The Sea King

by C. L. Wilson

  And he was taking too long!

  She dragged his head away from her breasts, snarled, “Hurry, damn you! Hurry!” Then she fused her mouth to his, feasting on him, all but attacking him. She bit his tongue, tasted the sweet, metallic savor of his blood. He groaned, slanted his head, and kissed her more deeply than ever, as if through a kiss alone he could crawl inside her and fill up that empty place screaming for succor.

  Some distant, shocked part of her mind whispered, What are you doing? But her body paid it no heed. It was as if some wild, primitive force had possessed her.

  And that primitive force wanted him—Dilys Merimydion—in ways Gabriella had never even dreamed of.

  A breath of cool air wafted across her backside. He’d finally fought his way through the tangle of her skirts. Her back arched as his hand curved around her buttocks.

  A furious snarl rumbled in his chest as his fingers encountered yet another shield of cloth standing between his hand and her naked flesh. She felt a tug, heard the rip as linen sundered, then tore her lips from his and arched her back as broad fingers slipped across bare skin that had never known a man’s touch.

  Without hesitation, those fingers dove between the rounded mounds of her buttocks, seeking and finding the softer, even more intimate skin between.

  Yes! Yes! She arched her back more, thrusting her aching breasts up. His hot mouth ate a scorching path down the line of her throat, found the mounds of her exposed breasts once more, bit at the hard, aching nipples until she cried out and writhed against him. Her fingers dove into the thick, soft coils of his hair, clutching his head to her. The hand between her legs stroked her slick, overheated flesh. Each brush of fingertips against skin ratcheted up her need.

  Then, abruptly, he drew back, pulling away from her breasts, stilling the fingers that had been working their delicious, feverish magic.

  “No! Please,” she wept. Her hips convulsed, riding his hand, his fingers. She pushed herself against him, not knowing what she needed, but knowing that she needed it and only he could provide it. “Please!”

  “My Name, Gabriella,” he said, and in his voice was a sound beyond hearing that rippled across her body, sank into her skin, vibrated across every cell of her body. “Speak my Name.”

  “Dilys!” she cried, shuddering. “Dilys, please!”

  “My true Name, Siren. Speak my true Name, and I will give you everything you want and more.”

  The terrible need she thought couldn’t get worse peaked even higher. The magic in his voice whispered across her nerve endings, played upon her like a thousand lips, tongues, fingers, becoming a torment of exquisite agony, until she thought she would say anything, do anything to find the relief just beyond her reach.

  A name trembled at the edges of her mind. The same name she’d heard before. Strange and foreign, a name that was both new to her and yet as familiar as her own skin. His Name, she knew. It rose in her throat, throbbed on her tongue, pushed to be Voiced. But she daren’t. If she did, if she let him in, let herself love him with the wild, all-consuming abandon currently raging through every cell of her body . . . He was the flame that would light the world-destroying inferno inside her.

  Her head thrashed from side to side. She was in an agony of need. She reached for him, fingers clawed. “Dilys, enough!” When he didn’t immediately respond, desperation sharpened with spikes of anger. He thought he could refuse her? That he would torment her into bending to his will? “Enough!” she barked, and something very powerful from very deep inside roared up through her body and spilled out of her mouth, filling her voice with Command.

  He shuddered as though she’d struck him a mighty blow. His eyes flared golden bright. His lips pulled back, baring gleaming white teeth that now included a distinct set of long, sharp fangs.

  He dove down, taking one breast with his mouth, the other with his hand. The thumb beneath her skirts pressed hard on a spot between her legs that made her gasp and start to shake. He lifted his head, tugging her tight nipple up between his teeth, stroking the pebbled tip with his tongue until she wept and pleaded against for release.

  And then he uttered, “Ililia nua,” in a Voice that penetrated every part of her being.

  Sensation exploded across every nerve ending. A scream ripped from her throat as an ocean of pleasure crashed down upon her. It swept her up, tossed her wildly about, sent her tumbling, washed over her again and again and again until she was boneless and limp, her throat raw from her unbridled cries.

