Claiming Crystal Read Online Free PDF Page B

love than they ever did about marriage and youth, and that was because the transcendent experience of these couplings changed people into something more than people. Crystal had already forgotten that the man inside of her, atop her, against her, celebrating her – that he was a simple stable lad who had been hired by her family to tend to their wild horses, and he was no more suited to marry her than one of the servants she had taken such routine boredom in bedding. But the more she heard herself whimpering for his closeness to come closer still, welcoming him deeper and deeper inside of her so that her very heart could feel the beating of his firm member, the more she realized that she too was a simple woman who had little experience in the world and no true status to separate her from suitors like him (who were not suitors at all).
    It did not matter that he had not been invited to her ceremony. Nor did it matter that her family would surely want to have words with her once they realized she had chosen someone with no money, wealth or reputation to trade, and that was the essence of lovemaking – the excising of all unrelated matters, and the focusing on a single enlivening experience until the vastness of an enormous world became small enough to cup to a breast and cradle like an infant.
    She did not realize that he had wept until she tasted the salt of his tears. She did not realize that she too had wept until he carefully daubed her eyes with a strong laborer's hand, and then he kissed each eye as if bedding them for sleep. He whispered something to her she did not hear, and finally made to pull away from her. She reached for him, wrapping her arms around his back, eager for him to stay and suddenly fearful and lonely about the idea of their broken connection, but he soothed her hands with his and kissed them each with that same loving warmth. Crystal would have been embarrassed of herself had she the mindfulness to remember herself, but she was taken away on the wings of love and she could not see such grounded things during her flight. She wanted more of him. She asked for more of him.
    ‘ Whatever you command,’ he told her once more, ‘but I fear that we have not acted with discretion.
    ‘ Look,’ he said, gathering his clothes and nodding in the direction of the hold where her family kept her in precious condition for the vaulted day when they might sell her for a fortune. Crystal turned and saw lines of men bustling back and forth, gathering guards, amassing servants, and then she saw the briefest suggestion of golden jewelry and crown and royal garbs, and she began to quickly gather her clothes along with the sorry horse trainer she had chosen out of a selfish lust that would have shamed her before her awakening.
    ‘ What of your chastity chain?’ the man asked, picking up the broken links of the jewelry her father had gifted to her on her first puberty, when he had explained to her that he would not marry her off at this age the way that other fathers married off their daughters.
    She was struck for a moment by the beautiful way the sunlight caught the chain and sparkled in his hand. Despite his background as a laborer, the man certainly had the elegant beauty of a nobleman. She fleetingly wondered if perhaps he truly was some rogue who escaped the confines of his family and could be traced back to an incredible fortune on the other side of the world, but Crystal was too thoughtful to fall for this kind of romance. Her family employed enough spies and messengers to know every relevant noble name throughout the kingdom and the greater world. If they had told her that he had no highborn name, then he truly was just a man talented with horses and sex.
    And that did not matter to her. A single look at the beauty of the chain against the beauty of the sun still rising against the side of his beautiful male sculpt was enough to make her forget herself in the dizzy fluster of a younger girl.
    Her father had