Torchlight flickered warm color across Imogen’s drab clothing, sparking memories for Cededa of Tineroth noblewomen in their court finery. A glittering procession of butterflies whose jewels caught the light of a thousand candles that illuminated his once majestic throne room. The colorful garb didn’t stay on their graceful bodies for long once they reached this chamber, though the jewelry sometimes did.
Imogen traveled the bedchamber’s perimeter. “This room alone is twice the size of the cottage I shared with Niamh.” Her gaze settled on him for a moment. “Was it yours?”
She shone pale and regal in the flickering light, her dark hair cascading down her back in red-tinted waves. Cededa considered telling her the truth. Before the Waters effects leached away both his needs and his desires, Cededa the Fair had a reputation known far and wide as a man of lusty appetites and the stamina to match them. His bedchamber had seen many women spend hours in its confines. By the time Tineroth’s mages discovered a way to trap and imprison him, it was nothing more than a place where Cededa brooded alone, enraged, impotent, and immortal.
He had lost the carnal appetites that once consumed him only to discover them reawakened by her lethal touch.
The curse flowing black and powerful beneath her skin was killing him and bringing him back to life at the same time. Each day, they engaged in an odd courtship of profound intimacy and innocence, one that left him clawing for control and wondering if his heart would pound out of his chest.
He needed no one to tell him she was untried. Cededa had never cared for virgins. They were too much trouble for his debauched tastes, like high strung horses unbroken to the saddle. Imogen displayed none of those nervous traits, even when she discovered the brothel scroll tucked away in the library. Niamh had done a fine job raising a young woman grounded in practicality. Cededa, however, had no doubt Imogen was innocent in body and unfamiliar with the subtle signals of desire.
Cededa had lost count of the women he’d seduced and who had seduced him before the Waters made a mockery of his humanity. Practiced in the art of sensuality, his wives and concubines had been raised to capture the eye and passions of an emperor. Imogen seduced him with her nothing more than her graceful, lethal hands and a steady faith in his ability to break the hold of her curse.
“Sire?”
The single word pulled him out of his musings. He dipped his chin. “My apologies for the inattention. I’ve something to show you.”
He crooked a finger. She crossed the room to stand beside him, listening as he uttered another soft word in a forgotten tongue. The torches brightened, their flames leaping higher to better illuminate the frescoes painted on the whitewashed walls. Not as bright as the illustrations on the scroll, they still glowed, their details highlighted in rich colors painted by a far more skilled artist than the one who painted the scroll.
These were neither landscapes nor portraits, unless one considered scenes of mating configurations of the land. A wide-eyed Imogen abandoned Cededa for the corner of the wall and a closer look at the first painting in the series that bordered the entire room.
Meant to arouse and excite the king and his chosen companion, the frescoes were as graphic in their depiction of sexual acts as the scroll had been.
The first painting showed a man covering a woman, his hips resting within the cradle of her thighs, the curve of his naked flank partially covered by her hand. He lay in profile to the viewer, and bent to suckle the woman’s breast. The woman’s painted eyes were heavy-lidded with pleasure. Cededa watched, fascinated, as a rosy blush crawled up Imogen’s neck and into her cheeks. A reciprocal heat that had nothing to do with Tineroth’s warm temperatures, pooled in his stomach before spilling downward. He stood still and enjoyed the once forgotten sensation of an erection.
Imogen moved on to the next painting. Here, the same man knelt behind a different woman, his cock half buried between her buttocks. In the next, the same woman knelt before him, sucking his cock into her mouth. A fourth had them switching places and partners. A different man and woman stretched out along the wall, his face hidden by her bent leg, her expression one of ecstasy as she arched her back and buried her fingers in his hair.
Imogen stepped back for another perspective of the painting, then turned to Cededa. High color washed her cheekbones. Innocent she was but far from immune to the frescoes’ effects.
“What is he doing to her?”
He did smile then. “Have you ever pleasured yourself, Imogen?”
She didn’t shrink away from the question or avoid his gaze. “Yes,” she said simply.
Cededa silently applauded Niamh for not teaching her daughter shame of her own body. Imogen answered him with no more chagrin than if he asked her if she wanted a drink of water.
