing the scar on Laurent’s shoulder, the only place his skin was marred, as Damen now knew intimately. ‘I’m sorry Govart is dead. I know you were trying to keep him alive.’

‘I thought he knew something that I could use against my uncle. It doesn’t matter. We’ll stop him another way.’

‘You never told me what happened.’

‘It was nothing. There was a knife fight. I got free, and Guion and I came to an arrangement.’