[Fae Scandals 1]Prince of Submission (2 page)

Secondly he chose New York because NYU was the one place in the world where he could make his own decisions. His family was six hundred miles away. He made his decisions and lived his life answering to no one. He went to all the hottest clubs in New York, shopped at all the SoHo boutiques, and attended art shows galore that ignited a passion within him that knew no bounds.

Within the first semester of his college attendance, he was a declared fine arts and art history double major. His father had thrown a fit, demanding that he change his concentration to a more suitable one like biology or sexual psychology. He was, after all, a third-generation descendant of a fertility god.

Corrin had bucked at the demand, another first for him. Luckily his mother had interfered and claimed that the human media would enjoy the creativity of the major and added that perhaps he could sell some of his work. Reluctantly his father had agreed, though he drew the line at sending him to graduate school.

After the novelty had worn off, everyone at school had treated him like everyone else. He’d attended class, taken exams, and balanced a social life like every other college student. Without the pomp and patronage of the Seelie court, he’d flourished.

Corrin specialized in acrylic painting, and it became his obsession. Even as an undergraduate his paintings, which were shown under a pseudonym, raked in several hundred dollars apiece. His instructors had encouraged him to apply for graduate admissions at the university, but he’d been unable to assure them that he would. It was the one aspect of his college experience that he regretted.

Since it was after his graduation, he was being shipped back to the court to begin his training as the heir to the throne. This vacation was the last-ditch effort to experience the freedom of the human realm and the last time he’d be able to have free time with his friends. It seemed such a bittersweet moment to Corrin as he’d stared out the windows of the plane. It was made specifically for the transportation of Fae and was the only one of its kind. Instead of heaps of iron, it was a cool platinum structure.

Corrin stripped out of his jeans and T-shirt and donned a soft white-suede suit that was a hundred years behind current human fashion trends. The jacket of the suit cut off at the knees and the matching pants went into tan leather boots that looked like they came from a renaissance festival. His undershirt was a starker shade of white and flowed like that of some romance novel pirate. His long blond hair, that was just this side of white, was pulled back into a low ponytail at the nape of his neck instead of free and flowing about his shoulders like it usually was. He stared into the mirror of the narrow bathroom and met his pale-green eyes. He looked the part of returning prince. It made him slightly sick to his stomach.

A hard knock jerked him from his reverie. Gael’s voice sounded from behind the door. “Are you ready to go, my prince? We have a car waiting.”

“I’ll be right out, Gael,” he called back, giving himself another proprietary glance at his reflection. Satisfied, he nodded and opened the door.

* * * *

Corrin panted, his body rigid and damp, strung tight from a delicious tension. He was in a dark room, his body highlighted by a hot beam of light, which was the only source of light in the room. His hands were tied to a beam over his head, his feet manacled to the floor, his body naked and aroused.

“Are you ready to suffer for me?” a voice purred from just beyond his line of sight. The voice was low and did frightening things to Corrin’s body, making his cock jump for attention like an eager puppy. His pulse throbbed, his heart speeding up impossibly.

“Yes,” he heard himself whisper. His voice was tight with passion. The voice from the darkness stepped forward, and Corrin looked up into the face of his fantasy.

The man was naked and obviously just as aroused as Corrin was. His dream-self groaned and licked his lips.
What am I doing
? This was a male for god’s sake. This was a man who had obviously chained him up and had nefarious plans for him. He was a prince of the Seelie court! Such perversions were reserved for the monsters of the Unseelie court, the black court that was in direct opposition to the light court’s genteel ways.

“Please,” Corrin moaned, his body shaking with pent-up desire.

“Please what?” the man asked. He still couldn’t see his face clearly.

“Please let me suffer for you.”

The man reached down and gripped Corrin’s shaven balls and squeezed, causing a fission of sensation to slither up Corrin’s spine. The pleasure was unbearable.

“Kiss me,” Corrin begged as the man used his other hand to massage his cock with surprisingly gentle movements. The contrast drove him mad. With a laugh the man bent forward and captured the lips of the Faery prince.

* * * *

A sharp barking voice broke into his dream and startled him awake. “Corrin, wake up. We’re here.” It took Corrin a moment to realize he was in the luxurious confines of a limousine.

“W–what?” he asked. His dream still spun through his head like a never-ending reel of lusty embarrassment. He felt his cheeks heat at the thought of what he’d been dreaming.

“Were you having a nightmare, my prince?” Gael asked.

Corrin shook his head and swallowed. “I’m all right.” He tried desperately to hide his erection through the soft suede of his pants.
Goddess, I’ve got to stop this
.

The dreams had gotten worse lately. They plagued him almost the moment he fell asleep. He didn’t have a problem with gay men. He’d worked quite closely with several in his time at NYU. The art world was full of them, and he’d accepted it as part and parcel of humanity. However, as a Seelie, he knew that such things were not acceptable in and among his own people. Some of the Seelie had even been kicked out of the community because of a proclivity to enjoy the comforts of the same sex. If the Seelie court even suspected that a prince of the Seelie was having fantasies about another male, he would be exiled.

Banishment to the Unseelie court was considered the worst fate an immortal could be handed. They were the “monsters” of the Faery realm. Their court housed the exiles of all the other courts, shape-shifting half-beasts and other unsavory beings. The most abundant of the races of the Unseelie were the light-avoiding Vampires who were known to indulge in nontraditional sexual practices and drink the blood of their lovers. Unlike “turned” Vampires who were once human, Unseelie Vampires drank blood only for pleasure. It was barbaric and perverse. Sex was for the mutual pleasure of the couple and for the production of heirs. What the Unseelie did to that tradition unnerved and offended the Seelie court in a way that was inexcusable.

