Page 6 of Corin and the Courtier
“God fucking dammit,” he panted, staring wild-eyed at—Corin, who lay at his side in the bed.Touchinghis side, because the bed wasn’t really large enough to fit both of them.
Corin. His sister’s ex-fiancé. The famed dragon knight. The man he—damn it, Corin. In the bed. With him. Touching him.
He ran through that several more times before his brain really managed to register it. He’d barely ever allowed himself to dream of touching.
They were both fully dressed, albeit disheveled, but the burning heat of Corin’s body seared his skin as if he’d been naked. And while his bedmate, oh, fuck, he couldn’t use that word or he’d lose his grip on reality, might’ve appeared to be sprawled at his ease to a casual observer, Aster could feel the tension in him. And see it, too, when he looked into those glittering obsidian eyes. Corin was, in fact, precisely as much at his ease as any lounging large predator would be, particularly when said predator found himself in bed with someone he’d probably like to eviscerate.
“Am I all right?” he gasped, his mind whirling, helplessly trying to land on an acceptable answer. Aster couldn’t even really formulate what was wrong, except that he couldn’t get a full breath and his skin tingled. “What’s—yes, of course, perfectly. Sir Corin, you must know that I frequently—that is—I’m fine!”
God, he must sound like he’d lost his mind. Sharing a bed would be nothing to Corin, who’d spent most of his life in close quarters during training, or on military campaigns. Even if he might’ve slept with another man for…other reasons…in other circumstances, Aster wouldn’t be the one to arouse those particular desires.
Hopefully he wouldn’t intuit that Aster had never spent the whole night in bed with a man, and he’d never even come near one who could measure up to Corin.
Corin lifted a hand up and rubbed it over his jaw, a lazy morning motion. Aster could imagine how it would feel if he reached over and did the same, the bristle against his palm. He shivered. The thick dark stubble Aster had noticed yesterday had grown overnight into something more like a scruffy beard.
Not that it made him any less perfect, of course. Aster couldn’t have grown a devil-may-care beard like that if he wanted to.
“Good,” Corin rumbled, his voice sleep-roughened and painfully intimate in the small space between them, in the soft silence that underlaid the rush and howl of the storm. “Because the fact that you woke up screaming due to my presence here might’ve suggested otherwise. And call me Corin, for fuck’s sake. Even if I were still Sir Anything, which I’m not, we used to be—”
Corin’s jaw snapped shut and his eyes went wide, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d almost said aloud.
Related. Brothers. Almost those, anyway. Family, or something like.
The thought of being Corin’s brother had always given Aster a lancing pain somewhere below his sternum.
Corin. He’d used the name without the honorific in his mind forever, getting a guilty thrill every time, but it would sound so very different coming out of his mouth.
And feel so very different on his tongue, between his lips.
“Corin,” he whispered. And then he snapped out of it, his cheeks going as hot as dragon fire. “I did not scream! For fuck’s sake. I didn’t—I wasn’t—knights don’t scream,” he finished lamely.
A look of relief flashed across Corin’s face, as if he were grateful to Aster for ignoring his slip. “Hah,” he scoffed, shoving himself up on his elbows and managing to loom, somehow, despite looking up at Aster from out of a nest of pillows with his hair all mussed and his shirt gaping open. Aster forced his eyes to snap up to Corin’s face, his belly clenching. “Look where we are, because knights also supposedly don’t—” He stopped himself again, this time so abruptly that Aster heard his teeth click together as he clenched his jaw.
Knights also didn’t—and then Aster’s fingers clawed into the blanket, going so tight they ached.
Corin had been gentleman enough to cut himself off, but he might as well have said it, because all the humiliation of the previous evening came rushing back at last.
As hot as dragon fire? Aster’s face could’ve been the sun.
“You don’t even have to say it, I know what you were thinking.” His voice rasped with strain. “Knights don’t faint dead away and need to be—” Oh God, oh God, he couldn’t say it, he could barely think it. But hehadto say it, since a gentleman never shied away from the truth, although until this horrifying moment he’d managed to ignore how he must’ve gotten where he was. “—carried to bed like a swooning maiden! And I may not be very impressive compared to you, Corin, but no one is!”
Oh, fuck, he had to stop his stupid tongue, but now that it’d gotten started it had a mind of its own. He heard more than felt the words continue to tumble out of him, a waterfall of embarrassment. “So that’s hardly my fault. And I had a hard journey, very long, and if you’d had to flee your home because your family would’ve forced you to marry Duke Marellus, who meant to mock and degrade you and make you watch him fuck another man in your marriage bed on the wedding night, then perhaps you wouldn’t be quite your usual self either!”
He came to a halt at last, panting, chest heaving, eyes stinging again with frustrated, miserable tears in exactly the way knights’ eyes weren’t supposed to.
A fraught silence settled over the bedroom. The wind whistled in the chimney mournfully as if in counterpoint.
Corin stared, opened his mouth, closed it again, and then clenched his fists, all the muscles in his arms bulging on either side of his equally massive chest. God damn, how did anyone have muscles like that? It was so bloody unfair. Aster might’ve been able to swallow his humiliation if Corin had at least possessed a few weaknesses of his own.
And if those hadn’t been the arms that had carried him up the stairs.
At last, so quietly that Aster almost couldn’t make out the words, he said, “What now? I beg your—what?”
God, he’d reduced the mighty dragon knight to monosyllables with his moronic babbling. For a moment Aster was powerfully reminded of his valet’s way of leaving him speechless. Pierre couldn’t stick to the point if he had it glued to his nose.
A fresh wave of grief would’ve taken him out at the knees if he’d been standing. Pierre. He’d never again have the opportunity to be furious with the lad for his nonsense—or to apologize for his harsh words in reply to it.
“For one thing, that’s not actually at all what I was going to say,” Corin continued after another excruciating moment, pinning him with a gaze so dark and deep that Aster’s breath caught and held. Were those scales forming around Corin’s temples, creeping up his neck from that distractingly exposed triangle of faintly greenish-bronze skin? To Aster’s knowledge, that only happened when dragons either meant to change to their other forms or lost control of themselves. And his eyes…Aster could’ve sworn he saw a faint flicker of orange behind Corin’s slitted pupils. He’d never even heard of that.