  Dilys cupped her face with shaking hands. “Now, Gabriella,” he urged in a harsh whisper. “Speak my Name.”

  She stared up into his fever-bright eyes, and found herself floating once more in that sea of sunlight again, heat and blinding radiance all around. And the voice was singing in her mind, a Siren’s Song that promised endless happiness, love, complete belonging, an end to the loneliness that had surrounded her soul since birth. She wasn’t meant to be alone. She was meant to be joined. To be part of another—part of him. Two halves of a whole, joined forever through unbreakable bonds that only she could forge.

  “Speak my Name, Sirena. Claim me as your mate. Bind me to you for all time.” It was Dilys’s voice speaking to her in the sunlit sea, but the tones throbbed with a compulsion that worked on her like a thousand tiny chisels, chipping away at the wall of her will.

  Despite the shattering release that had just torn through every part of her being, the power she’d feared all her life was nowhere near drained. Instead, it was bubbling inside her, rising like lava in the throat of a volcano, pressure building, making the shuddering ache of her pleasure-wracked body seem minuscule by comparison.

  Claim what is thine. Speak his Name. Set us free.

  The voice was like a sentience inside her, a caged beast fighting to be free, furious at the continuing shackles she placed upon it. It wanted Dilys with a wild, ferocious eagerness. Rejoiced at his nearness. Reached for him with all its considerable might.

  And she, Gabriella, the Season who knew what horrors came from someone like her letting down their guard and surrendering to the madness of love, was all that stood between them.

  If she gave in . . .

  “No!” she cried. “No!” She sat up quickly, shoving at his chest with force enough to throw him off balance.

  “Gabriella.” He reached for her as she leapt to her feet.

  That powerful wildness was still leaping hungrily inside her. If she let him touch her—seduce her—again, she would lose the battle to keep it contained. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. “No!” she cried. “Get away.” She shoved him away once more, and this time, unbidden, a burst of sharp power shoved with her.

  There was a flash of light. The smell of something burning.

  And Dilys Merimydion went flying backward through the frothing white curtain of Snowbeard Falls.

  “Gabriella!” Dilys bobbed up, surfacing in the Llaskroner Fjord in time to see the Siren he planned to marry run out of Snowbeard Falls Grotto clutching the edges of her gaping bodice with both hands. “Gabriella, stop!” She paused, saw him there in the middle of the fjord, then took off running again, heading for the palace.

  He swam quickly to the fjord’s north shore and was about to climb out of the water when he realized his shuma was gone. The linen gudo he wore beneath was burned, and hanging in tatters from one hip. And there were scorch marks on his abdomen. He poked experimentally at the reddened skin and hissed a little at its tenderness. The blast of power that had sent him flying off his feet and into the drink had not only burned his shuma right off his body, it had done a good number on him as well.

  A little lower, and she would have burned off something he’d miss a Hel of a lot more than his shuma.

  And he would have deserved it!

  He smacked the water’s surface with the flat of one hand and sank back down into its depths, kicking off from the shore to float out into the center of the channel. He tracked the sky blue of Gabriella’s gown through the garde
ns and back into the palace, where she slipped in a side door and disappeared from view.

  Only when she was safe inside did he drop beneath the waves and dive deep into the cold, dark waters of the fjord. The webbing between his fingers and toes expanded, giving him greater speed as he swam the length of the fjord and out into open sea. After what had just passed between Gabriella and himself, he needed the comfort of the deep, blue saltwater world that was his natural element. He needed to think and regroup.

  He had, without a doubt, made a gross tactical error.

  Fury sizzled his veins, the bite of self-recrimination sharp and painful. What had he been thinking? How could he have made such a grievous mistake? All his life, he’d trained for one ultimate goal: to forge a powerful and lasting mating bond with the woman to whom he would anchor himself, body and soul.

