Married To The Mad Vampire Lord-Chapter 106: Book in the shelf

"In fact, Miss Cordelia, I don’t think you should be inside the boutique since you are not buying anything. Please step out and wait for his Lordship and the lady to finish shopping," Madam Elizabeth added, angry and bitter that the vampiress had put her in this mess.

Cordelia was taken aback by those words and was about to remind the woman who she was, but then remembered she no longer had that power without the support of her father’s wealth and cousin, who was pretending like he wasn’t aware of what was happening and kept browsing the shop while his wife was back in the refreshments room, resting.

She turned to speak to him, but he brushed past her and said to Madam Elizabeth, "You should keep that policy. When one isn’t paying or buying things, they should be thrown out. If they resist, call the vampire guards at the front and throw the person out of your premises. Keep up the good work." He walked into the next shop, leaving Cordelia behind.

"Cousin Rohan, you—"

"Please step out, Miss, before you are dragged out," said the madam, gesturing towards the front door.

Cordelia felt her throat become so tight as anger flowed through her veins and made her see red. She, Cordelia, who had been respected by many, was now someone they threw out like some nobody. All because of what? Because her cousin married a stupid human!

If he had not married her and she had not been brought to this land, she would not be going through this insult. All her misfortune started the day the useless thing had come into their land. She brought bad luck with her and ruined everything for Cordelia.

How dare her cousin, who had always liked to pamper her, turn against her because of a human? Wasn’t she better than that thing he called a wife?

When her father’s riches were falling, she had hoped to get back in power by marrying someone wealthy, and her second cousin had been the man she wanted. Being a woman, one’s life didn’t have to depend on a useless father; her husband, if wealthy enough, could uplift her name again in society.

She could get any man in Nightbrook, of course—she was beautiful, intelligent—but none of the men were as intriguing, feared, wealthy, and handsome as Rohan Dagon. He was a man everyone called names, but in secret, women admired and worshipped him. Her friends had envied her for the way he kept her close in the past.

If she married him, she would have a chance of being the center of attention again—the all-envied woman. She would also have the chance of becoming a queen, his queen, because she had heard her father talking about how Rohan wasn’t lost to the throne, with the other princes not giving birth to an heir that would earn them the crown. And since the last heir was still alive, there was a chance he would be crowned.

That had been her motivation to want to be his wife. But all chance seemed lost—all thanks to some unattractive, freckled-faced human! She was supposed to be the one he gave all that attention to. She was supposed to be cared for by him!!

Cordelia’s fists clenched as she glared towards the refreshments room door, so angry she wanted to storm into the room and strangle and drink the human dry of blood. Her dark red eyes turned even darker. ’I will make you pay for this, human. You will regret ever coming into his life and ruining my life,’ she swore, and with a glare to Madam Elizabeth, she turned and storm out of the boutique.

Inside the refreshments room, where Belle was left alone with a tray of snacks and tea on the table and gift boxes beside her, she felt the back of her neck prickle, and she rubbed it. Who was thinking ill of her? she wondered, and then sighed, believing it must be the girls who had been dragged to their worst nightmare.

She wanted to feel sorry for them, really, but she couldn’t. Whenever she tried to find the sympathy for them in her heart, her mind returned to the sting of that slap, the taste of blood on her tongue, and the humiliation burning in her eyes. Once upon a time, she would have pleaded with Rohan to let them go. The fact that she hadn’t, still hadn’t, astonished her.

Was she becoming cruel, bit by bit, simply because her heart had chosen a man who wore cruelty like a second skin? A man she should never fall for—but the heart never followed logic. If someone had told her just weeks ago that she’d start to feel something for her husband, she would have laughed, mocked the idea, slapped herself awake if she had to.

Yet here she was, no longer certain of what she felt—or what it meant. It terrified her, how little control she seemed to have over her own heart and mind when it came to him. And somewhere deep inside, a whisper warned her that letting herself fall for him could be her undoing. A dangerous thing—this growing fondness for a man she barely knew.

She looked around the cozy beautiful refreshment room, bored. She was waiting for Rohan to finish their shopping, so they could leave, but he showed no sign of being done.

Her gaze wandered to a wall lined with bookshelves. Grateful for the distraction, she stood up from her seat to walk to it to find one to read to pass time.

