"You cad!" cried Lady Talia, long lush chestnut tresses streaming in the wind, her cheeks flushed with anger and unwanted desire, her considerable bosom straining against her tightly laced bodice. "How dare you speak to me so!"
"I will speak to you however I choose, you ravishing wench," Garren sneered, his perfectly formed eyebrow raised above his astonishing blue eyes and aquiline nose. His muscles rippled under his half-laced shirt as he stepped forward to roughly pull Lady Talia into his arms.
"My father will have your head!" she cried, even as her bosom and her heart strained toward the terrible, rakishly handsome, unreasonably tall chevalier.
"And I will have you!" he said huskily, and claimed her mouth with his own.
Against her will, Talia melted against him, feeling the fire of his lips, the strength of his large, masterful hands, and the insistent length against her of his...
Cordelia blinked. Yes, she'd read that right.
...throbbing manhood.
She gasped in pleasure as he tugged at her bodice, ripping off the buttons in his lust, revealing creamy orbs with pink, hard buds of...
Oh dear, thought Cordelia. Oh dear.
"Wynne!"
"Yes? What is it?"
Cordelia's cheeks were raging pink. "That book I gave you," she said. "The Rose of Orlais. I thought it was about horticulture... so. Um." She stared at her feet. "I borrowed it."
"That's perfectly fine! Feel free to take advantage of my library any time. Just don't spill anything on anything – for that matter, maybe you'd better not lend any to Oghren –"
"It's banned, isn't it?" Cordelia said anxiously. "The Chantry doesn't approve of that sort of thing. Fiction! And all about..." She cleared her throat. "Goings-on."
Wynne sighed. The Chantry drilled mages from a young age to keep their minds on their studies and on their moral character, lest they falter and become abominations; the chanters' sermons (attendance required) often railed against "frivolous pursuits," novels and sex being two of said pursuits, and novels about sex being too scandalous even to mention.
"What the Chantry doesn't know won't hurt them," she said patiently. Had that tattered copy of Lady Chuffley's Coachman that used to make the rounds of the girls' dormitories gone out of circulation? Wynne suspected it was still scandalizing apprentices to this day, but no one had thought to pass it on to respectable enchanter's-pet Cordelia. Poor girl.
"That's good to know, because I wanted to ask you. Do you have. Um." Cordelia's face was entirely red. She lowered her voice to a whisper. "Do you have any more?"
Wynne bit her lip trying not to laugh.
"By all means," she said, clapping Cordelia on the shoulder. "A girl your age should know what she's about. Now, The Rose of Orlais is a classic, but really if you want to get into the genre, you should start with Seven Nights in Rivain..."
"Cordelia?" Alistair said. "Can I borrow your...? Oh."
She wasn't in her tent. This was unusual, because she had been spending altogether too much time in her tent recently. Also unfortunate, because if she had been there, it would mean that for the brief amount of time it took her to find and give him her map of the Bannorn, they would both be in her tent. His heart had soared with the possibilities. Would it be too improper to ask her for a kiss? In her tent? Oh, Maker.
He sighed. Shouldn't have got his hopes up, really.
Now where would she keep her papers? His eyes fell on a manuscript-sized wooden box carved with leaves and flowers in the Dalish style, nearly hidden under a pile of poultice components. Curiosity (and the need to plan the quickest route to Denerim) won out, and he felt only a small pang of guilt when he opened the box. Really, he needed that map. And if he got to see that treatise on the properties of lightning she had been working on all week instead of spending her evenings with the rest of the party (and occasionally sneaking off with him for a kiss and some passionate hand-holding), that would be a totally random coincidence, wouldn't it?
Sure enough, the box contained a haphazard pile of papers covered in elegant but cramped handwriting; her handwriting, exquisite just like the rest of her. He smiled to himself and traced the lettering, lost in a brief reverie; her tent, her handwriting, and over there, oh Maker, her bedroll - wait. This wasn't about lightning.
The Rose of Ferelden, he read, by A Lady. Chapter 3.
Lady Coraline luxuriated in the forest pool, relishing the feel of the cool water on her bare skin. She had fought hard and well, and now that the bandits had been thoroughly defeated, she had time to bathe and wash the blood and sweat from her long, flowing, golden hairtresses locks.
She thought of Bann Cormac's dark, flashing eyes, how his rich deep voice had bid her stay at his estate, and shivered slightly, not from the cold. Cormac was handsome, true. But her heart was with another.
Coraline rose from the pool, dried her lithe but womanly form on a soft cloth, and had donned a flimsy diaphanous robe when she saw movement in the trees.
She gasped, startled. Ser Alexander stood there, watching her with a yearning look in his hazelbluebrown hazel eyes. She had last seen him on the battlefield, armor shining in the sun, striking down all those who opposed him; now he wore no armor, but the sun caught his golden hair, and he shone like a young god.
Heart pounding, she clutched her robe to her. "Well met, good ser," she said
"Well met indeed," he said. "You were not at the feast. We could not celebrate properly without you, so I sought you out."
"You have found me. How long have you been standing there, pray?"
"Long enough," he said, his voice hoarse with longing. He stepped closer to her, and Coraline saw his muscles move ripple under his thin shirt; she thought then of his bare chest slick with sweat on the practice field, and she wanted nothing more than to slide that shirt off him and explore that manly expanse with her hands and mouth.
"I want you," he said. "Coraline, I want you more than anything I have ever known. No man alive can best me, but you have conquered me utterly. And I have tried, Maker knows I have tried, but I cannot resist you."
"Then, ser," she whispered, "do not resist. And neither shall I."
He crushed her to him then, his lips hot and fierce on hers. She surrendered to the kiss, dizzy with joy and lust. "Alexander," she saidwhispered murmured, and gave herself up to him utterly.
Her robe slipped from her shoulders, and he drank in her body with a long, ravenous look before drawing her to him again more forcefully than before. She moaned as he stroked her smooth, pale porcelain skin, his strong hands gentle as he moved to caress her breast, and her hands were busy at the laces of his breeches as she yearned to release his straining –
"Oh," said Alistair. "Oh my."
He was halfway through Chapter 5 before Cordelia returned.
"Just what do you think you're doing?" she snapped, ducking into the tent and snatching the manuscript out of his hands. "Those are my papers you're pilfering, and my treatise isn't anywhere near done yet, and you know I don't want anyone to read it until I'm done –" Her eyes fell on the stack of handwritten sheets on the ground. She paled. "Oh no. You read it, didn't you?"
"Honestly, I wasn't trying to invade your privacy. I was just –"
"Invading my privacy," Cordelia said angrily. She looked at the pile of papers again and seemed to deflate. "You read everything?" she said weakly.
"Well, not everything. I have to say, it's awfully explicit for a scholarly work."
"Um."
"And the guy with the muscled chest glistening with sweat? Ser Alexander? Is he supposed to be who I think he is?"
"I just... with the... oh, drat!" Her cheeks had gone pink with shame again . "Look, Wynne lent me some books, and I thought, these seem easy to write, maybe I'll try my hand. It's fiction. Pure fiction. Now if you'll excuse me, I just have to go die now." She turned to leave.
Alistair caught her hand.
"I didn't say I didn't like it," he said quietly. She looked at him, bewildered, and he realized she was absolutely lovely when she was embarrassed. He pulled her down to kneel beside him on the bedroll. "'Like a young god,' you wrote. Is that really what you think?"
"Yes," she whispered. "Maker help me. Yes."
He kissed her then, propriety be damned; she sighed and touched his face and said his name, and it was better than anything he'd ever known. He tentatively slid his hand to the neck of her robe; raising her hand to his, she smiled and undid the clasp.