Page 79 of Somber Prince

Rha arched an eyebrow, flicking a curious glance between the Keeper and me. Knowing his obsessive possessiveness, I half expected Rha to send Sigid away in a jealous fit. Instead, the prince nodded calmly.

“I’m wishing you joy, ladies.” He turned, his skirt whipping around his legs. The side slit opened as he ascended the stairs, flashing his muscular thigh with every step.

“Well,” Melanie turned to me. “He really wants to keep you joyful. Just look at this place. And it’s all for you alone.”

“Alone,” I echoed. “Which isn’t as great as you think.”

Elaine’s expression darkened. “Did he hurt you?”

“What? No.” I shook my head adamantly, refusing to let anyone think about Rha like that even for a second. “It’s just boring, sitting here by myself. That’s all.”

Elaine wrapped herself tighter into her sweater, not looking relieved by my words.

“Elaine,” I tried to calm her worry. “They can’t hurt us. It’s not in their interests, remember? They want us to be happy, so they can experience it, too, because they can’t feel it on their own.”

The servants brought in a low round table and placed it on a rocky island in the middle of the wide stream. The island was connected to the riverbank by a short wooden bridge with carved railings.

As the servants set the table with lunch dishes under Sigid’s instructions, Melanie strolled along the path, surveying the picturesque waterfalls and the luscious flowerbeds between the rocks. Elaine and I joined her.

“So, are you happy here, sister?” Melanie asked. “Is the prince doting on you and catering to all your needs?”

Other than the confinement and isolation, I didn’t have much to complain about the way Rha treated me. But the mean, mocking note in her voice triggered me.

“Are you judging me for what I have no control over?” I snapped.

She stopped, facing me. “Do you like it here, Dawn?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“What if there was a choice? Would you even consider it?” She held my gaze. “Is the prince making you happy enough for you to forget where your true home is? What kind of joy exactly have you been sharing with Prince Rha?”

I propped my hands on my hips, taking a defensive stance. “If you’re implying that I fuck him, then no, I do not. I’m not sleeping with him.”

One could argue that oral sex was still sex. I’d shared intimacy with Rha that normally happened only between lovers. In some ways, he’d come even closer to me than that—he felt my orgasm as his own. But I clung to the most direct, technical definition of sex—there had been no intercourse.

Melanie clearly didn’t believe my claims, giving me one of her signature unimpressed looks.

“They don’t have sex the way we do,” I blurted out. “They don’t even have dicks.”

Elaine gasped softly behind me. “What?”

“They don't?” Melanie’s eyebrows crawled up her forehead as her mouth dropped open.

We’d walked away from the island where the servants were now arranging the sitting cushions around the table. Still, I lowered my voice, just in case.

“Without pleasure, sex is basically an annoying task that they perform solely for reproduction. That’s when their sexual organs appear. The rest of the time, they just don’t have them.”

Elaine frowned in thought. “How do they pee?”

“That I don’t know,” I confessed. “Maybe they don’t? They’re magical creatures living in the desert, after all. Or maybe they have something for it down there? Like I said, I haven’t looked. I haven’t seen the prince naked, despite what you may think.”

He, on the other hand, had seen me naked plenty of times already. He’d seen me. Touched me. Tasted me…

Heat creeped up my face at the thought of everything Rha had done to me so far, even without the actual fucking. I blinked rapidly and gestured at the island with our lunch table.

“Hey, it looks ready. Should we eat?”

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