Chapter 61 - You need a good lay

EMMA

Someone is stamping on my head. They have their feet pressing against my skull. That can the only explanation be for the throbbing pain in my head. I groan and squint my eyes. The bright beam of sunlight burns in my vision and I quickly close my eyes again.

The familiar scent of cedar, sandalwood and bergamot comes closer. A hand runs through my hair and fingers run softly over my scalp. “Emma, can you hear me?” The deep voice of Hadrian cracks my skull open.

“Don’t. Talk.” I groan.

Talking hurts, listening to talking is even worse.

“Can you not do anything?” Hadrian growls at someone in the room.

“Aargh…” I move a hand to cover my ear.

“Sorry little mate.” He whispers and presses a kiss on my shoulder.

I notice that I’m lying on his lap. He has a hand resting on my stomach, it’s big and heavy.

I open one eye in an attempt to see what is going on. I move my hand to the throbbing pain and notice some blood coating my fingers.

“Don’t touch it.” Hadrian says and cleans my fingers to his shirt and kisses them.

I look up at him and he has a scowl on his face. “What happened?” My memory is as clear as looking through murky water.

His jaw locks and he doesn’t look me in the eye. “You fainted and hit your head on my desk.”

I look around the room and there is a big empty space in the middle. “Am I imagining the empty space where your desk should be?”

“No.” Hadrian grumbles.

I close my eyes. “Don’t tell me.” I sit up and wait for the stars to disappear from my vision. My thoughts slowly start to become clearer. “Camomile and… uhm, calendula."

I notice Galena in the room for the first time and she looks at me with confusion. I’ve never seen her this bewildered. I realize that my words must sound gibberish.

“A compress of camomile and calendula helps.” I’m pretty sure that I concussed my head.

“On it,” Miles calls and I swing my head in the direction of his voice. My vision is slow to catch up and he’s already gone.

I gesture to Hadrian that I want to get up from the floor and he reluctantly helps me. He doesn’t let go of me, however. He has a firm grip around my waist as he guides me to our bedroom.

I take a glance out the window and notice a heap of mangled wood in the grass and Callum picking up the scraps with several other guards.

“Hadrian, why is your desk lying in the garden?”

His chest rumbles against my shoulder blade. “It hurt you.”

“You threw your desk out the window?” I blurt out. I clutch my head again as his bursts of onslaught give me a headache on its own. "Unbelievable."

Hadrian releases me when I sit down on the bed and we’re alone in the room. He moves to the bathroom and gets a wet cloth. “Why are you not healing?” Hadrian carefully dabs away blood that has trickled down my temple.

“Well injuries like these take a while, the concussion probably a week if it's minor.” I reach my hands out for Hadrian and he looks at me with a confused look. I pout because I feel like a perpetual child who wants what is hers.

*Mine.*

The possessive thought should shock me, but I don’t linger to think about it.

“A week?” Hadrian burst out and I flinch at the sound. “You should be healing faster.” Hadrian moves to the bed and I scooch aside for him.

I wrap my arms around his waist and inhale his soothing scent. “I’m not a werewolf, Hadrian.”

I don’t know how many times I will have to remind him of this obvious fact.

“You’re half a werewolf.” Hadrian refutes.

I blink my eyes. *Right, that also happened.*

A shiver runs over my spine and Hadrian runs a hand over my back. I wonder if it’s a conscious action.

“I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe it skipped a generation. Maybe I take after my father.” I press my nose into his shirt.

There is a knock on the door. Miles comes in with a makeshift compress of camomile and calendula and I press it against my head.

“You healed me,” Hadrian says when Miles leaves the room.

I sigh. “That is probably because you’re a werewolf in combination with the bond or something. I don’t know, I’m not exactly an expert on werewolf anatomy.”

Hadrian removes the compress and presses a kiss on the sensitive skin on my head.

“What are you doing?”

“It worked for me.” He grumbles with a grimace. His hulking frame is contradictory to his actions.

I chuckle at the surge of softness beneath his rough exterior. It blooms in my chest. I kiss him and Hadrian eagerly responds to my advances. I do feel better under his touch even if it doesn’t heal me. Pressing memories demand my attention, but I want to forget about reality for a while.

