RAMHM Chapter 158

Sweet Torture

Empress Letina's former palace had long since shed every trace of its old, somber atmosphere.

So much gilding had been applied that it gleamed from a distance, announcing itself with a splendor that made it appear more magnificent than even Rhodness's own Crown Prince's palace.

The bathing chamber Bianca led me to held a bath that Rhodness had designed and built to special order. Bianca had put such care into its preparation that it was already warm, already fragrant with flowers.

In the ordinary way of things, a Crown Princess's bath would be attended by ladies-in-waiting drawn from noble families rather than handmaids—but since the investiture and wedding ceremony had been held simultaneously, those arrangements were not yet in place.

I had no wish to entrust myself to strangers on a day like this, and that had nothing to do with today being a special occasion—I simply never wanted that, period.

Bianca attended my bath herself and, with characteristic frankness, did not spare me the details. The advice was mostly concerned with how a wedding night ought to go.

"Rienne, you don't look the least bit embarrassed."

"Oh!"

It was only then that embarrassment arrived, rising to my face in heat.

What had made me blush was not Bianca's advice—it was the sudden, vivid awareness that Rhodness and I had already done things considerably more shameful than anything she was describing, and that I had very nearly been found out.

Bianca, taking my color for a new bride's fright, told me not to worry and patted me on the shoulder.

Her worry was misplaced. I was not frightened at all.

The one who needed to be nervous today was not me.

After the bath, Bianca drew me into a long embrace and said a blessing.

The moment I stepped out of the bathing chamber, Madame Leblais was waiting with a triumphant smile and the slip she'd made herself.

In her own words—"sexy yet innocent, demure yet dizzying." Whether such a design was physically possible was left as an open question.

Rhodness, who had submitted to his attendants' ministrations for the day without complaint, let them dress him in his formal wear and then waited in the bridal chamber alone.

He had packed the fireplace with so much wood—because Adrienne always ran cold—that once the warmth had spread to every corner of the room, he finally seemed satisfied, and took stock of the bridal chamber.

The palace's exterior was extravagantly decorated, but the bedchamber itself had been arranged with Adrienne's tastes in mind. He had initially planned to use green—then remembered that green would evoke the Grand Ducal Estate bedchamber where they'd spent their first night, and revised every plan from scratch, choosing instead the deep purple that was her other favorite color.

A canopy of soft violet chiffon trimmed with gold-thread tassels hung over the bed in a way that was somehow quietly suggestive. He looked at it, pleased, and felt the corner of his mouth rise.

When at last the knock came to announce that the Crown Princess had arrived at the bridal chamber, Rhodness moved quickly to sit at the small table.

He had already arranged the champagne Adrienne liked, anticipating praise. He was, accordingly, slightly giddy.

Click.

He had been pouring the champagne, and the soft liquid rush of it into the glass was still in his ears when Adrienne stepped inside—and he forgot to breathe.

"Rhoan!"

Her face was flushed, and she looked up from beneath lowered lashes and came straight to him. Only then did he register that champagne was running over the rim of the glass, and he pulled his hand back quickly.

"Adrienne, what on earth—"

"I was told the groom is supposed to wear a formal robe, but apparently nobody actually follows that anymore."

Rhodness looked her up and down, and felt his face go hot.

The slip was not transparent, exactly—but it was thin enough to follow every line of her.

"You're pretty. No—beautiful. No—alluring, and—"

He was stumbling over his own sentences in a way she had never heard from him before, and Adrienne, who had been slightly tense, laughed and sat down across from him.

The large ribbon at her chest moved every time she did, catching at the edge of his vision in a way he found profoundly difficult to manage, and he made a deliberate effort to look somewhere else.

She seemed not to notice. She picked up the champagne glass he had already poured for her and lifted it toward him in a toast.

He drank—he could not have said through his nose or his mouth—until nearly half the large bottle was gone.

"...Is it legal, being this beautiful?"

"Rhoan, stop. You've said nothing else all evening."

"Wait—I actually died, didn't I? This has to be Abadhelia. The world already has one Adrienne, and how is there another woman just as beautiful standing right here?"

"Strictly speaking, I'm a twin—so there is one more like me."

With all her tension visibly gone, Adrienne wrinkled her nose at him and smiled. Watching the easy line of her throat as she tipped her head back to drink, thirst rose in him.

"...Rienne."

"Yes?"

Rhodness regretted, bitterly, ever having crammed that fireplace full of firewood like a man trying to burn the place down.

He had drunk only three or four glasses of champagne, and yet his heart—which had been running at full speed through the entire ceremony—was misfiring, a loud percussion filling his ears.

"You know what?"

"What?"

"What they gave us to drink before the Grand Prelate's address—do you know what that was?"

"Mm. Holy water, maybe? Or some sort of ritual wine that represents the union—an imperial tradition?"

Adrienne answered easily. She had taken it for a kind of commemorative drink shared by the couple during the ceremony.

Rhodness reached toward her mouth. His thumb pressed against her lower lip—damp from the champagne—and he wiped it slowly. Adrienne's body shifted, barely, involuntarily.

Under ordinary circumstances he would have laughed, low, at her reaction. Now the laugh didn't come.

A strange tightness wound through him, and beneath it he wanted, right then, to swallow her whole in one bite and roll her around his mouth like a sweet.

"Members of the direct imperial line begin taking a strong contraceptive the moment they come of age, so that the noble bloodline cannot appear in the wrong place. When a formal marriage is contracted, they're given something to release the effect—like an antidote."

