The Hidden Route Picked the Friend novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Flour Table
She goes to the scullery meaning to end it and instead takes him on the flour table, his hand over her mouth when a guard passes. At dawn her friend's page is at the door.
Briony reached the east scullery at midnight with the tea tray, and she had a speech ready.
It was a good speech.
It said that she was a lady's attendant, that she was leaving the capital after Midsummer, and that this had to stop.
She had practiced it all day, in the receiving rooms, between handing Clem her gloves and fetching Clem her fan.
The scullery door was ajar.
One candle burned on the flour table.
Sevrin stood against the far wall in his black coat with his arms crossed, and he had been there a while.
She could tell, because the candle was nearly gone.
"You came," he said.
"I came to say something."
"Say it."
Briony set the tray on the table, turned, and found that she couldn't remember a single word.
He was looking at her mouth.
"I can't do this again," she said.
"All right."
"I mean it."
"I believe you."
He didn't move from the wall.
That was somehow worse.
He stood there with the candle flickering over his cheekbones and his bandaged hand tucked under his arm.
He let her stand there with her speech falling apart.
"You haven't said anything," she said.
"You're the one with the speech."
"How do you know I have a speech?"
"You held your tray like a shield all the way down the stairs."
He had been listening to her come.
Heat went through her so fast it was almost anger.
"Take your coat off," she said.
His head tilted.
"I thought you couldn't do this."
"I can't.
Take it off."
He took it off.
He draped it over the back of a stool, slowly, and stood in his shirtsleeves with the cuffs rolled to the elbow.
The bandage on his palm was clean.
She had wrapped it again before dawn, and she realized he'd let nobody else touch it.
Briony crossed the floor and stopped in front of him.
She put both hands flat on his chest.
He was solid under the linen, and his heart was beating as hard as hers.
"I've never done this," she said.
"In a scullery?"
"At all."
It came out of her before she could stop it.
She had two lives, and in both she had been too careful and too busy.
She had always been too sure there was a later.
His eyes went dark.
"Then I'll be slow," he said.
"No."
"Briony."
"I've waited long enough to be slow," she said.
"I want it now, and I want it hard, and I want you to tell me when I'm doing it right."
For a moment he didn't breathe.
Then he took her face in both hands and kissed her, and there was nothing patient in it at all.
He walked her backward until her hips hit the flour table.
His hands went to her waist and lifted her up onto it.
Flour puffed out around her skirt.
She laughed against his mouth, and he made a sound that was almost a laugh too.
"You're white," he said.
"So are you."
He looked down at his shirt.
There was a perfect handprint of flour across the front.
"Now it's evidence," Sevrin said.
"I'll burn the shirt."
"Don't you dare burn the shirt."
She pulled it off over his head.
His chest was lean and hard and crossed by old scars.
Some were long and pale and some were short and round, a map of twelve years.
She laid her palm over the worst of them, a puckered line under his ribs.
"That one," she said.
"A knife.
Sixteen."
"Who gave you that?"
"A man I was sent to kill.
I was sixteen, and I lost."
She leaned in and kissed the scar.
His breath left him.
His hands closed in her skirts and dragged them up over her knees and her thighs.
He pulled until the whole heavy mass of the gown was bunched at her waist.
She was bare under it.
She'd decided that on the stairs, and not admitted it to herself.
His eyes dropped.
"You came down here with nothing on."
"I came down here with a speech."
"You came down here for this."
"Yes," Briony said.
"Shut up and do it."
He unlaced his trousers.
His cock sprang free, thick and flushed and already wet at the tip, and she stared at it with her mouth open.
"That won't fit," she said.
"It will."
"Sevrin."
"It will, because you're so wet it's running down the inside of your thigh."
He put two fingers between her legs, and she bucked.
They came away slick.
He held them up so she could see, and then he put them in his mouth.
Briony nearly came right there.
"Lie back," he said.
She lay back on the flour table, and white dust floated up around her head.
