It was not the custom in Valdemar, much to her relief, for the Monarch to leave a social gathering with any fanfare. So they simply drifted off under the ever-watchful eyes of her Guards, and took the private entrance back into the Royal Suite.

Once there, her maids descended on her like a swarm of ants, while he sauntered off to his dressing room to the like attentions of his servants. The days were long gone when she could dress and undress herself; being Queen apparently meant wearing gowns that it was impossible to get into or out of without help. But once her maids had taken down her hair and gotten her stripped down to her shift, she dismissed them all, slipped into a silken bed gown, and with a shiver of anticipation, got into bed to await Karath.

He was not long in coming. With a knowing grin when he saw her waiting for him, he extinguished the last candle, and she felt the mattress take his weight in the sudden darkness.

In the next moment, he had slipped the gown from her shoulders, and his lips were on hers, insistently; his tongue probing at her mouth. Her lips opened immediately as she felt her skin flush, and for a moment, his hands cupped the sides of her face as his tongue teased hers.

But then his hands were moving lower, caressingly, clever fingers making her skin tingle, and when his hands reached her breasts; she gasped at the sensations he awoke in her body, and with that now-familiar feeling of melting, lay back into the softness of the mattress.

As one hand slipped still lower, his mouth took over where his hands had been, evoking still more intoxicating thrills of pleasure, and she moaned softly under his caresses. By this time, she was nearly mindless, all of her attention bound up in the sensations that he was creating in her body, feeling herself on fire with pleasure and desire and an urgency driving her towards that peak she now not only knew existed, but which had become so very necessary to her life.

So that, when he finally took her, she was all animal, crying out as she raced toward the goal, nothing else mattering in all the world but their bodies moving together to that moment when she exploded in pleasure, convulsed and paralyzed at the same time, a cry escaping from her that she could not have stopped and didn’t want to.

And before she had fallen from that pinnacle of sensation, he had come to his own shuddering climax, so that they fell together, tangled in sweat-gleaming limbs, into dreamy, euphoric lassitude, and then, when he had pulled the covers over them both, sleep.

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