a Pleasure Rites, #1 by Ines Johnson (reader novel .TXT) 📕

Chanyn removed her hand entirely from his arm. "Khial, do you mind if we sit down?"

"Of course." Khial guided her to a white metal bench in a shady spot of the garden. The sun and clouds jockeyed for a place in the late afternoon sky. Chanyn sank onto the bench and rubbed her neck. Khial rolled his shoulders round.

"I'm sorry," she said. "You're a bit taller than me. It was a little awkward holding your arm like that."

"I thought that's how ladies and gentlemen walked," he said. "Arms out at odd angles like that?"

A light rumble of laughter shook Chanyn's chest, bringing the outline of her nipples into view.

"Let's make a promise," she said. "Let's not do things because we think it’s what we should be doing. Let's do them because we want to do them. And let's teach our child to do the same. Deal?" She put out her hand. The motion pushed her breasts together so that they swelled above the neckline of her dress.

Khial touched her hand briefly. "Deal." He sat down, his arm stretching along the back of the bench. The indent of her shoulder pressed into his side. He'd sat just like this with Dain an innumerable amount of times. The rightness of the intimate position unsettled him.

Chanyn's hand grasped her belly. She inhaled sharply, and her body jerked.

Ice skittered down Khial's spine. He sat up, rigid, unsure. He looked to her lap for any sign of blood. There was none. Chanyn sat still, eyes closed, cheeks puffed, holding her breath. Khial's hands braced in front and behind her, not sure if he should be prepared to lay her down or scoop her up.

Finally, she inhaled slowly. "It passed."

When she saw the stricken look on his face she grimaced in apology.

"Khial, it’s called morning sickness. Merlyn says it lasts a few weeks at most. And that it’s a good sign."

Khial nodded stiffly. He knew all these things, but he couldn't help the little voice inside his mind, the voice that called to him in nightmares and memories. The voice that wanted to poke and pop anything Khial became attached to.

He retracted his arm from behind Chanyn and folded his hand in his lap. They sat there quietly for a long moment, looking out over the lush garden. Darlyn, Dain's mother, had been full of so much love and she gave it freely, to people and plants alike. It didn't surprise Khial that the garden continued to be lush long after her passing. He wished he had an ounce of that feeling to share with this child and its mother.

"I was serious last night Khial. I don't expect anything... husbandly from you."

Khial's lips upticked at the word husbandly.

"Don't make fun." She bumped his shoulder with hers. "You're as clueless as I am about all this."

He looked over at her; the bark of laughter got stuck in his throat. With the sun backlighting her brown face and liquid eyes, Chanyn took his breath. She brought the plump lower lip into her mouth, pulling it with one tooth. Khial‘s mouth watered. He saw Chanyn's eyes flare.

"Khi?" She placed a hand in the crook of his elbow.

Khial's dick jerked to attention. The sudden rise after days of dormancy proved more painful than pleasurable.

He stood. "I'm going out."

Her face looked horror stricken.

Khial held up his hands as though he could stop her assumption. "Just for a while. I won't do that again, Chanyn. I promised."

The look of horror was slow to melt away. "You'll be back by dinner?"

He nodded.

She stood and held out her hand with her smallest finger extended. "Pinky swear."

"What?"

"It’s something I read in a book. If you break a pinky swear, your little finger will fall off."

Khial extended his finger and linked it with hers. They shook on it, both grinning like schoolgirls. With their fingers still entwined, Khial leaned down and kissed Chanyn on the cheek. His lips tingled on contact. When he pulled back he paused for the slightest second, an inch from her mouth, before putting a breath of distance between them.

"Now you know I've told the truth," he said. "If I lose my pinky finger I won't be able to play the violin any longer."

She released his finger. Khial turned and left.

It took him twenty minutes of driving to realize where he was headed.

In Khial's worst nightmares, people looked at him with accusing eyes, even though he'd walked away from his mother all those years ago. Now, in reality, people looked at him as he walked toward her.

"She's had no visitors," the guard said in answer to Khial's question.

"None?" He'd always assumed his mother's followers, deranged men who paid homage to her work or her lineage, had been visiting her for years. They had to have done so in order to carry out the assassination of Dain's parents. An assassination Khial believed was called out due to his defection from her household.

The guard shook his head. "Not once in the ten years she's been here."

The guard had to wave Khial ahead twice. He stood, stuck in place. Khial walked slowly into the interior of the prison. He heard her before he saw her. He stopped to listen.

She breezed through the song, a song he still fumbled. The place where he always tripped up, she sailed through effortlessly. When that song ended, she immediately began another, more difficult than the first.

Khial crept to her door slowly, as though sneaking up on an opponent in a gunfight from a Western film of the twentieth. It took him five breaths before he gathered the courage to peer inside the cell door.

The woman in the room playing the violin looked nothing like the memories he lugged around of his mother. She was wrinkled and gray. Her brown skin looked sallow and unhealthy. Her hair a riot of curls upon her head. She looked... helpless.

"We do the best we can," the guard said. "But she doesn't speak and she often gets violent. You can try