Chapter 462: Chapter 462: After Hours

By the time Dax returned, the palace had gone quiet, muffled enough to pretend the kingdom had stopped asking for things.

Nero had been put to bed an hour earlier after resisting sleep with the stubborn dignity of a much older tyrant. His nannies had taken over from there, which meant the nursery wing was now someone else’s battlefield.

Chris had no intention of volunteering for a second shift.

He was already in bed, freshly bathed, wearing a loose dark sleep shirt, his short black hair still a little damp at the ends. One knee was raised under the covers, his phone in hand, thumb scrolling with the grim concentration of a man exhausting himself further on purpose. Doom-scrolling, at this hour, in that posture, with his black eyes narrowed at the screen, made him look less like a consort and more like a beautiful threat being mildly inconvenienced by civilization.

Dax stepped into the bedroom, loosened first by private rooms and the absence of witnesses.

He stripped off the last pieces of court from himself – rings, cufflinks, watch, and the black stone set in aged gold – placing them one by one on the table near the bathroom. Even that looked beautiful. Annoyingly so.

Chris looked up once, watched the jewelry accumulate, then dropped his gaze back to the screen.

“That does not look restful,” Dax said.

His voice was lower at this hour, his Sahan accent softened by fatigue and warmth.

Chris didn’t look up. “It isn’t. I’m making myself worse with information.”

“A familiar hobby.”

“Yes.”

Dax crossed into the bathroom.

Chris kept scrolling for exactly seven more minutes before the shower shut off.

He locked his phone and tossed it aside just as the bathroom door opened.

Then he looked up and paused.

Dax stepped out with a towel low on his hips and nothing else, steam and heat still clinging to him. His hair, white-blonde and heavy with damp, fell loose to his shoulders. Water still traced along his collarbones, across his chest, down the hard lines of a body built on a scale that should have looked excessive and instead looked mythological. Seven feet three of quiet menace and sculpted control, purple eyes darkened by the late hour, shoulders broad enough to make every room acknowledge him whether it wanted to or not.

Chris let his gaze drag down him openly.

Dax noticed immediately.

His mouth moved slightly, and he reached for a spare towel to run through his damp hair. “You’re staring.”

Chris settled deeper into the pillows, absolutely shameless. “Yes.”

Dax’s expression warmed by a fraction. “Good.”

The scent of him reached the bed seconds later – dark spiced rum, fresh from the shower but unmistakably him, rich and warm enough to make the entire room feel smaller.

Chris looked him over again, slower this time. “You look obscene.”

Dax dropped the towel over the back of a chair. “And yet you remain in bed.”

“I had a long day,” Chris said. “I’m appreciating from a seated position.”

Dax came closer.

Chris watched him approach and knew, with the calm certainty of a man long accustomed to this, that Dax loved being looked at by exactly one person and would burn cities before admitting it so plainly to anyone else.

When he reached the bedside, Chris tipped his head back to look up at him properly.

Dax towering over a bed was unfair in ways the gods should have regulated.

“The black ring looked excellent on you today,” Chris said. “Very tragic. Very elegant. Very expensive.”

Dax’s gaze held his. “I assumed you’d approve.”

“I did. It was offensively tasteful.”

That earned him the smallest, real curve of Dax’s mouth.

Chris held out one hand.

Dax gave him his at once.

Chris turned it over slowly, thumb brushing over the place where the ring had been earlier, then over his knuckles. “You’re all right?”

Dax answered just as quietly. “Yes.”

Then, after a beat, because this room did not require lies, “I miss him. But yes.”

Chris nodded and brought Dax’s hand to his mouth, kissing his knuckles once before letting it go.

His own scent had settled back into fresh rain after the bath, soft and clean now that the day was over, with none of that frost left in it. Not furious. Not wounded. Just tired, warm, and looking at his husband like he still enjoyed the sight too much to be dignified about it.

“Well,” he said, resettling against the headboard, “that is enough emotional honesty for one evening. Come here.”

Dax looked at him for a second, then sat on the edge of the bed.

Chris’s eyes dropped again immediately.

Dax noticed that too and, if anything, seemed more pleased.

“Still staring,” he said.

Chris reached out and laid a hand flat against Dax’s stomach, skin still warm from the shower, then let it slide slowly over familiar muscles. “You say that like you don’t enjoy it.”

Dax’s hand came up to the side of Chris’s neck, thumb resting just below his ear. “I do.”

Chris’s fingers moved lower, catching lightly at the edge of the towel at Dax’s hip. “Good. Because I had a terrible day, and I would like compensation.”

Dax looked down at him, purple eyes gone darker in the low light. “Compensation.”

Dax’s hand, still resting against the side of Chris’s neck, flexed slightly. His thumb stroked a slow, possessive line along the tendon there. “Name it.”

Chris’s black eyes held his, unblinking, and pulled the towel free.

It dropped to the floor in a soft heap.

Dax’s cock, already half-hard and thick, lay heavy against his thigh. It was pale and veined, with a flushed, dark purple head that Chris was all too familiar with.

Chris’s gaze was drawn to every detail: the prominent ridge of the crown, the thick vein running along the underside, and the heavy, full balls drawn up tight.

He reached out and wrapped his fingers around the base.

Dax’s breath left him in a soft, controlled rush. Heat radiated from his skin, and his scent deepened, the musky alpha dominance in it spiking, turning richer, more possessive.

“You’re tense,” Chris murmured, his thumb stroking that sensitive junction.

“It was a long day,” Dax echoed his earlier words, a faint rasp in his voice.

Chris’s hand moved, a slow, firm stroke from root to tip, his thumb smearing the bead of moisture already gathered at the slit. He watched, fascinated, as the flesh darkened further, swelling in his grip. He leaned in, his breath ghosting over the head, and then, without ceremony, took him into his mouth.

The taste was clean skin and salt, uniquely Dax’s.

Chris hummed around him, the vibration making Dax’s hips jerk. He took him deeper, his lips stretching, his tongue flattening against the frenulum, tracing the sensitive ridge there.

He worked him with a hungry rhythm, one hand cupping his balls and rolling their heavy weight. Dax’s hand slid from his neck into his hair, fingers tangling in the short black strands.

Chris pulled away with a wet sound, looking up. Dax’s purple eyes were nearly black, his jaw tight.

“Enough,” Dax said with a low voice, the command vibrating in the air between them.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep