“Have you dominion over these?” he asked her, gesturing toward the trees, meanwhile removing one branch that had gripped his torso familiarly as he passed it by.
“I am the Goddess of the Dream Well. There is where my dominion lies. Only the greater gods have dominion here among the ancient ones.”
“But they heed you,” Gar said. “I see them genuflect as you pass by.”
“They show respect, yes,” she said. “It is unwise to disrespect any deity. Why do you ask?”
The path they followed narrowed suddenly, or was it that he’d just begun to notice the trees on either side crowding close? He opened his mouth to speak, but too late. The goddess waved her hand, and a sturdy oak reached out its branches and tethered him by the arms to its vine-covered trunk.
“…And they do my bidding!” she concluded. Strolling back and forth before him, she pointed to the obvious. “You are aroused,” she said. “The little seal’s doing, while I was left beneath the lake!”
Gar popped a bitter laugh. “You cannot fault her for this,” he said. “I’ve been aroused since I arrived here. You have seen to that. And as to leaving you, the sinking boat struck me in the head. But for that little seal, I would have drowned. She saved my life.”
“I saved your life,” she reminded him.
“Yes, you did,” he returned, “and you gave me your favors until dawn. There is still some time left before that, and I can hardly do you justice tied to this tree. Turn me loose! Believe me, I perform much better as a guest than a captive.”
She continued to stroll around him. “In due time,” she purred.
He shrugged. “You are the one continually telling me time is short,” he said. “Suit yourself.”
Her eyes flashed, and she seized his cock, wrenching a groan that smacked of an odd mix of lust and surprise that startled even him. “Do you mean to say that little seal didn’t cause this to harden?” she demanded. “I saw you two just now!”
“Then you saw naught but the sort of affection a man might have for his faithful dog.” That wasn’t entirely true, for he saw something in the little seal that struck an affectionate chord and touched his heart. Inside that sealskin, there lived an entity that could take the form of a woman, a woman who could be his for the taking if he possessed her pelt. A woman with childlike innocence possessed of a tenderness that he had never known. There was something magnetic about such a tender nature. Something once tasted no man could resist, least of all Gar Trivelyan, who had never known the like.
Secretly, he longed for the little seal’s tender touch, longed for her adoring eyes and benevolent nature, for that truly was a nurturing facet of the little creature’s makeup, an attribute conspicuously absent in the goddess. But it wasn’t the animal. It was the creature within shining through that so enthralled him to the point that he was becoming obsessed with seeing that creature in its human form. He was haunted by the longing to see if the attributes he so admired in the seal carried over in her human incarnation.
These secrets of the heart he could not share with the goddess. It would not do to anger her. His future was still suspect. For all he knew he would never return to his own world. It was more than likely that he would remain a captive in this plane of existence ruled by libidinous lust for the rest of his life, if in fact he still had a life. It did not bode well.
Her hand tightened around his cock and he sucked in a hasty breath. There was no question that she had the touch, no argument that she possessed the power to arouse and fulfill like no other he’d ever known. Her deft fingers were picking out the distended veins in his shaft as she sidled closer, flaunting her nakedness. She’d come so close he could feel her body heat radiating toward him. She was on fire, so steamy hot he feared his cock would burst into flame under the friction of her touch. He could feel the blood thrumming through the pulsating veins she stroked so skillfully. She was about to finish what had started deep within his loins when the little seal nearly touched his genitals on the lakeshore. The difference was the enigmatic little selkie did not have to touch him to set his pulse racing and riddle his loins with drenching fire. If he were to come now, it would be the selkie’s doing, not the hand of the goddess that stroked him so relentlessly. For it was a different hand entirely that stroked him now, playing his body like a fine musical instrument. As skilled as that hand was, there was no love in it. No. This, he would not let on to the Goddess of the Dream Well.
“I do not like tethers,” he said. “Have this ancient one unhand me else I break its branches. I am well able, you know. That I remain thus is out of deference to you, but I grow tired of this game. It would be wise to let me go now.”
“You change the subject easily enough,” she observed. “You have not answered my question.”
“I give no credence to it,” he said succinctly. “What you accuse is too impossible to deserve an answer, and a moot point. What you are doing there is about to make me come. Would that not be more enjoyable if I had the use of my arms, my lady?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she purred, sauntering closer still, so close her hardened nipples touched his chest and his cock leaned heavily against her slit. “There is something very provocative about bringing a bound man to climax.” She began rubbing herself against his shaft, slow undulations that threatened to drive him mad. “See how it lives for me?” she murmured.
She ground the petal-like folds of her vulva harder against him, and he strained against his tether. To his dismay, he found that he could not break his bonds as he had boasted. The tree branches were possessed of superhuman strength. They were enchanted, as were the vines that roped him now, climbing his body, binding him to the trunk of the ancient tree, while she had her way with him.
“It must be nearly dawn,” he said. “Can we not find a more comfortable way to couple?”
The goddess laughed. “Time means nothing here, knight of the realm,” she said. “Dawn here and dawn in your world are two entirely different things.”
