Perfect Master(14)

“Then finish restraining her and go. Hurry. I will call when I need you to get me back into the leather.”

Footsteps, too light to be her Master’s, padded along the floor. The door opened and closed. Tentatively she moved her arms and legs, found them so lightly tethered that she could move one arm. When she raised her hand to her cheek, she found the spot that still was damp from the prince’s tear. “Master?”

“Yes, it’s me.” He sounded resigned, as though expecting her to try to bolt. “Open your eyes and take a good look. I’m naked now. Hikaru finished the job you started. At least this time when you faint, you’ll already be on the bed.”

Emerald forced her eyes to open, the edges of her mouth to lift. “I never faint,” she said, but her words sounded hollow to her own ears. She looked up, steeling herself not to wince or scream. There he was, in profile, his uninjured side to her, as magnificent now as he’d seemed when she saw him in the window, and she spied another tear on his cheek, sparkling like a diamond.

A diamond in the rough, as courtiers often whispered about the man who’d one day sit on the Diamond Throne. “I want to see all of you.”

Slowly, he turned, showing her his back. Broad shoulders tapered to narrow hips and massive thighs as thick as tree trunks. On the left side he was perfection, his skin reminding her of satin-smooth caramel and cream. On the right lay crisscrossed scar tissue that extended the length of his body, its devastation most evident in the hideously mangled stump of his arm. “When you wear the bodysuit, it looks as though your arm is uninjured. Oh gods, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I shouldn’t—”

“Why? You’d have to be blind not to notice. I usually use a primitive sort of hook prosthesis they taught me how to use when I was recovering on Eastphalia.”

Beneath the gruff, almost defiant façade, Emerald sensed Arik was hurting. Though she still shuddered, recalling her shock at the sight of his ruined face and the gaping hole where his eye had been, the emotion that overwhelmed her now was not pity but anger. Anger with him for thinking her so shallow she’d reject him because he was less than princely perfection.

He wasn’t imperfect where it counted. He still had his mind, his emotions. Again she recalled the tear he’d shed when he thought he had repulsed her. She’d show him he didn’t, much as he’d shown her yesterday that they’d been destined to mate—that he only needed that lustful eye and his magnificent cock to make her cunt explode.

She held out her free arm to him, her expression as stern as she could manage while trembling like a leaf in Obsidion’s hot summer wind. “Untie me, Master. Then forget you’re my Master for a little while and lie down on the bed. Face up. I want to look at every inch of you, caress you, show you the kind of pleasure I can give you with my hands and mouth.”

For a moment she thought he’d refuse. His mixed emotions showed in his eye, in the set of his mouth, in the way he clenched his fist before sitting on the edge of the bed and loosening her bonds. “You don’t have to do this,” he said gruffly when he met her gaze.

“But you do.” Smiling, she moved to the foot of the bed and looped the silk scarves Hikaru had used to confine her around his ankles, then bound his left wrist to the ornately carved headboard. Looking at the stump, she smiled and set one of the scarves down. “I guess we’ll just have to pretend I’ve tied down this arm, too.”

Settling cross-legged by his ravaged side, Emerald reached down and stroked the worst of the scars from where it started above his right ankle. “You must have taken quite a hit,” she commented as she traced the jagged, reddened mass up his leg and body. “All this came from just one battle, didn’t it?”

“Yes, but it was one hell of a fight. Me in my little transporter against three armed mercenary fighters. Some of the damage happened when I had to crash-land on Eastphalia and my ship caught fire.” He flinched when she stroked the mangled stump of his arm but looked at her and said, “Don’t stop.” He watched her, wonder in his expression as though he could hardly believe she didn’t recoil at his scars.

Her intuition had served her well. Her Master was literally starving to be touched, treated as though someone still found him worthy—desirable. Bending, she touched her lips to his stump. Nuzzling his warm flesh as she moved inward, she found his right nipple buried in his dark chest hair and laved it with her tongue. “Mmmm,” she said, lightly tracing along the web of scars on his upper arm with a finger, “this must have been terribly painful.”