The Queen's Line (Inheritance of Hunger #1) - Kathryn Moon Page 0,1

that moved from the men and fastened onto me. I resisted the urge to duck my chin as I would've as a child, and instead held my head high, ignoring the trail of men as I hurried to the platform to take my seat on my throne.

Grandmother's hand pinned me in place before I had finished bending. "You've been putting this off for years, Bryony."

"I know, Grandmother," I said softly.

The men were stripped down to their stockings and underwear. Some even less, as if I might be more tempted to choose them at the sight of their dangling flesh bouncing listlessly between their thighs. I had seen plenty of men and their cocks in my twenty-three years, and I wasn't convinced that buck naked was a man's best presentation. They took their place in organized lines so I could view ten of them at once, speeding up the process of the choosing, and their reflections bounced off the mirrors around the room and blurred over the ornate gilding until the great hall was an abstract of flesh.

"Your sister, Camellia, will have snatched up all the good ones by now," Grandmother said.

My face twitched as I wrestled down the urge to wrinkle my nose. I didn't like Camellia's men at all. But Camellia must have because ever since her second choosing ceremony, the only time I saw her was when she had one between her thighs. She was doing her part for the kingdom.

Now it was my turn. That was my only consolation—what I lacked in desire for the men trailing into the room, I at least had for seeing the betterment of my kingdom.

"Although, he's not bad, now is he?" Grandmother murmured, and this time I couldn't withhold my wince as her fingers dug into my shoulder at the sight of one of the men in the front line. "Millie, grab that one there. No, the one to the right of him!"

The man in question stepped out of the line and up to my grandmother's lady-in-waiting with a nod. He was terribly tall, much too tall for me, surely? And he did remind me a bit of the way men were described in the novels I loved so dearly. Ruggedly handsome with a dimpled chin and curling dark hair falling over his brow. He had thick, defined muscles and more dark hair curling over his chest and down his thighs. At least he was wearing underwear.

"Drop those, let us see it," Grandmother barked at him.

The man's eyes flicked to mine—a kind of cheerful, agreeableness in his gaze—but he was as careful as I was to keep his face neutral in front of the dowager queen. His thumbs hooked into the laces of his underwear, and he shimmied the fabric down his hips, exposing his cock.

Can't fit, I thought, blinking at the over-generous appendage.

"Oh yes, that's very nice," Grandmother murmured. "Fluff it up for us a bit, won't you?"

I had seen sex. I had seen men waiting for their turn to worship my mother, and my sister seemed to revel in thrusting her sex life in my face. The women in my family were not shy in their appetites, nor were they expected to be. The queen's line must be virile, must have the Hunger. It was our duty and our gift to the kingdom. And yet I still shied away from the sight of the beautiful man reaching down to his own cock as he tried to stroke it to life for my grandmother's perusal.

"Very impressive, that's enough," Grandmother said. "Unless you'd like him now, Bryony?"

So here was the kind of man I was supposed to desire. Tall, big cock, quiet, aesthetically pleasing. I wanted to refuse. I knew nothing of him, he was only a man standing in front of me. What if he was rude, or his voice was too loud, or he was unkind? If I imagined him like Henry Fredericks, one of my favorite of all the romantic heroes I'd fallen in love with, then…

I blushed as a soft unfurling of warmth built in my center. If he was Henry Fredericks, then yes, I found him very pleasing.

But he wasn't the charming and humble duke to be. He was a stranger.

One my grandmother, my entire kingdom, was waiting to see if I desired. How could I explain to them that I lacked what everyone had always told me I was destined to rule with? There were some nights, alone in my bed, a book in hand