Page 21 of Corin and the Courtier
Two of them. Fuck. He’d made the lad come twice and hadn’t even touched him. Corin’s hands twitched and he had to force his feet forward rather than giving in to the sudden urge to run back up the stairs.
Belinda had never allowed him to make love to her—in retrospect, probably to ensure he’d marry her, though she’d claimed to be afraid of what he might do to her. That had kept him humble, gentle, obedient. He hated himself even more for that.
But he could take and ruin her brother. Wreck his pretty body, make him scream, show him how draconic and how monstrous he could truly be. Show him the differences between a human’s body and that of a dragon claiming what he wanted.
Fuck, he’d never have held it against her if she’d simply broken it off, even though it would’ve broken his heart. She didn’t owe him her body or her touch or her love, only her honesty.
Aster had been honest. Too honest. Naked, even, in his wide-eyed and low-voiced commentary on Corin’s strength and prowess. And he hadn’t seemed afraid at all.
Corin had paid little enough attention to Aster before he arrived yesterday. Apparently Aster had been watchinghimmuch more closely.
He strode into the hall and stopped, assessing the situation. The fire had burned down to embers. As promised, the half-empty bottle of brandy had been left on Aster’s chair. Slightly brighter daylight than before seeped through the cracks in the shutters. He’d only taken a moment to look out the upstairs windows, but the snow had appeared to be slowing down.
All at once claustrophobia had him breathless and too hot inside his skin. He had to get out. Dragons had adapted to human life in many ways since the father of their shapeshifting kind had first taken another form some two thousand years ago, but the confinement of a human dwelling still chafed at times.
And became unbearable at others.
The fire didn’t need attention and no one would come to the tower in this weather. Corin could leave without the slightest risk to Aster, or that stupid, disapproving horse of his, or even the chipmunks in the chimney. For a couple of hours, he could shrug off his responsibilities to any of them, for fuck’s sake.
He stripped as he all but ran for the door to the back courtyard, his shirt flying to one side, his trousers to the other, his boots tossed somewhere into the dimness of the hall with a double thud. Out, out, he needed to get out, and his first breath of frigid, snow-dusted air felt like fucking heaven. He sucked it in, letting his own fire ramp up to melt the ice, plumes of smoke and steam rushing out of his mouth and somersaulting up toward the sky.
Scales bled over his skin. He slammed the door shut behind him and took three long steps into the center of the courtyard, spreading his arms as his bones lengthened and took on mass, as his face transformed, as his own natural armor wrapped around him from head to toe.
Corin threw his head back and roared out a gout of flames that sizzled and spat as the snow fell into them, that lit every corner of the courtyard. His claws dug all the way through the snow, and he curled them, scritching against the stone beneath.
With a massive shrug that rippled all the way down his spine and into his long spiked tail, Corin unfurled his wings. They filled the courtyard.
What felt like limitless physical and magical power thrummed through his muscles and veins. He crouched, allowing the potential energy to build to a crescendo, and then launched himself into the air, soaring over the edge of the chasm behind the tower, buffeted above and below and sideways by the icy winds, his body more than equal to the challenge.
Up, up, wings flapping and tail extended, the sharpness of ozone in his snout and nothing but the roar of the gale to be heard, until dark clouds wrapped around him, crackling with lightning—and at last he popped free, blinking into the sudden onslaught of brilliant sunlight. Below him the clouds lay dark and heavy, gilded at the edges like the pages of an expensive book. Above, the sky vanished into an infinite dome of nothingness.
Corin wheeled in lazy circles between the storm and the void. He owned the expanse of it all; nothing else would venture so high or so far. His mind expanded with it.
And for a little while, he could be at peace.
The snow had stopped atlast when Aster opened his eyes to a frigid and empty room. Even the wind seemed to have run out of willpower; he’d never heard such silence in his life, ringing in his ears and pressing him down into the bed.
Of course, that could’ve been his incipient hangover. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, perhaps. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, groggy and dizzy and blinking and frowsy-feeling. No amount of sputtering dislodged the tendril of hair stuck to his lip. For fuck’s sake. He gave up and looked around him now that his eyes had started to clear a bit. The light hadn’t changed. That didn’t mean much; it couldn’t have been past noon when he…
When he…
“Oh, fuck,” he groaned, and he fell back onto the bed and shoved his hands over his eyes.
Well, not fuck. Even though he’d begged for it.
Hands covering his eyes weren’t enough. Aster rolled onto his belly and screamed into the pillow.
No, that didn’t help much either, especially since it twisted his still-damp drawers and trousers around his hips and tugged on everything in a particularly uncomfortable way. His erection pulled to the side, straining up toward his hip and pinned by his thigh.
Another erection, even though he’d come his brains out twice however many hours or minutes before. He’d been hard more since he got to this miserable place than he had in the last six months.
There had to be something in the air or the water, because not only had he been hard more than he ever had, he—shy, plain, dull, not-at-all-charming Aster—had mustered the courage or the recklessness to get drunk and beg the mighty and renowned Sir Corin, his former almost brother-in-law, to fuck him up the ass.
Corin had brought himself off while watching Aster spend in his trousers.
Those double ridges. Corin’s huge hand looking entirely in proportion to its surroundings for once when wrapped around that intimidatingly thick shaft.
Hangover or no, Aster’s hips had started to move without any conscious intent on his part. Even smothering himself in the pillow as much as possible, he couldn’t shut out the rustling of the sheets and the straw in the mattress as he rutted into—Corin’s bed, which smelled like him, faintly smoky and spicy and masculine beneath the fresh scent of pine.
