by Nara Malone
Goddess, he wanted inside her. Now.
Her hands slid up his chest and fisted in his hair, pulling his face to hers. Her lips opened under his with an eagerness he hoped to find when he went probing lower down. He turned her and she moved easily, intuiting the direction he’d take.
He backed her against the glass wall, his hands sliding up her arms to capture her wrists, while his tongue caressed hers, coaxed her to kiss back. Her body warmed under his attention and her desire rose, filling his nostrils with sweet incense, turning his blood to liquid fire.
He broke the kiss and dropped to his knees, dragging her hands downward, pinning them against her hips while he buried his nose in the slick folds of her pussy. A swipe of his tongue along her slit plucked a full-body shiver from her.
He would die. He would die. With a flip of his middle finger at all the immortality curses Mere could spout, he would die right here on his knees with his face pressed into the heaven between Maille’s thighs.
As if Maille had somehow turned the tide, turned selkie pheromones back on him, he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Waves of lust sluiced through his body, unraveling his moor rope. Leaving him clutching at the last strands of control.
“Don’t stop,” she whimpered. The wrenching, sweet agony in her tone restored sanity. A drop.
Just enough.
“You have me, love,” he said between licks, “any way you want.”
Pleasure shuddered through her, even as she turned her head from side to side, denying him. Or denying herself.
He parted her swollen lips, baring her engorged clit to quick, fluttery strokes, his tongue fast and gentle as the beat of butterfly wings. Whatever she intended to say was lost in a string of whimpers and moans.
His tongue burrowed into her heat and her muscles clenched around it, making his cock jerk and throb. Wrenching moans from him as well. She shook his hands off and dug her fingers into his hair, locking his head in place, freeing his hands to squeeze that firm bottom.
He didn’t need more urging, alternating thrusts and licks with a speed and precision that would drive her right to edge of mindlessness.
Water lapped over his lower legs and the hot spray of the shower pummeled his back, but the woman squirming under his tongue had all his attention. She was close, so close.
His teeth caged the erect nub of her clit, while his tongue flogged the tip. “I can’t. I can’t. Can’t,” she groaned.
I can’t was a long way from I won’t or I don’t want to. I can’t meant she would if he insisted. Though he was likely to lose a few patches of hair when she did.
He had tasted a lot of women but none like this woman. The tang of honeysuckle had him burrowing his tongue deep in her clenching tunnel. The squeeze of her muscles around him gave lie to her can’t. She could. She was close to proving so.
She managed to get one hand between him and the treasure he meant to devour. Her nails scraped his scalp as she forced his head back. Panting, she kept his mouth covered until she could speak.
“Fuck, f-f-fuck m-me,” she panted. “I n-need…”
He didn’t need any more encouragement than that. Rising from his knees, he hauled her up and her legs went readily around his hips. Her head dropped back to rest on the rippled glass and her eyes squeezed shut as he nudged his cock into her exquisite heat. He thought she was sobbing now, with pleasure certainly, but his grasp of the situation was failing. He had one thought, and one thought only—she wanted fucking. She would have it.
“Hold tight, sweetheart.”
Her legs tightened around his back. The first hard thrust ripped a cry from her. He took his time, savoring the sweet, slick heat he’d been aching to sink into since his tongue went diving.
Ah, she was a treasure. He pressed deep and she quivered around him. Their eyes locked. The barrier between Ronin the enchanted and Maille the enchantress dissolved. He was part of her, her mind entwined with his.
Stunned, he could only stare, frozen in time, his mouth hanging open. It was as if a key turned in the lock guarding his ugliest secrets and she saw without shrinking away.
The ghostly call of a wild loon turned her rigid in his arms, and an equally haunting answer snapped the psychic connection.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered.
“It’s okay, sweetheart. An eerie sound, to be sure, but it’s just loons calling. An avian love song, no doubt. Probably have their minds set on the same thing we do.”
“They don’t,” she said with conviction and a shiver. He bent his head to stop her next words with a kiss, bring her back to pleasure.
It didn’t take long to make her forget the interruption. With each thrust her panting rose, quickening with his. But the psychic link remained beyond his grasp. She arched her back and moaned when he drove in, but she held a small part of herself back, her emotions impenetrable.
He picked up the pace, the slap of bodies, her arching back, nails raking his skin, drove him senseless, so he was barely aware and willingly obedient when she said, “Now, Ronin. Come with me, now.”
She murmured in his ear. Words that seemed familiar but made no sense. And did that matter just now? His wild mind was taking over, submerging reason, as if he were sinking into a dream, leaving him fathomless.
His cock drove deep into the impossible silky heat of her. Her muscles tightening around his cock had him babbling something back.
He tried to regain some sense but she was so soft and silky and responsive. If he could fuck a woman in the depths of the ocean, bodies connected in the liquid weightlessness of fluid power, it might feel like this. Mindless, weightless passion, unfettered by the harshness of air and earth.
He meant to slow down, make it last, but couldn’t stop. It was as if she had turned the tables, drugged him with her DNA.
She had taken charge, turned him inside out.
He hovered on the brink of orgasm. Sweet torture. Drawn out by her control. Still, he couldn’t let go without the melody of a woman’s voice rising in release.
As if she read his mind her whimpers filled his ears. His cock jerked, filling her and leaving him empty to the soul.