From somewhere deep in the fuzzy labyrinth of his memory, Gar recalled hearing that time as mortals knew it did not exist in the Celtic Otherworld. A pity he hadn’t remembered earlier. But he would not dwell upon that then. It was clear that Analee wasn’t going to release him until she’d satisfied the lust that was inherent in her, the libidinous drive that powered all the fay. There was much he needed to know, much he needed to ask her, but not while her skilled fingers were setting fire to his moist skin, and her body was charging his loins with unstoppable lust. While she was his guest, his slave, his captive, he was under her spell. She had made him what she was for the duration of his stay. How long would that be? How long before the dawn? He was almost afraid to ask these questions, though what flimsy shred of humanity he still possessed in this enchanted place demanded he do so, just not yet…
“Umm,” she hummed. “I see your point about your tethers. Something is lost this way, but I know a way to get it back, maybe even stronger.”
With no more said, she began pumping his cock in slow, deep, spiraling revolutions that wrenched a troop of throaty moans from him. A beam of moonlight spilled over them through the trees’ leafy branches. Glancing down, he saw that his shaft was blue with engorged veins, the head a desperate shade of red, slick with pre-come. It wouldn’t take many of those motions to bring the climax, and though he fought against it with his mind, his body jerked, and his loins jutted forward as if his body were possessed of a mind of its own.
A captive of the passion, his whole body throbbed like a pulse beat. It echoed in his ears like the beat of a galley drum, thumping—hammering—begging for the release her cool hands promised. He began to drive himself against those fingers relentlessly.
Gar shut his eyes. He was on the brink of ecstasy, but they wouldn’t stay closed. Was there any part of his anatomy that didn’t have a mind of its own? Instead, his hooded gaze fell upon what she was doing to him, and to herself, for she had begun to stroke her slit with her free hand.
Exposing her clitoris, she began to rub it in the same slow, shuddering rhythm as she stroked his cock. He could see the hard bud slick with the wetness of her arousal, and the swollen nether lips beneath as she parted them, inching deeper inside the petal-like folds of her vagina.
Gar’s breath was coming short as she quickened the rhythm of her strokes upon his shaft to match that of her deft fingers caressing her genitalia. She pressed up against him, grinding her hard nipples into his chest as she stroked herself, and Gar could bear no more. He groaned as his hips jerked forward, and he thrust himself into her hand faster and faster as she undulated against him, his heart hammering against her, his whole body convulsed in wave upon wave of heart-wrenching contractions.
There was no stopping, no holding back now. He could no longer watch what she was doing to him, to herself. It didn’t matter. He could feel, oh how he could feel! Pistoning into her hand as she stroked him again and again, he matched her thrust for stroke until the thick lava flow of his seed erupted from him. It rushed out of him in long shivering spurts that spilled over the leaf mulch on the forest floor like rain. The riveting sound it made combined with the goddess’s orgasmic murmurings quickened his heartbeat, wrenching another groan from him.
A wave of Analee’s hand released him from the tree, whose branches once more reached toward the sky as if they had not ever tethered him. The old oak seemed to sigh, the sound whispering through its uppermost branches. It was almost a human sound that called Gar’s eyes to the treetops, where the silvered moon was visible in fleeting glimpses.
Analee ran her finger along the side of his cheek. When it reached the corner of his lips, she slipped it into his mouth. It tasted of herbs and bee pollen, and of her musky juices, dark and sultry. Why did he think of ambergris then? How strange that in the fragrant forest, rich with the scents of lush foliage, herbs and the peppery tang of pine, he could smell the mysterious sea, in all its evocative splendor.
“Come,” she said, leading him deeper into the wood. “A place has been prepared for us to wait for the dawn.”
Gar breathed a sigh of relief. Those words held a glimmer of hope. This was all very well, but he had begun to fear that the dawn would never come for him in the goddess’s realm. She was a skilled seductress, and a more formidable adversary than any foe on the field of battle that he had ever come up against. She used her sexuality like a seasoned warrior used his sword, and with it, she possessed the power to maim or kill or to enslave. Which fate had she planned for him? There was no question that she had a plan; he could see it in the little smiles that did not reach her eyes, and in the way she avoided answering him directly. Like a poisonous serpent paralyzes its victim, so had she paralyzed him with her wiles, with the secret powers of the astral that had been known to drive men mad. That he was still aware of that was a good sign, and he called upon what few threads of his humanity still knitted him together to burnish it into his fogged memory.
They walked a while in silence. There were so many questions banging around in Gar’s brain demanding answers, questions that he was almost afraid to ask. He was hoping they were heading toward some body of water where he might see the little seal again, but this was not the time to broach that subject. The Goddess of the Dream Well was possessed of a temper, and this wasn’t the moment to test it.
“What happens when dawn breaks?” he said at last.
She cast him a sidelong glance. “That depends,” she said.
“Upon you, I know,” he returned. “But surely you know by now what you mean to do with me at sunrise.”
“That depends,” she repeated, “but not upon me, upon you.”
Now he was intrigued, though he decided to leave that for a bit. “You say time does not exist here,” he said. “How much mortal time has passed since I washed up on your shore?”
