She nodded dubiously. “There’s one here in the Center. Is this to be in exchange for an answer to my question?”
“A bath would definitely make me more malleable,” he told her. “And less foul-smelling.”
He wasn’t at all foul, and he knew it, but she was eager for answers. This was the very information the Advisor sought. It would buy safety for Sophie and herself. She pushed away the niggling reluctance she felt regarding the matter of supplying such information, once gleaned, to the authorities.
She’d sought escape for so long. And now a new idea was born in her mind. Sophie had never seen another way of life. If Luc could be convinced to take the two of them through this mythical gate to the adjacent world, maybe her sister’s feelings would change. Maybe she would realize that her happiness could be found in EarthWorld instead of here with men like Titus Cato.
“I’ll make arrangements,” she told him. With that, she opened the curtain and left the cell. A half hour later, she returned. Instead of locking herself inside with him this time, she held the door wide. Outside it stood a half dozen armed guards. When they insisted that Luc wear restraints, Natalia replaced the irons at his wrists and ankles.
Wearing only manacles and a pair of the drawstring trousers that were freshly supplied to him each morning now, Luc stepped outside the room that had been his prison for over a week. Minutes later they found themselves the sole patrons at the Center’s public baths. Their guards positioned themselves at every exit, where they stood waiting with their eyes averted.
The floors and benches in the bathhouse were travertine, and in the middle of the rectangular room there was a long oval pool bounded by enormous stone columns. She avoided the main bath for now, since its cool waters were meant only for rinsing off. Instead, she drew her patient into one of the private nooks framed by towering Corinthian columns, where he might enjoy a solitary bath.
A female bath attendant followed them, but Luc stubbornly refused her ministrations.
“You’ll need help at your bath, wearing those restraints,” Natalia pointed out.
“Then help me,” he said simply.
“Do you promise me answers afterward?”
He nodded, his expression a little too innocent to suit her.
As Natalia stepped behind the screen in the corner of the nook, she heard him take the steps down into the circular bath.
You can do this,
she told herself. She’d given baths to both male and female patients during her training at the institute. When she stepped from behind the screen, she wore only the long linen gown that was the traditional garb of a bathhouse attendant.
Luc was already seated on the stone bench within the subterranean bathing pool. A fog hovered over the surface of the pool, steam rising from its warm waters to obscure all but his head, shoulders, and upper torso from view.
His eyes slipped over her as she waded in to join him, a worrisome gleam in them.
“This will be a bath, nothing more,” she informed him severely. “Afterward you’ll rinse in the main pool, which is cool by contrast.”
Nodding solemnly, he took her hands and placed them on his chest, moving them over him in a circular motion.
She kneeled before him. “This is a mistake,” she told herself under her breath.
“Hmm?”
“Nothing.” Briskly and efficiently, she washed his chest, slicking soap over him. Under his arms, she felt tufts of hair, but his torso was as smooth and well formed as the marble it had once been. She washed his back, thighs, calves, and feet. Everywhere she touched, any last vestiges of rock returned to flesh. He groaned now and then as she ministered to him, and she wondered what such a transformation must feel like to him.
She pretended not to know what she’d left out, but he eventually pulled her hands there to his phallus and wrapped her fingers around it. It was hard, swollen, and straining from him—hotter even than the surrounding waters. This sort of physiological change had occurred in patients before during her training as a healer, and was one of the very reasons she no longer accepted male clients. However, she had agreed to take this particular man as her patient, so she merely washed him as her job required.
Still, she’d never been attracted to another patient. And the very fact that she was attracted to him lent an intense intimacy to the act. Her hand trembled as it encircled him. Her other palm gently coddled his testicles.
His head fell back, the tendons of his neck going stark. “Gods,” he swore through gritted teeth. His hand closed over hers, pushing her soap-slicked fist slowly down his length, then upward, then along the same course several times more. His visceral enjoyment was so easily read in his face that she could only stare at him raptly as she worked him, her lips parted.