He closed the distance between them and studied the painting with her. “He is using his tongue in the same way you use your fingers.”
Her eyebrows drew together in puzzlement, and she tilted her head as if considering a greater question. “And this is pleasurable for her?”
He gestured at the fresco. “Look at her face. What do you think?”
She bent for a closer look, then turned to gaze at him over her shoulder. “Have you done this?”
This girl didn’t possess a speck of coyness. He found it refreshing. “I have.”
“Did you enjoy it as well?”
“Very much so.”
This was likely the strangest, most fascinating discussion he’d ever had with a woman, or any person for that matter. Imogen delighted him, enchanted him and if he dwelt on it too long, terrified him. Part of him wished he’d met her before his world crumbled around him. The greater part was thankful he hadn’t.
She straightened and moved past him, her eyes traveling over the remaining frescoes. All depicted scenes progressively more lurid than the ones before it. “Why did you have these painted in your chambers?”
Cededa had no intention of detailing the debauched atmosphere of his court during his long reign. “They seemed appropriate at the time.”
She didn’t press him for more but moved on to another question that made him grin. “Have you tried all of these?”
“I have. Several times.”
She looked away from him then. Her arms crossed protectively in front of her, and she stood silent for a few moments, pondering, before meeting his eyes. The blush had faded, and her gaze was both resolute and steady. “Once you rid me of this curse, I want to try all of these as well, and I want you to teach me.”
She wouldn’t have caught him any more off guard than if she’d suddenly stripped naked and ran around the room in circles. No fear, no maidenly embarrassment, only an honest desire to experience the pleasures of the flesh denied to her. Cededa wanted to reply, but she’d knocked the breath out of his lungs, not to mention strengthened the erection that already made his trews uncomfortable.
“What?” she asked when he continued to stare at her in silence. “Do you think it wrong to desire such things?”
The words hung in his throat for a moment, bitter and sharp. “I think you will one day make a fortunate man very happy, Imogen.” A brief, agonized jealousy spiked him in the chest, along with the urge to break the lucky bastard in half. He ruthlessly crushed the emotion and tried not to dwell too long on the idea of Imogen as the woman in one of the paintings and himself between her pale thighs. He’d lose the ability to think at all if he did and act on instinct.
She inhaled an audible breath and drew closer to Cededa. A new tension made the air around them almost thrum. Her fingertips grazed the edges of key markings tattooed across his throat and partially revealed by the open edges of his tunic. Her eyes had turned dark, the pupils so large they nearly encompassed her irises. The tip of her tongue glided across her lower lip as she stared at the path her fingers traced. “You are a pleasure to touch,” she said in a voice deepened by desire. “A gift beyond price.”
The slow poison of her affections inflamed him, and he stood for a moment, docile under her caress as her bane surged through his body, igniting his insides so that the numbness instilled by the Waters burned away entirely. Imogen of Leids was the pinnacle of contradictions – sensual innocence and a death touch that made him feel so alive, he feared he might combust from the euphoric effect.
They strove together toward disparate goals—she to live a normal life, he to die a normal death. They had agreed on a process to attain both. She touched him as often as she pleased, and he bled the curse out of her by taking it into himself. He’d been the one to present the idea, and she readily agreed.
A fine plan except Cededa didn’t count on his body awakening so fiercely under an onslaught of sensations long forgotten. Imogen’s demand that he teach her the fine art of coupling combined with her forthright honesty in her pleasure at touching him raised his lust to fever pitch. If she didn’t leave him be for now, he’d either burst into flame or take her on the filthy floor.
He grasped her wrist and forced her hand to her side before stepping out of reach. Desire, lust, anguish, fear—they surged through him on a relentless wave. This woman had no place with him. He had nothing to offer beyond the lifting of her bane.
“Don’t touch me, Imogen,” he ordered. “Not here. Not now. Not in this place.”
She flinched away and turned her back to him, but not before he caught the shame and hurt stamped on her elegant features.
The tether holding his control in place threatened to snap. He fled, leaving her in his dusty chambers with their lurid frescoes and the ruins of his humanity.