Page 13 of Gift of Dragons
He didn’t, keeping his eyes averted, in deference to his already throbbing cock and stones. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to matter.
“They’re tiny!” she cried, infuriated.
“My hips are narrow and my ass is small. Where are my feminine curves! If I have to be stuck being a woman, why aren’t I blatantlywoman?!”
He didn’t comment that he thought she was plenty “woman.” If she was any more woman to his man, he’d be in constant agony, all but bursting out of his cage.
He winced at the very thought, stopping just shy of cupping himself.
Finally, she threw herself onto her bed, lying spreadeagle upon it, staring up at the fine netting that draped around the platform from the canopy above.
“I should have indulged in lots of sex with lots of magnificent men when I still had the chance,” she muttered forlornly.
Shai could barely hold back the growl that rumbled from deep within his chest.
He knew he had no claim on the Princess. He had no right. And yet…
Just the thought of other men touching her made him want to tear open his own skin and emerge from the husk a chest-beating, snarling, raving monster. One who tore the heads off her would-be lovers with histeeth, then ripped those “dangly bits” right off with his bare hands.
“It just…never occurred to me,” she went on.
“I was always interested in other things. I cared more about new trading routes than the gleam of a well-oiled chest.”
Shai scowled ferociously that she even knew of “well-oiled chests.”
But why should he be surprised. She saw just as much nudity and sex as he did. Perhaps he should be thankful she’d never been distracted by the sights.
“Now, as a married woman, I’m expected to be faithful,” she said grouchily.
“Of course,hecan have other wives and even more concubines. Not that I think he will, given he can’t even get it up for the one he’ll have by the morrow. But it’s the principle of it all. Commoners can fuck all they like, with anyone willing, before marriage. Then fuck their spouse all they want during marriage. And if they find they don’t like each other after all, they can just as easily get a divorce. But royals are bound to honor the pact until death do us part. It’s just notfair.”
She was silent again for a while, simply breathing.
He came closer to the bed and quickly undressed, following his normal routine.
She rolled to her side and faced him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her prop her chin in her hand as she regarded him.
She always did this when he undressed at night, unless she was already asleep. She liked to watch him in silence, for once not sharing her thoughts.
He wondered if his form pleased her, as hers did him. It shouldn’t matter, and yet…it did.
He’d grown even taller in the last seven years. Broader too. His muscles thickened and bulged. Hard as stone. She accompanied him to his daily martial arts training so that she would never leave his sights. There, too, she watched him with a strange fixation, hardly blinking.
He knew he didn’t look like anyone else local to these lands.
The Egyptian people were generally smaller, built on narrower frames. The men here varied in skin tone, but none quite like his. He especially stood out with his shoulder-length hair that he usually tied into a half knot at the back of his head, and his amber-colored eyes. He also possessed a prickly, stubbled jaw no matter how he tried to scrape the beard off each morning. It only grew back like cactus by afternoon.
The princess took pity on him and let him keep the beard, even though it went against Egyptian standards of beauty, and quite frankly, basic hygiene, for no telling what sorts of critters could crawl into a hairy patch. And so, he now went days without shaving, which both saved time and the skin of his jaw.
You’re like a lion amongst servals,she said to him once.
He didn’t know whether that was a good or a bad thing.
Once he was down to his loincloth, he lay on the floor beside her bed. He lay on his side too, facing her as she faced him from above, using his arm as a pillow beneath his head.
He listened for the cadence of her light breaths, and the signal for when they deepened into slumber.