Without warning, his eyes slitted, catching her gaze. The rich black of his pupils dilated, overtaking the silver of his irises. Hands covered her breasts, cupped them, squeezed in an arousing rhythmic massage. His thumbs brushed her nipples.
Forgetting the manacles, he tried to embrace her and then cursed softly when he could not. Instead, she rose higher in the water before him and laid her palms on his chest. There was some great secret pain buried deep within him. But he was strong. He’d been hurt but not broken. At this moment, no cost seemed too high to see him whole and content, as she sensed he had once been and could be again.
And he was open to her now like he hadn’t been before. She would give anything to heal his heart. Even herself, though in the giving she herself, or at least her heart, might be broken instead.
“Natalia.” Luc’s hands framed her face, the chains of his bonds forming a bizarre sort of necklace at her throat. “I’ve been a carnal creature for more years than I care to count. I’ve fornicated in order to survive, but never—never in my eighteen years have I made love.” His voice was gruff, welling up from some place deep inside him where he’d hidden away a wealth of horrors. “Let me love you now, Lia. My Lia.”
His lips came closer. His fresh breath stirred hers. Something leaped between them—a dangerous attraction akin to heat lightning flashing from sky to ground.
In her true heart, she had known this would happen if they came here. Had yearned for this. For him. Something in him drew her. Had drawn her for twelve years, even as he slept.
Her hand curled around his nape and she angled her head slightly, brushing her mouth over his. He was Satyr. Everyone knew what that meant. They required regular carnal activity, she rationalized. A healer’s mandate included the offering of physical surcease to a patient in need. And even though she knew she could not maintain a proper clinical distance in the giving of it, her heart thumped with anticipation as she whispered to him, “Yes.”
Immediately, she heard the clink of chains. Then the loop of his chained arms lifted over her head, encircling her until his cuffed hands found the small of her back. Her knees separated around him as he pulled her close upon his lap. His body strained for her, his cock hot, slick, and hard. Her private flesh convulsed gently for want of it. Only the wet linen of her gown separated them now.
“Mistress?” One of the guards had apparently grown concerned and now stepped into the nook. She blinked at him over her shoulder.
Luc snarled, low in his throat—a male animal repelling another male who threatened to separate him from his mate. “Leave us!”
“Do as he says,” Natalia told the guard. “I’m fine.”
The guard nodded and stepped away, lingering just outside.
“First at the temple, now this. Must there always be an audience at our amatory engagements?” Luc growled. His hands curved over the rounds of her bottom, and he spoke at her ear, hot words of wanting. “I want out of this place. And I want you to ... come ... with ... me.” Those big hands of his moved her now in a rolling motion that plowed his length along her furrow without yet plowing deep, his rhythm matching the pace of his last three words.
“The soap,” he whispered urgently. “You’re small. I don’t want to hurt you.”
Realizing what he wanted, she snatched the soap up from where she’d set it on the edge of the pool and slicked it over his vein-roped length between them. His hands went lower under her bottom, lifting her. Fingers parted her folds, opening her to receive him. He pushed.
A small cry left her at the sensation and she put her hands on his chest. A harsh, ragged groan came at her ear, an erotic sound low in his throat as her flesh accepted his plump, slick head, and began to take more. He was enormous, yet her body took his as readily as if she were a candle mold and he, molten wax.
Her lips parted in a silent cry as he slowly penetrated her, plowing deep, so wonderfully deep, and deeper still, filling her as completely as a man could. “Gods, it’s good. So good. My Lia.” The very second that her bottom met his thatch, his grip on her seized and he bit off a strangled shout. Hot semen blasted from him. Her body jerked under its strength. Another pulse came and with it a ragged groan and another vigorous spurt of cum. And another, flooding her tissues with his thrilling passion.
Her eyes squeezed tight, as she sought to find what he had found, sensing it was close. The hands at her bottom tilted her then, and he moved her against him in just the right way so that each slow, downward stroke of her slick flesh against his exposed her clitoris to the delicious rub.
And then she was coming as well, her blood pumping and fizzing, her inner tissues fisting on his. The hard rhythmic squeezes went on and on and on until she thought she might faint under the glorious pleasure of it.