“I do not know time, mortal or otherwise,” she replied. “It has neither meaning nor purpose here in the Otherworld.” She shrugged. “Some who have visited here return to find their loved ones long gone to their reward, while their stay here seemed no longer than what you mortals call ‘hours.’ And others…never return.” Her voice deepened with the last, and her hesitation troubled him, but he went on nonetheless. He’d come this far. He needed to know what to expect.
“Because they chose to stay here, or was it something else?” he asked her.
She stopped in her tracks and faced him. She was wearing her long flowing mantle again. When had she put that on? She was as naked as he was when she emerged from the lake. It didn’t matter. The garment was as transparent as a morning cobweb spangled with dew, catching glints from the low-sliding moon. The trees were thinning and the moonbeams picked out the firm, round shape of her buttocks and the perfect globes of her breasts. Her tawny nipples straining against the gossamer fabric held his gaze relentlessly.
“Some choose, and some are chosen,” she said.
It was clear that she wasn’t going to give him a straight answer, and the more important his questions seemed, the less she was going to divulge. He attempted a casual attitude, as casual as he could manage possessed by Otherworldly lust madness in the company of a nearly naked sex goddess who was flaunting her charms.
“I see,” he said. “And where do I fit in that number?”
She smiled. “Are you so anxious to leave?”
Gar laughed. Did it sound as blatantly nervous to her as it did to him? “It is only natural that I would be concerned for my fellow shipmates,” he said. “That galley was bringing us home from a long campaign in the north. It was the last lap of a harrowing journey over land and sea. The knights were battle weary, longing for home, and here I am safe in the arms of a beautiful goddess. Is it any wonder that I would be anxious?”
“You were not so anxious a moment ago, when I held this cock in my hand, Gar Trivelyan,” she purred, fondling his shaft, which had begun to rise again. “But your member here is anxious, isn’t it? I fear we may not make it to the perfect place to wait upon the dawn.”
“Because you have enchanted me,” Gar said.
“I have granted your wish,” she murmured, “and awarded you my favors, but only for a little…until the dawn. I have said so from the start. I promised no more, or no less. Is your arm healed?”
“Yes, but—”
“Have I not given you my favors?” she interrupted him.
“You have, my lady, yes,” he responded.
“Then I have kept my word, knight of the realm, and I owe you nothing more.”
“But the dawn has not yet broken,” Gar persisted, “and as you have so often said, time grows short. I would know how short, my lady. It is a reasonable request.” There! It was out. She would have to answer him now. It was a direct question.
The goddess smiled a smile that chilled him to the bone. “Like I’ve said,” she purred, “and I do not like repeating myself: That, my impetuous knight, does not depend upon me. It depends upon you. Come now, the best is yet to come.”
5
G ar said no more. He was at the mercy of the Goddess of the Dream Well. It was that simple. Everything he’d heard about the Otherworld was coming back to haunt him as they walked through the forest among the thinning trees toward a little clearing beyond the thicket, where a blanket had been laid among the sleeping wildflowers. It was no ordinary blanket, but a thin veil of transparent stuff spangled with the morning dew. Bowls and platters set upon it were heaped high with fruits of the harvest, nuts, apples, plums, grapes, and succulent pomegranates, along with fragrant breads and cakes made of tender unborn grains glazed with honey. There were slabs of soft cheese, flagons of sweet wine, and crocks of mead, a veritable feast for the gods. She waved her hand and a ground-creeping mist rose like a cottony fog surrounding them.
Gar was suddenly very hungry. His mouth was watering over the array of food spread out before him. Above, the moon was slowly sinking toward the horizon. Soon the sky would lighten and he would finally have the answer to the q
uestion he so longed and dreaded to hear all at once: What would become of him when dawn broke?
Analee knelt upon the shimmering cloth and beckoned to him to join her. Gar dropped to his knees and reclined on a pillow, watching her examine the food. As good as it all looked and smelled something nagging at the back of his brain brought a constricting lump to his throat. It was common knowledge that one must never accept food from the fay. To do so meant captivity in the Otherworld for all eternity. Was this what the goddess meant when she said it was up to him? If that were so, he knew what would happen to him if he did eat the offered food. The question was what would happen to him if he didn’t?
“None for me,” he said, as she offered him a succulent grape from the bunch in her hand. “I am sated on your love alone.” Why did the word love addressing her taste so bitter on his tongue? There was no love in her, only lust. There was more love in the soft flipper of the strange little selkie seal than there was in the goddess’s whole voluptuous body. And why did the word evoke the little seal’s image?
The goddess bit into the grape she’d offered him. A little rivulet of the juice trickled over her lower lip, glistening in the moonlight. The moon seemed to have frozen in the sky. Its position hadn’t changed since they sat down on the gossamer cloth.
Gar nodded toward the heavens. “We seem to be frozen in time,” he said, as casually as he could manage.
“You mortals are always so obsessed with time,” she returned. She caught a drop of the juice on the tip of her finger and sucked it clean. “If you only knew how much better you would fare in your world without it.”
Eros Island Page 10
