Page 51 of Ravished By the Revenant

“Oh, for the love of—” She sits up fully, and there’s a glint in her eyes that both scares and arouses me. “Okay. I know how to make you forget about honor.”

I scoff. “I doubt that very⁠—”

“It’s called sixty-nine,” she interrupts.

Sixty-nine? “Is that a year? Something significant happened in⁠—”

“It’s a position.” She’s already pulling the shirt she commandeered to sleep in over her head. “Lie back, my lord. Class is in session.”

I lie back, because I am a strategist, and a strategist knows when the battle is already lost.

Then she turns herself around, straddles my chest facing my feet, and lowers her mouth to my cock at the same moment she settles her hips over my face, and I understand the name, the number, the entire architecture of the arrangement.

“By Saint George’s⁠—”

“Less talking,” she says, and takes me down her throat.

Every thought leaves my skull. Honor, gold, notaries, the district official, the deed, the seven centuries—gone, all of it, scoured away by the heat of her mouth working down my ladder of piercings while her cunt hovers wet and open an inch above my lips. I grip her thighs and pull her down and feast. She moans around my cock, and the vibration nearly ends the lesson before it has properly begun.

It is warfare. She works me with her mouth and her fist, sloppy and merciless, and I retaliate with my tongue against her clit in the tight circles that make her rhythm stutter, and we drive each other higher in a spiral with no sane end. When she comes, she comes screaming around my cock, and the sound drags me over with her, and I spill down her throat while she grinds against my mouth, both of us shuddering, graceless, ruined.

She collapses sideways onto the mattress, breathing hard, hair everywhere.

“So,” she pants. “Any remaining concerns about the division of labor?”

“What labor,” I say to the ceiling.

“That’s what I thought.”

The electricity arrives in what Clara calls record time, which apparently means the amount of gold she distributed embarrassed several companies into competence. Men in orange vests carve a trench through the forest and plant poles like a procession of gallows, and I watch from the turret with a spyglass because Clara has forbidden me from looming over the contractors.

The first night of being connected to the power grid, she positions me in the great hall beneath a bulb dangling from a cable, her hand on a small switch.

“Ready?”

“It is a lamp, Clara. I have seen lamps.”

She flips the switch.

Light floods the hall from one glass bulb no larger than an egg, and I stare up at it with my mouth open like a peasant witnessing his first eclipse.

“It doesn’t flicker,” I say, awed.

“Nope,” Clara replies, popping the P.

“It doesn’t smoke. It requires no oil, no tallow, no…” I turn in a circle, seeing my great hall in a literal new light. “Decades I spent reading in dim candlelight while electricity was available outside these walls. The books I abandoned because my eye ached…”

“Aldric.” Clara’s voice is soft, and she’s watching my face, not the bulb.

“It is only a lamp,” I say roughly.

“Sure it is.” She flips the switch off, then on again. Off. On. “Also, it does this.”

I blink. “Stop that.”

“Can’t. It’s the law. Everyone has to do this with a new light switch. It’s in the Constitution.”

The mobile phone is witchcraft, and I say so.