  And yet, when that woman appeared before him, instead of courting her with the tools he’d spent a lifetime preparing, instead of winning her trust and her love with patience and skill, he’d bungled everything. From their very first day, he’d alienated her. He’d dismissed her, insulted her, wounded her feelings, and now, after realizing what she was—who she was, both to Calberna and to him—he’d rushed her. Instead of sliding into the chase with the sleek confidence of the Calbernan prince he was, he’d thrashed about with all the finesse of a frenzied shark. Had his mentors witnessed his behavior, they would have rightly turned their backs on him in shame.

  If she refused to let him come within a thousand feet of her ever again, he wouldn’t be able to blame her!

  His hands curled near his face, claws fully extended. It was all he could do not to tear the ulumi-lia from his own cheek in self-loathing. He wasn’t perfect. He made mistakes. Even now, despite his years of training. But not once in his life had he blundered so many times and so badly as he had with Summer Coruscate.

  His failure was all the more galling because his blunders had been with her.

  He should never have followed her to the grotto. He’d known she wanted him. She couldn’t hide that. Even if she hadn’t lost herself almost as badly as he had in their kiss, he knew well enough how to read the signs of a woman’s body to know that he aroused her on the most basic and primitive of levels.

  He should have used that to his advantage. Been patient. He should have baited his hook and dangled it before her until she came to him. Instead, he’d cornered her, left her nowhere to run, overwhelmed her with his sheer physical presence and his own unbridled passion until she yielded.

  And in doing so, he might just have lost everything.

  There were some prizes brute force could not win. Some victories that required subtlety.

  He needed to regroup, to set aside the wild, wave-tossed storm of emotion and desire and aching, painful need that battered him from the inside out. He needed to find or force calm enough to think.

  He could not afford to blunder again. From this point on, his hunt had to be flawless or he would lose her altogether, and that was unthinkable.

  The only thing that gave him any hope at all was the sweet, wild way she’d come apart in his arms, after she’d Commanded him to end her torment, and in return, he’d Commanded her to surrender to the ililia nua, the ocean of pleasure.

  She was a Siren. He could not have compelled her just then with the weak shadow of susirena that Calbernan males possessed unless she allowed it. And she would not have allowed it from any male except one with whom she shared a bond of trust.

  She might lie to him, try to deny him, refuse to Call his Name, but at least on some basic level, the Siren in her recognized him as a male she could trust. Recognized him as a mate. As her mate.

  He clung to that realization as the beacon of hope it was.

  From this moment forward, he was going to make up for all his past wrongs. He was going to woo her as she deserved. Until he won her trust, proved to her that she had his complete devotion, convinced her beyond all doubt that he was the right—the only—mate for her. Until she Called his Name and bound him to her—and bound herself to him in return, body and soul.

  This was the mission he’d trained for all his life. Gabriella was the victory he’d spent a lifetime working to achieve.

  Filled with a renewed sense of purpose, Dilys shot for the ocean’s surface, instinctively summoning his seagifts to speed him along. He shouldn’t have gotten much of a response. Even though Ryll, Ari, and a number of his men had gifted him with enough of their own power each day that he was no longer struggling to make it through the day without collapsing, keeping Gabriella alive had drained away all the great magic his mother had given to him. He had no ability to replenish that power, and yet, now, he shot through the water at a speed that could only be powered by great magic.

  That was when he realized that in their passion, the Siren in Gabriella given him power. A vast ocean of it. More power than even his mother had ever be able to share with him—and Alysaldria held within her the concentrated magic of generations of Calbernan queens.

  He broke the surface of the ocean, leaping skyward, soaring weightlessly through the air. The warm golden rays of the sun enveloped him in a sea of light, and he gave a laughing shout of exultation before his body arched gracefully and speared back into the Varyan’s welcoming blue waves.

  She was his. Deny it all she would, but she was his as surely as he was hers.

  She had accepted his passion, his care, his devotion, and given him in exchange trust, passion, and her glorious, Siren-born magic, filling him with crackling energy and more strength than he had ever known. In doing so, whether she had intended to or not, she had completed makura ri, the touch of giving and receiving, and committed herself to liakapua, the Calbernan mating ritual.