The dreams chasing themselves through his head every night were horrifying by their standards. For all his play as a world-weary urbanite, Corrin was, in all the essential ways, an innocent and a student of the Seelie court. He sighed and ran the months of dreams back through his mind. It was always the same man, always the same sort of situation. Corrin would be bound in some fashion, sometimes alone as he had been in the most recent dream, sometimes bound before a room full of like-minded people who took pleasure in his obvious humiliation. The man would approach him, touching him as if he owned him, hurting him in a way that made Corrin’s obviously flawed psyche view the action as a delicious thrill, and, at last, kissing him with such power that Corrin would wake gasping. He’d been trying to get the images out of his head with little success.

Maybe this vacation would help him get out some of his built-up tension, help him get the human world and all its excesses out of his mind. When he got back, he planned to start courting a few of the female courtiers, preparing for his ascension to the throne in another fifty years, find a wife, start his own family. In short, fulfilling his father’s expectations to the fullest. He had to put this part of his life firmly behind him. His responsibilities were too many to be selfish with his life.

* * * *

The conference went smoothly. They had made the announcement that Prince Corrin along with two of his closest friends from his graduating class were going to be flying to Cancun tomorrow and spending a week at a private resort. His mother had asked the reporters to kindly be respectful, something they all knew wouldn’t be happening, thus why they were putting the deception to the press to begin with.

Now the royal family was holding a “welcome home” banquet in the great hall. They were en route to the royal palace, taking the magically spelled carriage, similar to the ones found in use by nobility in the seventeen hundreds, that was safer to travel in than the bulletproof limos that they used for travel in the human world. They left the quaint country houses of the human world behind and passed the towered gates that served as the entrance to the Seelie realm. Corrin watched as the Seelie emerged from their hidden places that blended into the surrounding countryside to greet their arrival home. The Palace was the only structure visible to the naked eye, all the others could only be seen by people who were magick themselves or had an invitation of the owner to do so.

The palace rose out of the white-granite mountain face like a pillar of nature, almost blending in with yet somehow enhancing the natural beauty that it was comprised of. It had been his home for eighteen years, and he never got over the great Greek columns that were rimmed with gold and the sheer beauty of the hundreds of windows that caught every ray of sunshine. The whole of the palace was done in those colors. Marble statues were placed throughout and the elaborate ballroom was white granite with gold veins.

“We’re glad you decided against attending your graduation ceremony,” his mother said, her voice a perfect imitation of a Midwestern accent. She was dressed in a pale-green summer dress that accentuated the fiery red-and-gold tresses that curled delicately around her slim face and small features. Corrin shared her eye color almost exactly.

His father injected his opinion right after. “More like we’re glad you finally came to your senses and realized that it was a ridiculous human rite that was below your social class.”

His dad was dressed in a suit similar to Corrin’s except the color was a soft golden tan. He wore his hair in the traditional Seelie fashion, long and tied back by the colored ribbons of his household. Seelie men were expected to never allow their hair to be above their shoulders. It was a mark of a commoner to have one’s hair so short that one didn’t need to take care of it. Because they were in the Royal family, Corrin nor his father had ever cut their hair. His father’s hair was just a shade darker than Corrin’s own, more gold than white.

“It isn’t beneath my social class to attend my graduation ceremony, Da,” Corrin said, sighing heavily. His father’s ideas of class were barbaric. “I just wanted to start my vacation early.”

His father raised an eyebrow. “Whatever you tell yourself to make it morally acceptable to you doesn’t matter, Corrin. The simple truth is that it’s ridiculous.”

His father very rarely thought Corrin had any opinion that was worth approving of. He was thousands of years old and had seen it all and heard it all, and his son’s thoughts were no exception. Corrin gritted his teeth and said nothing.

“Are you sure that we can’t convince you to take a few of the royal guards with you to New Orleans?” his mother asked, her eyes holding a glimmer of concern. His father and mother may have been backward in their thinking in comparison to the modern human, but they did care about him a great deal. He was, after all, their only son.

“No, Mother,” Corrin said. “I will be just fine, and I already compromised by saying that I’m taking a private jet. I want a little freedom before I settle down.”

“You know your father did the same thing when he was your age,” she twittered, gazing at her husband with adoring eyes.

“That is enough, Marietta,” his father said. His voice was as aloof as ever, but his eyes were sparkling. They had quite the romance. Corrin resisted the urge to roll his eyes and cringe. They’d fallen in love and had their fairy tale, and they’d never let him forget it.

“That is where we met as matter of fact,” she continued on, ignoring him. “Every Royal heir since the beginning of the dynasty has gone on a sort of final adventure before coming home to assume responsibility. Humans were just entering the Bronze Age at the time. I was attending a fertility rite in England to celebrate the harvest, and your father was sailing from ancient Greece in a sort of worldwide sailing expedition. He was stopping off near Stonehenge to pick up additional supplies on his way to visit one of his uncles who lived in the middle of the Atlantic with a sea goddess. One of Poseidon’s younger daughters I do believe. We danced at Imbolc, and he ended up staying the rest of his allotted time with me.” She giggled. “When he left, I went with him, unsurprisingly enough. So maybe, you’ll follow family tradition and find your own lucky lady friend while you’re in New Orleans.”

Corrin did roll his eyes then, secretly hoping like hell that it was true, but fearing equally as much that those fantasies running through his head would prevent such a thing from ever happening.

“Thank God!” Mariah, his best friend, exclaimed as the private plane finally touched down in the crowded New Orleans airport. His dark-haired companion was as excited as he was.

Taylor squealed, throwing her pencil-thin arms around Corrin’s shoulders. “We’re finally here!”