Harbor (On the Wind #3)

17. Orestes

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ORESTES

I was almost sorry I’d given away that vial of arnica, when I was coming back to my rooms and found Tybalt limping back toward his own quarters. Clearly, he was injured, walking tentatively, and...

Well, I knew my cock was proportional to the rest of my large frame, but I’d never had complaints about it before, and I had certainly never injured anyone with it, so I hoped the prince wasn’t so delicate that I’d managed such an awful feat.

He jumped when he spotted me, leaning back against the wall and sighing. “You startled me.”

“Sorry, most people see me coming miles off.” I figured personal space was a thing of the past between us, so I came over and stood next to him, leaning against the wall and letting our arms brush against each other. “Are you well? You’re limping. Did you have a fall?”

He quirked a brow at me. “After we fucked all those times last night, you don’t assume your cock is responsible?”

I winced. “I’ve never injured anyone with it before. I hadn’t imagined the prince of a foreign nation would be first.”

His perfect lips twisted in annoyance. “Not that my being prince means much of anything around here. But it wasn’t you anyway.” He winced, hunching his shoulders just a bit. “Well, not just you. I went riding. Probably spent too much time out. I needed... I needed time to think.”

That made sense. When I needed time alone with my own thoughts, I went flying. Tybalt couldn’t do that, so it made sense that he had another way to achieve the same effect.

I couldn’t imagine riding a horse to clear my mind, but that was a matter of habit. I could fly, so I did. Nemedans didn’t ride horses very often, because we didn’t need to.

Also, my experience with Urial horses was that they were enormous creatures, stocky and wide in a way that made Nemedan horses all look like colts by comparison. The thought of already being a bit strained by fucking so many times, then going out and sitting atop one of them for hours gave me a twinge just imagining it.

I frowned and shook my head. “Come on, then.”

He blinked owlishly at me for a moment, but apparently wasn’t offended by being ordered about, so he followed me back to my own quarters, where I pressed him down onto the bed before heading to my trunk. I hadn’t brought all the things I probably should have, but I’d had no idea when I was leaving that Urial would be so oddly deficient in so many ways.

Still, I found the thing I was looking for and set it on the bedside table before turning to Tybalt. His eyes were round, and he stared up at me. “Now? While I’m sore?”

I cocked my head at him in confusion. “It’s the best time. Now take your trousers off, unless you want oil on them.”

He hesitated only a moment, then shrugged and started stripping. It was hard to see all that lovely bared flesh and not want to do something more inappropriate than I’d had in mind, but no. He was in pain, and it wasn’t time for that.

So when he finished stripping, I took hold of his feet and rolled him over onto his belly, then reached for the bottle of oil I’d hunted down.

“This is... normal in Nemeda?” Tybalt asked, his tone oddly false. Light, like he was trying to be nonchalant when he felt anything but.

“Helping someone who’s in pain?” I asked, lacing my voice with as much wry amusement as possible. “Why yes, shockingly enough.”

And then I started working the muscles of his thighs and ass—both more substantial than I’d realized, even the night before when he’d ridden me to exhaustion. Perhaps he spent more time on his monster horse than I’d considered.

Still, the muscles were taught and hard from overwork, so I pressed into them the way I’d been trained. He groaned aloud, then turned his head to look at me, eyes wide. “Are you... are you giving me a massage?”

I lifted a brow in return. “What else did you think I was going to—” Pausing, I blinked at him for a moment. “You thought I was going to fuck you. While you were sore and in pain.”

Quickly, he turned his face away, refusing to look at me again, and shrugged with forced casualness.

More than having thought I meant to fuck him again, he’d intended to let me. Just like that, in pain, he’d fully planned to let me use him—abuse him—as I saw fit. Did he want that? We’d have to have a deeper discussion about it in the future, but knowing what I did about him, for the moment I decided to go with the assumption that he didn’t want to be ill-used, but had simply expected and accepted it.

Instead, I worked his thighs and ass with my hands until he was a lax pool of clay slumped bonelessly in the middle of the bed, making tiny aborted moans with every stroke of my hands on his skin.

When I thought him nearly asleep, I turned him onto his back and repeated the process with the fronts of his thighs. His cock was hard, despite the rest of him having gone entirely soft, so when I was finished with his legs, I leaned in and gave it a lick.

His eyes snapped open and he gasped, looking down at me with surprise.

I lifted a brow. “No?”

“No?” He sounded shocked at the word, or perhaps at the very concept. “Yes. Always yes.”

I almost laughed at the sheer outrage in his voice. Like thinking he might not want his cock sucked was a grave insult. So I leaned back forward and took him whole down the back of my throat, much to his pleasure.

Tybalt was... calling him an effusive lover was minimizing what he was. He was loud and demanding and so very communicative about what he wanted. Which was perfect, because I wanted to hear it all.

His fingers dug into my shoulders as I bobbed up and down on him, alternating long, laving strokes of my tongue and pushing all the way down onto his cock, swallowing around it and sucking on him, which made him arch up with a whimper every time.

It took no time at all for him to come down my throat with a high whine before falling limp against the bed once more.

I climbed up to lie next to him on the bed, petting his leg soothingly. “Better?”

“Better?” he croaked, turning to look at me through hazy eyes. “You’re out of your mind if you think that’s just ‘better.’ Give me a moment. I can... I’ll come around and return the favor.”

I snorted at that, shaking my head, though something like affection bloomed inside me. “You can return the favor when you’re conscious. For now, rest. I do want to talk to you later, though. I want... I know it isn’t always how such arrangements are done, but so long as we are fucking, I want to be the only one you’re fucking. You’re certainly the only man I plan to touch.”

He stared at me a moment, eyes still glazed with exhaustion and orgasm, then slowly, he nodded. “We can... we can talk about that, if you want to.”

I didn’t know what the confusion on his face meant, but as his eyes drifted shut and he let out a soft snore, I thought that was something else we could discuss when he was fully awake again.