Desires of a Monster - Roe Horvat Page 0,27
too curious to let it go. Knowing he had to answer if I asked him directly, I caught up with him. “Answer me, Rees. What made you frown? What are you thinking?”
“I thought about the difference between us. About your wealth. About how many men you must have had. And then I reproached myself for being foolish,” he said hastily, his tone angry. “You shouldn’t make me say these things.”
“I’m sorry.” Little did he know that I was the foolish one, manipulating him because I needed to know what lay behind his every smile and sigh. “The greatest difference between us lies in your beauty and my monstrosity.”
He looked away and over the fields, hiding his face from my sight. He didn’t seem to appreciate the joke. I tried being serious instead.
“None of the men went riding with me, Rees. Not once in a thousand years.”
He turned back to me, his eyes wide, a blush on his cheeks.
“Come, we’ll go to the river and rest in the shadow for a while.”
He smiled softly and nodded.
By the stream, I let Sera roam freely. She was old and experienced, and she knew not to venture too far away from me.
Rees frowned, hesitating with Troll’s lead in his hands.
“Let him go. He’ll follow Sera.”
The horses wandered along the river, staying in the shade of the tall oaks, and Rees and I sat in the grass. The stream was clear but fast. A few ducks kept to the shallows and nooks where the water couldn’t sweep them away. Tall forest loomed on the other side, and the smell of a group of elk not far away drifted in the air.
“It’s beautiful here,” Rees said. “I rarely went outside the Town before.”
“Not even when you were a child?”
A bitter smirk marred his lips. “No. During the week, there was school and work. Sundays meant long hours at church. When I left the orphanage at fifteen, I didn’t have to go to the sermons anymore as I was my own master. I began working in the harbor on Sundays, with the pagans. The foremen pay extra on Sundays. I could buy more food and sleep in a better bed.”
Again, I was reminded of how little enjoyment he’d had in his life. He’d worked seven days a week since he’d been fifteen. Fifteen.
I couldn’t turn back time and save him from his past, just like I might not be able to save him from his illness. I took off his boots and massaged his feet until he reached for my face in a now-familiar gesture, his thumb caressing the corner of my mouth. Surrendering to the want in his eyes, I crawled up his body and kissed him. I undressed him so he lay naked in the grass, hard and straining toward me. I opened my shirt and pants, clutched his body to me, and kneaded his ass cheeks. He rocked in my arms, rubbing his groin against my hard cock until he peaked, crying out so loud he startled the ducks on the other side of the river.
It was almost twilight when I rode back to my estate the next day. Coming from the fields, I crossed the pastures and took the gravel path along the windbreak behind the gardens. At the end of the row of old oaks stood a single cherry tree. Overgrown, it loomed there like a giant scarecrow after old branches had died and fallen off, and new grew in wrong directions. I would have asked for it to be cut down and replaced, but it still gave sweet cherries earlier than any other tree on the estate.
“My Lord!”
Startled by Rees’s voice, I looked up. Sitting on a branch high up in the crown, shirtless, he smiled widely at me.
“What on earth are you doing up there?”
“They are ripe! Maybe I can convince Ana to make a pie.”
“Come down here, now!”
He swung on a branch and slid down to another, fast like a squirrel. When his feet touched the ground, I sighed with relief. He handed me a linen pouch, stained with red from the cherries. It was his shirt, tied in a bundle so he could collect the fruit into it.
“Look. They’re delicious. I couldn’t leave them all to the birds.”
“The gardeners would have come and picked them. With a ladder.”
With how high he had been, he could have easily broken a limb if he’d fallen. I frowned at him, but his smile only grew at my mild reprimand.
“Maybe. But like