Burning for Love (Kindred Tales)

Between her legs…well, Rissa wasn’t sure about that area, because she wasn’t allowed to touch or examine herself and never had been. She had tried once—but that had been a long time ago. And she could feel the heat growing there too, despite the solid hour she’d spent soaking in the icy tub.

She padded across her vast bedroom, the pink, Te’lishian fur rug tickling the bare soles of her feet, to stand before the mirror. Its silvery surface reflected the opulence of her room with its large, four-poster bed hung with rich, rose and gold brocade curtains and the diamond chandelier hanging from the ceiling. These were her mother’s old apartments, which Rissa had been moved into at the start of her Cycle, and they were much more luxurious than the smaller, plainer rooms she’d grown up in.

But it wasn’t the opulence behind her that interested her, it was the sight she saw in the mirror.

She saw a girl with creamy brown skin that had a pearlescent sheen, which denoted Royal blood flowing through her veins. Her curves were full—perhaps too full to be fashionable—but her mother had been full-figured too, Rissa remembered.

The girl in the mirror had an abundance of thick, curly hair that hung in lush ringlets all around her face. It was light brown shading to blonde at the ends and there was so much of it, she had great difficulty in fitting it under the formal, styled wigs which were the fashion of the Court.

Lady Mildew had opined more than once that she ought to have her hair cut or even shaved all the way off—the better to slip into her wigs more easily. But there, Rissa had put her foot down. She refused to be bald just to serve fashion—she liked her long, curly locks and secretly thought they looked prettier than the huge, heavy, powdered wigs she was constantly forced to wear.

She had an all right face, she thought—not beautiful, but pretty. Her features were well-molded with high cheek bones and a dimple on her right cheek which winked fetchingly when she smiled. Her best asset was probably her large, starry eyes which were a warm amber-brown.

But it wasn’t her eyes or her hair that anyone would have noticed about her now. Her points were glowing dull red with heat and between her legs…well, Rissa shifted uncomfortably, wondering if she was glowing there too. She would never know, as she was forbidden to part her nether lips and find out.

The sight of her sensitive areas glowing and hot to the touch, sent a shiver of fear down her spine. She had always known that her Heat Cycle would be difficult to contend with—it was something all Royals of the Very First House had to deal with. But she hadn’t anticipated that it would cause her quite so much distress, or that her dreams would become so strange once it started…

“All right now, let’s get you dressed.”

Lady Mildew came up behind her, a perpetual frown on her wrinkled face. She shook her head and clicked her tongue disapprovingly at the sight of Rissa’s glowing points.

“Well, well—it seems your Cycle is ramping up again. I’ll get the ice gel pads for your points but first we must put on your Chastity Wire.”

“Must I wear it all the time now?” Rissa protested, as the older woman brought out a thin silver wire and slipped it around her waist, just above her full, curving hips. “You only used to put it on me before bed. Why is it necessary to use it all the time since my Cycle started?”

“The belt keeps a young lady such as yourself pure and chaste,” Lady Mildew said briskly. “This way there’s no temptation for hands to wander where they shouldn’t as they did before you wore it.”

“That was once—before I knew better!” Rissa protested as the older woman finished clasping the wire and turned it on with the remote she kept with her at all times. There was a low, buzzing hum as the chastity device came to life. It would deliver a painful shock to anyone—Rissa included—who tried to touch her between her legs.

This seemed deeply unnecessary to Rissa. She had been wearing the wire to bed since she was ten years old—she’d learned by now not to touch herself—or to let anyone else touch her, for that matter. In fact, she automatically flinched if her hands even went near her nether lips—even when she wasn’t wearing the wire.

The fact that she must never touch herself in her “intimate areas” had been well and truly ingrained in her from an early age. Why did her old chaperone think she would suddenly forget that important lesson simply because her Heat Cycle had started?

Though, she had to admit, some things had changed since the Cycle started to ramp up. Her dreams, for instance. Sometimes they left her so…unsettled. One, in particular had been bothering her for the past month. She kept having the strangest dream of a man with pale skin—well, it was tan instead of brown, like her own, anyway—and with no pearlescent sheen. His skin had looked, in fact, much like the skin of the Kindred Commander and his wife, when they had come to visit.