The hand that had wiped her lip moved down slowly and closed around her arm.

Her slender form was drawn toward him. Adrienne naturally circled his neck with her arms and settled herself across his thighs, her legs finding his waist as though they'd always known the way.

The firelight crackled in the grate, and somehow the same fire had moved into his eyes—or that was how it looked to her, watching him. The red of his gaze flickered and threw sparks.

She forgot to breathe. She looked into it.

His hands gripped her waist, firm.

"Do you understand what I mean?"

"Then..."

"It means we have a great deal of work to do."

His voice came from somewhere low, and it moved through the air  like a snake, slithering into her ear. The waist held in his hands shifted, just slightly.

"If you don't want to, say so. If you don't want this—"

"I want to."

The answer came without hesitation. A faint, devastating satisfaction moved across Rhodness's mouth.

He stretched his neck and bit gently at her lips.

Their breaths moved together through the place where their mouths met.

Adrienne adjusted her position on his lap.

Both her arms pulled tighter around his neck. The leg that had been half-exposed through the slip's side-slit wrapped around his waist as though it belonged there.

"Adrienne..."

The sound came through the seal of their lips, pressed down into something low.

Rhodness stood abruptly, and carried her—simply lifted and carried her—to the canopied bed.

Even then, when he had laid her against the headboard and settled himself with her across his lap, their lips did not part.

Wait.

A sudden wrongness brought him up short. Rhodness went rigid.

"...Rienne?"

He released the soft, swollen lip he had been pulling at, and looked at her—blank.

He had clearly intended to lay her down and hold her beneath his shadow. Yet here he was, effectively supine against the headboard, with her sitting across him—

It hit him like a bucket of cold water—his head suddenly, sharply clear. Rhodness parted his wet lips.

He moved his arms to take hold of her waist. He could not. His arms and legs were bound fast by something, immovable.

"Rienne?"

And then Rhodness saw it.

"I've been learning a bit of magic with Rotsy, Rhoan."

Adrienne, above him, smiling faintly at him, gathering her hair to one side over her shoulder.

Her white shoulder was bare.

The sight was so overwhelming that Rhodness drew a long, shaken breath.

"That's... what...?"

"Bianca told me—marry, and pin your husband down early."

As those red lips, slick and wet with his own trace, parted, Rhodness swallowed hard against his will. The throat that had been parched for a while now was burning.

"You're always the one who takes the lead. I won't let you have it your way today."

At Adrienne's low murmur, Rhodness couldn't even blink. Her magic held him so that he couldn't lay a hand on her—though apparently it left him free enough to grip the sheets.

His mind had already gone blank-white, blanched clean of any ability to think straight.

"It'll get in the way of what I'm doing, so I have no choice but to keep you still. So don't get in your wife's way, Rhoan."

The word wife alone was intoxicating. Her face, leaning closer, tilting toward him. Her fingers, toying at his throat, working open the buttons of the shirt he'd worn as formalwear—between the two, what little reason he had left was wrung completely out of him.

I could feel him clearly against me where we pressed together—the distinct, unmistakable tension of him.

Rhodness clenched his jaw.

The bone stood out at his jaw. A vein appeared at his temple, sharp.

I didn't know how strong his mana was, but it was possible he could break a parlor trick like this at any moment.

If the positions were about to reverse themselves, I needed to be faster. I reached with impatient hands for his buttons.

Rhodness watched my fingers work his buttons loose with the look of someone entirely captivated—or someone enduring something at great cost.

"Gah..."

My cold fingers grazed his collarbone, and he flinched hard.

"Shh—"

Settled across him, I parted his shirt front entirely. The chest I had uncovered rose and fell in uneven swells.

He had no choice but to surrender himself to me.

Rhodness shook his head as if none of this could possibly be real, and could not look away.

I gave him a small smile and brought my hands to his belt. At that, Rhodness's eyes went very large.

"Adrienne!"

His torso lurched upward so sharply that my body rocked with it. I looked at him with mild disapproval.

"Hold still, Rhoan."

I helped him with the rest quickly and settled myself back across him.

Then I moved my hands, slow as a snake, across the taut, defined planes of his stomach. Another vein appeared at Rhodness's temple.

"Adrienne, please—"

The pressed-down sound of his voice kept sinking lower. I hadn't done anything yet, and I couldn't stop now.

"Please, what?"

"This is torture."

I stopped.

And then something more unexpected happened. The face that had said torture went slowly, steadily redder—and he looked up at me, the woman sitting over him, as though he were bewitched; then dragged one hand along his own throat and exhaled long and deep.

"Shall I stop?"

"God, please—"

"Tell me what you want, Rhoan."

"...I'm going mad wanting to touch you."

He bit the words out from between his teeth.

I set my hands moving again.

I had only drawn my palm once across the broad plane of his chest, and a sound came from his throat that I had never heard from him before.

Something clarified, all at once. All those times Rhodness had moved with such intensity—kept me hovering at the edge of myself—I thought I understood, now, what it felt like from where he had been standing.

It wasn't that I was doing something unfamiliar, and therefore at ease. My hands trembled. They were hopelessly clumsy, hopelessly unpracticed.

I wet my dry lips with the tip of my tongue and explored the body beneath me—so differently textured from my own in every particular. And the sounds that escaped him as my hands moved, sweet and unbearably intimate at once, were dizzying.

I lowered my head and kissed him. Our breaths tangled and deepened together.

I stroked his chest as the kiss drew us closer.

His parched lips answered mine like someone finding water at last.