Page 41 of Gemini Kings
As befits the headmaster of Villa Augustus, the elite residential college of witches and warlocks I’ve hand-picked for ourdomusfrom the dwindling student body, I’m the responsible one.
God in Heaven knows, someone in this harem needs to be.
For once, my outraged bitterness at being left behind—uninvited, unconsulted, and unmissed—while Zara and half her harem wreaked holy hell in America is blessedly short-lived. I’m righting an overturned desk when my shifter senses detect the thud of familiar footfalls rushing toward me down the now quiet corridor, coupled with the clean dry whiff of sage.
My wolf growls in happy anticipation and claws at my skin. He wants out of this prison of skin and tweed and professorial propriety. Out to play with Neo.
Actually, playing with Neo is what we’d both like.
Even that secret admission feels like a sin. All the blood in my body rushes straight to my groin. I’m scant days away from going into heat—yet another reason I curse Vasili daily for leaving. What damnable sort of alpha leaves his mate in this wretched predicament, hot for him as Dante’s inferno and cursing his alpha’s very existence?
But my looming heat is not the reason I’m currently hard.
Carefully I contain the impulse to stride to the classroom door, drag my visitor inside, bend him over my lectern, shred his uniform trousers to ribbons with my claws, and rut savagely into my prize pupil until we’re both mindless and howling with pleasure.
Instead I clear my throat, sternly will the unruly erection swelling behind the zipper of my houndstooth trousers into subsidence, and turn with suitable composure toward the door.
“Master Aries?” Neo Mercury, perennial First Boy on the Dean’s List, model citizen, respectable scion of the Capricorn clan, and Zara’s fated mate, skids into my classroom at a dead run, his loafers squeaking on the age-scarred Venetian marble floor. “It’s Zara and Ronin and Vasili. They’re back!”
His broad chest heaves under the moss-green jacket of the Thursday uniform with the Academy crest embroidered on the breast. His stylish dark-rimmed spectacles are sliding down his nose and his magenta curls are tumbled around his face in permanent disarray. Even though he’s sworn to me earnestly that he’s furious with all of them for leaving, precisely as I am myself, he looks so sweetly flushed and excited by their return that it’s all I can manage not to pin him to the chalkboard and kiss my star pupil senseless.
“The three of them are in a great deal of trouble,” I remind him sternly, clasping my hands behind my back and fighting the urge to slide my fingers through his tousled hair to tidy him. “And we’re terribly angry with them, are we not, Mr. Mercury?”
I’m diligently working not to recall all those times he’s cradled my face gently between his big hands and kissed me so tenderly, like a ministering angel, while we’ve all made love in our queen’s curtained bed.
During those times, I always call him Neo.
“I know. We are. I am.” He rakes an earnest hand through the curls that graze his shoulders, to no discernible effect, and blinks at me owlishly through his spectacles. “I’m giving them their space like you said while they get settled back in at thedomus. I’m letting Vasili come to you first like you said, so you can tell him how much trouble they’re in. They got in hours ago, but I didn’t know because I was up at the Dean’s Tower finishing my Honors Alchemy experiment, so I haven’t even said hi to her… I meanthem… yet.”
I grope about at random for some sort of professorial utterance. “And how did your alchemy experiment turn out?”
“Copper into bronze.” He rushes impatiently past this remarkable achievement that no other student at Icarus has managed in at least a decade and reverts at once to his true topic of interest. “But… still… is it okay that I’m glad they’re back?”
“Sweet boy,” I whisper, the words slipping out past my guard despite my best effort. “Nothing you could ever do would be wrong.”
His chiseled face softens beautifully all over, the blush rising to warm his skin all the way to his hairline. He’s been hovering uncertainly in my doorway, filling the space and his uniform with that impressive physique he hones for hours in ourdomusgymnasium. Now he inches fully inside, a shy smile curving his lips.
He does that a great deal with me lately. Blushes, I mean to say.
Ronin claims my star pupil is crushing on me. In fact, Ronin has taken to urging me rather impatiently to bugger my fine sensibilities and bloody get on with it.
Nonetheless, I continue doggedly to resist his ruination.
Neo Mercury has been First Boy on the Dean’s List and my pride and joy in the classroom since his freshman year.
Not to mention the unmentionable: he’s a full nine years my junior.
True, Ronin is younger still but, Christ, Ronin is no sweet innocent. Ronin was born to sin. Born to drag others cheerfully beside him (and inside him, oh God) straight down the road to damnation. Heaven knows, Ronin pursued me relentlessly for years before I finally succumbed to his irresistible enticements and claimed him with the savage mating bite he demanded.
Now he’s our new mate, and my wolf and I have been deliriously happy and utterly tireless and shockingly shameless in our carnal attentions to him ever since.
At least, weweredoing all of that until Ronin absconded with the jet.
Now, we’ll all be exceedingly lucky if he isn’t expelled.
“I, um, like what you’re doing with your hair now,” Neo blurts out suddenly. Awkward, adorable, and still rosy with blushing.
“My hair?” I echo, one hand rising absently to pat at my head.