Her ankle, which had been throbbing earlier, barely hurt anymore—Rohan had applied some cream to it. Slipping her shoe back on, she made her way toward the books.

She browsed through the books, most of which were short entertainment reads, and one in particular caught her attention. She pulled it out, it had a red cover with a drawing of...

Belle flushed at the sight of the crude drawing on the back and quickly tucked it back into the shelf. It was a book with a drawing of a naked man on its back. How could such a book be on the shelves of women’s entertainment books? Was this the kind of stuff the vampire women read for entertainment?

She was embarrassed and shy on behalf of the people reading such books, but to her utter dismay, she found herself getting curious about what such a book held and what they read in it for it to be here. From the red side design, she could tell there were many copies of it on the shelves.

The vampires seemed to have many things different from humans. They even allowed their women to work and run a boutique. In Aragonia, men ruled the world, and a woman was to be a woman. She liked the fact that the night creatures treated women differently—to the point that they were not killed for having such a book displayed for women to read.

Looking towards the closed door and not seeing the sign of anyone coming in, she bit the inside of her cheek and slowly reached out to pull it out of the shelf.

Without looking at the inappropriate cover, she made her way back to sit down on the sofa and opened it. Looking at the naked drawing might discourage her from reading it, thus she opened the first page.

It was a Greek memoir filled with risque passages. Belle realized it wasn’t actually what she had thought—it was an educative guide for women to understand the male body and anatomy, and she found herself relaxing to read it, though the images drawn on the pages were as uncomfortable as the one on the back cover.

Naked men and written words of their body parts. Why on earth would anyone write such a book? Who had stayed naked to be drawn and used in a book?

She never knew books like this even existed. She read the book, wide-eyed and increasingly disturbed by the information in it. When she came across a passage that talked about retained seed and unrelieved male arousal, she held her breath and gasped in shocked disbelief.

Belle knew she shouldn’t read further into this as it felt like invading the opposite gender’s private matters, but she couldn’t stop at this point. The book explained male arousal and how their... manhood reacted to it, and she flushed to the root of her head as she realized something.

She had always wondered what poked her within her husband’s trousers when he kissed or hugged her—now she had the answer in this book, and she felt herself begin to warm up from the inside.

The book explained with all the seriousness of old pseudo-medical texts that a man who was repeatedly aroused but not permitted to find release may suffer from testicular tension, which may cause the following things:

Mental instability

Physical weakness

And in rare cases... death!

Belle gasped. She pressed her palm flat against the page, heart pounding in disbelief and shock. It couldn’t be true that a man could die of that. Surely not. And yet, why would it be in a book if it weren’t?

She continued to read, and to her embarrassment, she read about ways for men to find relief and to avoid such illness.

Her mind raced back to this morning when they had almost done it. The way Rohan had looked at her across the room before he left, his jaw clenched, his eye somewhat annoyed at the interruption. She had noticed on many occasions that the bulge in his trousers had not been tamed like the book said.

Was it... killing him? What about his harem of whores? Did he not go to them at night to tame it?

A strange pang twisted inside her. She hadn’t thought a man could be this affected and severely in a state of death if the bulge wasn’t tamed.

Why wasn’t this taught to them in Aragonia? Women should know about men and get to understand them, but unlike the vampires who were openly writing it in books, you could be thrown in a dungeon in Aragonia if such a book was published.

She had married a virile man and denied him his... his natural urges of release, but then it wasn’t her fault at all. Though she had been glad that they hadn’t gone on with it this morning, it wasn’t in her intentions to make him suffer—not when he had looked after her in ways that made her heart race in his presence.

No one had ever done the things he had for her since the day she was born. And to her dismay, she was beginning to accept this marriage and see him as what he was—her husband, whose presence she was warming to.

It was the main reason she had decided to let Jamie go completely. She might never get loved back by the man she married, but his care and attention were enough for her to live on. She recalled how he had stood with her today, and her heart trembled and swelled with warmth. It was time she also did something for him.

Her cheeks flamed. She would need to inspect him. For signs. For... swelling, like the book had said.

That settled it. If her husband was on the brink of the illness of arousal, she would need to help him release it.