Yes! Oh yes!
Oh gods!
What have I done?
M
inutes later, she was behind the screen, dressing, and then they were on their way back to his cell.
“What’s wrong with me? With the idea of us?” Luc demanded.
“There’s nothing wrong with you. You are doing well. Healing nicely under my treatment.”
“Your
treatment?
” he sputtered. “Is that what you call it?”
“Lower your voice, Luc. The guards. And I’ll tell you what’s wrong with
us
in any long-term sense. You’re too damn young. Too damn handsome. I am plain. I’ve always been so. No, don’t try to flatter me,” she said when he tried to argue. “We would make a ridiculous pair.”
He smiled, making a
tsk
ing sound. “Two curses in one speech. My, my, Mistress Natalia.”
His eyes roved over her, noting the bruised shadows under the sweep of her lashes; the chafing his evening beard had left on her pretty neck; and her lips, red from his mouth. He’d been greedy with her, rough. His body still wanted hers. Wanted to kiss her, fuck her, love her. It clamored to press itself to her warmth again, to inhale her goodness, her kindness.
His lips curved. And she thought herself plain?
As they reached his cell, she entered, but he balked, bracing both arms on the doorjamb.
“Stop it, Luc. Come inside.”
He did.
Once the guards backed off, she murmured to him. “As of tomorrow, I’m relinquishing you to another’s care. Another healer.”
“No!”
“Please don’t worry. I’ll weigh in on the selection of my replacement and make sure you are in good hands.”
He grabbed her arm, suddenly desperate. “They want you to cull information from me? All right. You want to know how I came here? All right. I came through a gate, from the other world. I’m guessing they want to know where it opens on this side, in this world. So that they can exploit it. I—”
“No! Don’t tell me where it is.” She fled, ignoring his roar of protest.
“He doesn’t know anything,” Natalia told Advisor the next morning. “He’s not from another world. He simply wandered in from an outland and fell under the spell of some inexplicable magic. I see no point in continuing on with him. As you’ll see by my recommendation, I believe he can be released into the general population.”
Advisor tapped his pen on the desk, staring at her where she was seated opposite it. “Nonsense. Try again. Three more days.”
“I’m telling you—”
“If you won’t, I’ll get someone else. You’re uniquely suited to this case, but not irreplaceable.”
“What do you mean?”
He lifted a brow. “I mean that there are no other maenad in the community or anywhere nearby. But we’ll make do with an inferior counselor. Is that what you want for him?”
Natalia’s heart fairly stopped in her chest. No one in the community knew what she was, not even Sophie. Her mother had known and told Natalia the facts of her breed and that it must be kept a secret. Maenads were the carnal worshipers of the Satyr.
Their mother had been wed, but when she’d proven barren, her husband had bought into the breeding program. His seed had sired children in not one but two program participants. Therefore Natalia’s and Sophie’s mothers had been different, neither of them the woman who’d reared them. But it was tradition that a husband’s issue from the program would be mothered by his wife as if they were her own.
“How did you—?”
“I’ve known all along. Mistress, why do you think I chose you for this task in the first place? We have the documentation regarding your biological mother. She died in the Sickness shortly after you were born. But she was a maenad. The only one in the community. The only one in all of Enclave a Roma, as far as is known.”
“I don’t understand why this matters.”
He leaned forward, his eyes avid. “The whole moon comes four days from now. The Calling time for those of Satyr blood. And for those with the blood of the maenad. Like you.”
“He’ll be vulnerable. You’ll be in a position to bargain with him.”
“With my body.”
“As you did in the festival. Is this so different?”
“Yes.”
“Are you refusing to cooperate?”
“The Calling has never affected me before,” she said doubtfully. In these outlands, its effect had lessened to almost nonexistence in most inhabitants.
Advisor’s eyes gleamed. “But then you’ve never been around a Satyr either, have you? All we’re asking for is the answers to a few simple but very important questions. The first being the location of the gate he traveled through. And then the details of transport. How he accomplished it. Whether he can go back.”