The kiss deepens and I let my tongue join in on the action. I taste him and let my body sink into the bed. Hadrian follows as he hovers above me. The headache is overshadowed by a heated ache in my core. His overpowering presence makes me shiver and excited. I slip a hand under his shirt and meet his burning skin. I rake my nails over the well-developed hills of his abdomen and I travel my fingers lower.

He growls and a hand grips my wrist. “What are you doing?”

I blink as I look up at his dark eyes. “I thought we could…” I don’t dare speak the words out loud.

There is a knock on the door.

“I’m not having sex with you, Emma!” Hadrian growls.

The rejection roils in my stomach and the blood flushes through the rest of my body and I peel my hands away from him.

Hadrian sighs and moves away from me before he opens the door. Paulina stands in the doorway with a tray of tea and a glass plate of fruit. Her face has a similar flush and I know she must have heard every word of his rejection.

I feel beyond embarrassed and throw the blanket over my head and hope feverishly that the ground will swallow me up.

————————

I place my bruised head on the cold granite counter and close my eyes. I groan when the repeating memory of his rejection plays in my mind. Days have passed and my mind is clearer now. I’ve had time to think.

“Are you still whining?” Cecile calls from the other side of the counter.

I roll my head to the other side. “Yes, let me.”

“You're in my kitchen Shortcake, my rules.”

I groan again. “I shouldn’t have come here.” I push myself off the cold granite.

“You say that every day.” Cecile is peeling some tangerines for one of her recipes. “You’re even more depressing than yesterday.”

She throws me an unpeeled tangerine. “Just tell me what’s up between you and Spice?”

The tangerine hits me on my upper arm and I rub the blooming bruise. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

She takes a knife from the wooden block and a sharp sound rings in the air. “Well you either talk about it or find another way to let it go, because this has been going on for too long.”

I pick up the tangerine from the counter and turn the fruit in my hands.

Cecile places the knife on the counter and gives me her full attention. “I can’t read your mind Shortcake, you need to give it to me.”

There is too much going on right now. Many things that I don’t want anyone to know at the moment. But specifically between me and Hadrian…

“Hadrian is avoiding me,” I mutter as quietly as possible. I know better than to lie to Cecile.

Hadrian has been avoiding me for the past five days. Ever since that embarrassing rejection. Doubt has created a knot in my stomach. Everything is slipping between my fingers like loose sand.

Cecile’s cackles and it booms through the room.

Blood floods my face. “Stop laughing, this isn’t funny.”

She wipes away a fake tear from her eyes. "Oh, but it is, it really is.”

“Are you done?”

Cecile finds her composure and snaps her fingers. “Okay, I know what you gotta do.”

I narrow my eyes at her. “What?”

“You gotta blow him.”

I choke on my breath and I feel all my blood rise to my face and chest, all of it.

Cecile doesn’t mind my nearly dying. “I got some inside information that Spice can’t resist a girl on her knees.”

I grind my nails over the granite and clench my fists. A red haze falls over my vision. “I don’t want to hear about his previous conquests,” I growl at her.

Cecile holds up her hands. “Easy there, Shortcake, keep those claws in.”

I let my head fall in my hands. “Sorry, I don’t know what’s going on with me.”

With everything that has been going on lately, I feel like I’m losing my mind. Our search for Graciella has reached a dead end. My mother is alive and locked up somewhere. The king has tried to kill Hadrian multiple times. And then there is the prophecy…

“I do,” Cecile says with a grin. “You need a good lay.”

There is a wedge between me and Hadrian. When you scrape away the matebond, what are we even then? We’re not a couple. Couples do things together that bind them, they have common interests. We’re just two people placed in an unfortunate situation.

The prophecy keeps nagging in my brain. Hadrian probably realizes too that what we have is bound to end sooner or later. Should I stand in the way of his fate when it could mean that the king will fall? The world would be a better place without Alpha King Magnus ruling the kingdom. So should I not do everything I can to make the prophecy happen?

Cecile tears a banana from a bunch. “I’ll teach you a trick that has gotten me very positive results over the years.”

I cover my eyes and press my palms on my heated cheeks as Cecile talks in the background.

“The goal is to get him as far down your throat as possible. The key is breathing through your nose...”

I look up with a glare and she throws me the banana. This time I catch the offending fruit.