I wanted to protest again that Jake was not my lover, but I didn’t want to get him hurt by delaying any longer. Plus, I had to pee so badly now I felt like I was literally going to burst.
“All right,” I said desperately. “I’ll go up in the attic, but can you please untie my hands first? I can’t climb with them tied behind my back.”
“I will untie you if you give me your word as a Royal Were not to try and run,” Ophelia said, frowning a little.
“Absolutely,” I said, not meaning it a bit. First of all, I wasn’t a Were—let alone a “Royal” one. Secondly, I might not run now, but if I saw a chance to get away with Jake, I was definitely taking it.
But Ophelia seemed to take me at my word because she untied the thick, scratchy rope that had been wrapped around my wrists and nodded at the ladder.
“Go ahead,” she said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
Feeling like I really had no choice, I gripped the wooden steps and climbed up into the dark hole above me.
ELEVEN
The attic wasn’t quite as dark as it looked from below. There was another fireplace up here, also filled with dying embers, and a large skylight located on the slanted roof above. It was positioned over a large, four-poster bed with a wooden headboard. The headboard had vertical slats in it but all of them were thick and looked like they were made of solid oak or some other hardwood.
There was a clean white bedspread on the bed and someone—presumably Ophelia—had arranged rose petals in the shape of a big red heart right in the middle of it. There was also a bottle of champagne with two plastic champagne flutes and a plastic vase of fresh roses sitting on a rickety wooden dresser against the wall beside the bed.
“Do you like the decorations?” Ophelia asked, smiling proudly as she climbed up the rickety ladder and stood beside me. “I did them all myself.”
Looks like she’s got it all set up like a bridal suite, I thought, looking around. And supposedly, this was the room I would be sharing with my stepbrother. I mean, I didn’t think of Jake as my real big brother the way he claimed to think of me as his real little sister, but this was a lot. Like, a lot a lot.
“Um, it’s really pretty,” I said, since Ophelia was still looking at me expectantly. “You must have worked really hard on it,” I added. The fact that I was supposed to compliment one of my kidnappers on her design style was not lost on me.
“Thank you.” Ophelia blushed with pleasure—a pale pink glow that came over her calm, oval shaped face. “I wanted things to be romantic for you and the Heir, since you’re going to conceive here, in this very room.”
Uh…okay, this was going too far.
“Ophelia,” I said gently. “You know that Jake is my brother, right? I mean, my stepbrother, but still, I don’t think of him that way.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” she said, smiling dreamily. “Once your Heat Cycle begins, you’ll be more than willing to let him knot and breed you. Take it from another female Were, once your Cycle starts, you’ll be desperate for any cock at all in your pussy.” She leaned forward, lowering her voice again. “Why, I even let Tainer breed me once when I was Cycling! Thank goodness he didn’t get his knot all the way in me, or my belly might have swelled with his child! And I really don’t want a pup with a male like him. Ugh!” She gave a little shiver of disgust and made a face.
I wasn’t sure what to think of that, expect that it filled my head with the unappealing image of Tainer with his trousers down around his ankles “breeding” Ophelia, who was at least a hundred pounds lighter and twenty years younger than him. Ugh, indeed.
“Um…Okay,” I said at last. “Uh, can you show me the bathroom now, please? I really have to go.”
“Of course—come with me and we can administer the test,” she said, nodding.
There was an enclosed bathroom on the other side of the slanted roof. Ophelia opened a wooden door and let me into a surprisingly spacious area with a sink, a toilet, and a huge old claw-foot tub that looked big enough for two. There were black and white tiles on the floor that were cold under my bare feet.
The white porcelain had some faint rust marks on it but it was clear that someone had scrubbed all the bathroom fixtures until you could almost see your face in them. Ophelia again, I guessed. I couldn’t imagine Tainer getting down on his knees and scrubbing a toilet for any reason.