He stepped between her knees and took himself in his fist.
He rubbed the head of his cock through her folds, up and down, slow.
Every pass caught her clit.
She grabbed the edge of the table.
"Please."
"Look at me."
She looked.
He pushed in.
It was slow and thick and it stretched her wide.
She sucked in a breath and clutched at his forearms.
There was a sting at first.
He stopped when he was a third of the way in and held perfectly still, shaking with the effort.
"Breathe," he said.
"Don't stop."
"I'm not.
I'm waiting for you."
"I don't want you to wait."
She dug her heels into the back of his thighs and pulled him in.
He swore, low and ragged, and sank into her to the hilt.
Briony cried out.
She felt full all the way to the back of her throat.
He was buried so deep that she could feel him throb inside her, and his forehead came down against hers.
"Good?" he rasped.
"God, yes.
Move."
He moved.
He pulled out slowly, almost all the way, and drove back in, and the whole table creaked.
Then again, a little harder.
The sound of it was wet and filthy in the quiet scullery.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and held on to his shoulders.
Every thrust dragged him over a place inside her that made her see sparks.
"Harder," she said.
"I'll hurt you."
"You won't.
Harder."
He pulled her to the edge of the table and fucked her harder.
The candle shivered.
Her breasts bounced under the pushed-up gown.
He dragged the neckline down with his teeth and took one nipple in his mouth.
She wailed.
He clapped his bandaged hand over her lips.
"Quiet.
They'll hear us."
She bit the heel of his palm.
His whole body jolted, and he thrust into her so hard that she slid up the table.
Boots crunched in the yard.
Sevrin froze, buried deep inside her, with his hand over her mouth.
The footsteps went slowly past the scullery door.
A lantern's glow slid over the crack beneath it, paused, and moved on.
They stayed locked like that, panting, his cock throbbing in her, his eyes on hers.
She clenched around him on purpose.
His eyes went wide.
She did it again.
"You're going to kill me," he whispered.
"You first."
The boots faded away.
He pulled out of her, flipped her over on the table with one hand, and bent her across the flour.
She gasped.
"Hands flat," he said.
She pressed them flat in the white dust.
He pushed her gown up her back and spread her thighs with his knee.
Then he sank into her from behind in one smooth thrust.
She nearly screamed.
The angle was deeper.
Every stroke ground against the front of her, and one of his hands came around her hip and found her clit.
"Oh," she said.
"Oh, that, that's."
"Tell me."
"That's so good.
Don't stop that.
Don't stop."
He rubbed her in tight fast circles, and he slammed into her from behind, and her whole body began to tighten.
His other hand fisted in her braids and pulled her head back, not hard, just enough to arch her.
"Come for me, Briony."
"I'm."
"Come on my cock."
She did.
It tore through her.
She came with a muffled shout into the crook of her own elbow.
Her pussy clamped down around him in hard spasms, and he groaned and went rigid behind her.
"Fuck," he said.
"You're, I can't."
"Then don't."
His hips stuttered.
He thrust twice more, deep.
He came with a broken sound, flooding hot inside her, and his forehead dropped between her shoulder blades.
For a long time there was no sound but their breathing.
Briony lay across the flour table with her cheek on her arm and her legs shaking.
He slid out of her, gently, and she felt the wet heat of him run down her thigh.
He turned her over and lifted her into his arms.
He sat down on the stool with her in his lap.
She was white with flour from her chin to her knees.
He was too.
"Briony Ashdown," he said into her hair.
"Sevrin Dray."
"Say it again."
"Sevrin."
He closed his eyes.
She stroked his short hair and felt his hand move up and down her back.
Neither of them said that she hadn't given the speech.
Dawn came grey at the window of the yard door.
A knock rattled the scullery.
"Miss Ashdown?"
It was a page's voice, high and bored.
"Lady Wray wants you for the receiving line.
She says to bring the good gloves.
She says," the boy added, and there was a pause, "to brush the flour off first."
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