  Chapter 12

  Thanks to servants’ stairs and a judicious use of Persuasion, Gabriella managed to make it back to her room without anyone raising an alarm over her disheveled appearance. Once safely behind her bedroom’s closed and locked doors, she shed her torn blue gown and silk chemise, then stood there naked trying to figure out what to do with them. If there’d been a fire in the hearth, she would have tossed the clothes in and let them burn, but it was summer and the hearth was empty.

  With no other obvious method of disposal available to her, she threw the dress and chemise in the corner of the room and began to pace with short, agitated steps. That lasted for perhaps five seconds before she groaned and covered her face with her hands.

  Summer Sun! What had come over her?

  He’d kissed her, touched her, and she’d lost all reason. He’d suckled her fingers, for Halla’s sake! Then suckled something more scandalous than that. She covered her breasts with her hands, only to shudder as touching the still-sensitized tips made her muscles clench with remembered passion. She snatched her hands back and resumed pacing.

  “It was magic,” she muttered. “It had to have been.”

  There was no other explanation.

  One kiss, one touch, and she’d practically begged Dilys Merimydion to ruin her right there on the bench in Snowbeard Falls Grotto!

  She’d let him unlace her bodice, touch her breasts—kiss them! She’d wrapped her legs around his waist and rubbed the most intimate parts of her body against his. She’d let him put his hand up her skirt, let him stroke flesh so private not even the maids who tended her in the bath touched her there except through the barrier of a washcloth.

  And, gods help her, she’d enjoyed every moment.

  She’d wanted more.

  Even now, after he’d given her a stunning release that was most assuredly the ecstasy Khamsin had told them all about, Gabriella wanted more. Much, much more.

  A knock on the door made her gasp and whirl around.

  “Gabriella?” Spring’s voice. “Gabriella, are you in there? Are you all right, dearest?”

  “J-just a minute!” Summer ran to her dressing room and snatched a robe off one of the hangers, pulling it on and thrusting her arms in the sleeves as she hurried t
o answer the door. Halfway there, she remembered the dress in the corner. “I’ll be right there!” she called as she sprinted across the room to seize it. A frantic search of the room, looking for a place to hide the gown, offered up no more options than earlier.

  “Gabriella, what’s going on? Open this door!” More knocking. The knob rattled.

  Summer ran back to the dressing room and shoved the dress into the corner, behind several other hanging gowns, rearranging them to hide the blue fabric.

  “Gabriella!”

  Summer ran for the door, tying the sash on her robe as she went. A lock of hair flopped against her cheek and she stopped in her tracks, her hands going to her hair. The neatly arranged coiffure that Dilys Merimydion had put in complete disarray. Gods! One look at that mess, and Vivi would have more questions than Gabriella was ready to deal with at the moment. She began pulling out pins, shoving them in her robe’s pocket. When all the pins were gone, her hair tumbling down her back, she ran her fingers through the mass to smooth it, took a deep breath, then opened the door.

  “Vivi. What’s the matter?” She tried her best to look surprised and concerned. “Has something happened?”

  Spring’s eyes narrowed and swept the room as she stepped across the threshold. “One of the servants said they’d seen you running upstairs. I was concerned.” She turned back to Summer. “I understand you ran into Sealord Merimydion in the garden.” At the sound of Dilys’s name, Summer flushed, and Spring’s eyes narrowed more. “Gabriella, be honest. Is everything all right? Did something happen?”

  “H-happen?” Summer heard the faint quaver in her voice and could have kicked herself. She’d have to do better than this if she didn’t want Viviana learning every humiliating detail about Summer’s indiscretion. “Don’t be silly, Vivi. Yes, I ran into the Sealord in the garden. He tried to convince me to accept his courtship, I said no and I left. End of story.”

  Viviana was no fool to be so easily duped. “If that’s all that happened, Gabriella, then why are you up here in your room, looking like you just rolled out of bed?”