Chapter 17: Volume 1- [ - 18 ]
Her eyes focused. Filled with something that was beyond fear — a weary, broken dread.
"No — please — I cannot — not again — please—’
"It is all night." He smiled. Not the soft smile. Not the vulnerable smile. A different one — the one that belonged to the man he actually was, the man who had been transmigrated into a villain’s body and had decided that if he was going to be a villain, he would be a ’good’ one.
He raised one hand, fingers curled into a circle — the universal gesture, the crude and unmistakable sign of what was coming next. His other hand slapped flat against his palm in a sharp, rhythmic motion.
Martha’s eyes rolled back.
"Please — no — I—"
She lost consciousness. Her body went limp, her head lolling to the side, her breasts settling into their heavy resting position, her thighs still parted, cum still leaking.
Caelum looked at her for a long moment. Then a knock came at the door.
Soft. Hesitant. The knock of someone who was not sure they should be here.
He slapped Martha’s ass once — a parting gesture, almost affectionate, the thick flesh rippling under his palm — and pulled her limp body from the bed. She was heavier than Elira, but he managed, dragging her to the edge of the mattress and then pushing her underneath the bed frame, her body sliding into the dark space beneath with a soft thump.
He stood, adjusted his towel, and walked to the door.
He opened it.
Lady Elira stood in the hallway.
She was barefoot, wearing a thin nightgown that did nothing to conceal the enormous swell of her belly, the fullness of her breasts, the width of her hips. Her dark hair was loose around her face, which was pale and anxious, her teeth catching and worrying her lower lip in that way he had come to recognize as the outward sign of a woman warring with herself.
Her eyes — damp, conflicted, determined — found his.
"Lord," she whispered. "Forgive me. I was — I could not sleep, and I — I—"
She could not finish. The sentence died in the space between them, killed by the weight of what she was actually saying, which was: ’I came. I came because you told me to. I came because my body has been aching since this afternoon and my husband is snoring in the next room and I told myself I was just going to check if you were awake but I know — I know — why I am really here.’
Caelum looked at her. This pregnant woman, standing in his hallway at night, barefoot and trembling, wearing nothing but a thin gown and the desperate, half-ashamed hunger he had spent the afternoon cultivating in her body with his hands and his oil and his mouth.
He reached out. His hand found her waist — the soft curve of it above her hip — and pulled. She stumbled forward with a small cry, her belly pressing against his abdomen, her swollen breasts flattening against his bare chest through the thin fabric of her gown, her face tilting up toward his with the involuntary motion of a flower turning toward warmth.
"I was just kidding," he murmured, and his thumb traced circles on the curve of her hip through the gown, each rotation sending small shockwaves through her oil-sensitized skin. "Come here."
Her breath caught. "My lord—"
"Your husband is sleeping?" His lips found her ear, his breath warm against the shell of it.
She trembled. "Y-yes. He is taking a nap."
Caelum reached past her and closed the door. The latch clicked — a small, final sound in the dark hallway. And in the silence that followed, with the pregnant woman pressed against him and the unconscious maid hidden beneath his bed and the dead knight cooling in the treasury and the grey sea grinding against the cliffs below, Caelum Veyne leaned down and whispered against Elira’s ear:
"Then let me give you a very good massage, my lady."
She moaned.
And the candle went out.
"Mmhnn~"
.
.
.
.
.
She was already on the bed when I closed the door.
The candle had been relit at some point — perhaps by her own trembling hands while she gathered the courage to walk through the hallway in bare feet with her belly preceding her like the prow of a ship. The flame was low, guttering in some draft I could not feel, casting the room in amber and shadow. And in that uncertain light, Lady Elira Thorne lay on her back across my bed with her panty caught around her thighs and her eyes wide as dinner plates.
She had been mid-undress. That much was clear. The nightgown had been pulled over her head and discarded on the floor beside the bed.
Her bra — a plain, functional thing, white cotton stretched past its intended capacity — remained clasped at the front, though the left cup had been tugged down in her haste, freeing one heavy breast which lay sideways across her ribs like a pale, leaking fruit.
And her panty — white, cotton, practical — was tangled around her left thigh, caught between the soft flesh of her leg and the mattress, stretched taut by the width of her hips.
She had been trying to pull them off when I opened the door, and the shock of the sound had frozen her mid-motion, one hand gripping the waistband, her legs bent at the knee, her thighs pressed together in that instinctive gesture of a woman caught in the act of becoming naked.
I stood at the foot of the bed and looked at her.
The candlelight painted her in tones of gold and honey. Her skin — already oil-sensitized from the afternoon’s session — gleamed with a faint sheen that could have been residual aphrodisiac or could have been the natural glow of a body running hot with pregnancy and arousal. Her belly rose between us like a pale moon, taut and enormous, the skin stretched so thin that the dark line from navel to pubis looked almost black in this light. Her free breast — the one escaped from the bra — lay heavy on her ribs, the nipple dark brown, wide, already beaded with a thin trail of milk that had leaked from the duct and was crawling in a slow, silver line toward her cleavage. The other breast strained against its cup, the fabric darkening at the peak where the same leakage was occurring unseen.
Between her thighs — pressed together, trembling — I could see the edge of her sex. Dark hair, matted with moisture. The outer lips swollen, flushed, parted slightly by the position of her legs, the inner flesh glistening with a wetness that had nothing to do with the oil I had applied hours ago.
"Lord," she breathed, and her voice cracked on the word, her fingers tightening on the panty waistband. "What are you doing?"
I tilted my head. Let my gaze travel the length of her body — slowly, deliberately, without shame. From her face, flushed and frightened and wanting, down the column of her throat, across the leaking landscape of her chest, over the great dome of her belly, to the tangled underwear and the wet, waiting heat beneath.
"You already know, don’t you?" I said.