Maille bolted almost as soon as he pulled out. Ronin turned off the taps and slid down the wall to sit in the draining water. It took a moment for reality to sink in. He’d been duped. He’d almost forgotten such a thing were possible, could never recall it happening. Not even when he was still human.
Sure, her reaction had been genuine at first. Right up until the loon call. Or maybe that psychic dip into his soul’s shadows had put her off. But something had changed at that point. Something had given Maille Shane power to do the impossible. She’d faked an orgasm with a selkie lover.
Had there been an undercurrent of untapped power running through her from the beginning? He would have sworn not. No evidence of such, save flashes of clarity, one moment under his spell, a moment later in control. Raw and unfocused power, perhaps. Yet, she’d wielded it well enough in the last moments. Well enough to wither magick wrought by a Goddess.
Beginners luck? Or was Mere bored and using the girl to torment Ronin in new ways?
He scrubbed his face with both hands and pushed to his feet. It dawned on him that somehow she knew what he was. She wouldn’t be the first intended who thought she might free him from his fate. If a woman could resist an orgasm with a selkie for an entire night, until the first flash of dawn broke over the lip of the sea, her selkie lover could go free.
That part of the selkie legend was a lie. Were it true, how was it no selkie had ever been freed?
Selkies were enchanted and irresistible. That wickedly erotic circle would not be broken. Maille would be under him, screaming her way through an orgasm at some point before this night was out. It was their fate. His sentence. He deserved every minute. Every second of every century he’d served. That and more.
The cackle of the loon’s song echoed down the beach again. It had an uncanny similarity to Mere’s laughter.
Chapter Three
The knee injury throbbed and Maille was grateful. Pain tamped down the intensity of Ronin’s erotic persuasion. Between the rush of adrenaline and raging hormones, the misery had receded to the background until now.
Yes, her skin still burned, feverish with desire. Another dunk in the ocean would feel like heaven, but then he would know she wasn’t satisfied, that right at the brink she’d pulled back.
Something was wrong. The warning had pricked in the back of her brain right at the edge of orgasm. Gave her stomach a monster-lurking-in-the-shadows queasiness. She’d known something was off even before the loons sang out a warning. It was silly to pay attention to these flashes of intuition. That she could interpret animal language was a fantasy spun by her grandmother, along with a whole host of other metaphysical nonsense about opening her senses to the power and second sight.
Senses weren’t reliable relays for facts. Emotions, like the bleak doom settling in the pit of her belly, were the least reliable relays of all. Facts, measurable data, were the only thing she could count on as truth.
That her body craved Ronin was fact backed up by—
a) a weeping pussy
b) bone-throbbing desire
c) hands that shook so badly she couldn’t manage to interlace her fingers and fold them in her lap.
Undeniable biofeedback. Any inner resistance to the idea of giving in to the hottest man she had ever laid eyes on—or hands or tongue on—had to be psychological.
Yet the thought of ignoring the warning and going back to Ronin made her feel so ill and dizzy she had to stop and sit on the sauna bench. Every nerve hummed, her skin so sensitized that if she stepped through the door, the wind’s kiss against her skin would bring her to her knees.
The door banged open. Ronin was not easily abandoned.
“You okay, Maille love?” he asked, his tone gruffer than the words.
She swallowed, kept her eyes closed. If she didn’t look, she couldn’t spontaneously combust.
Quaking hands were bound to telegraph just how un-okay she was. She pinned them under her thighs.
“Maille?” Deep inside, her body responded to his lilting brogue with clenches and quivers.
“Fine,” was all she dared say. More than one word, one syllable, and her voice would have a quaver.
“You’re shivering.” His tone softened. “Did I hurt you?”
He was reaching for her. She knew it even with her eyes closed. Like an electrostatic generator, the friction of his presence charged the air between them. Energy snapped and tingled over her skin.
She shrank away, pressing her back into the redwood wall. “Don’t.” She meant it to sound confident, assertive. It came out a whimper. The hand she held up to fend him off shook. She tucked it behind her back.
“Why? What’s this now?”
He was moving in. She’d be trapped. No way would he miss the longing still telegraphing through her limbs.
She grabbed towels and robes, rose on wobbling legs to thrust them into his arms. The presence of a barrier, however flimsy, gave her strength. She snagged a robe from a hook and pulled it on like armor—silken armor gliding over sensitized skin. She ground her teeth and fumbled with the belt tie while trying to keep an eye on Ronin without seeming to.
Ronin stepped back, angled his head as if a new perspective would clarify her behavior. She regretted the frown crinkling his forehead. And at the same time she knew getting distance between them was the only way to get a grip on this carnal mania that had taken hold of her. She’d had no practice at reining in lust.
“I’m fine,” she said again. This time her voice sounded believably steady.
Ronin, of course, was having none of it. He shoved the armload of terry cloth back at her, caught her by the shoulders and turned her so her face was illuminated by the sauna’s solar lamp.
“No, something’s wrong…” No question in his tone, just a simple statement of fact that trailed off as his frown deepened. As if guided by an invisible GPS, he dropped to his knees, hands skimming from waist down thighs, sending erotic sparks through her robe, dancing over her skin and zinging up her spine. “You’re hiding something from me.” He said it as if the very concept was a complex mathematical equation to be balanced and solved. Then he went still.
No way to escape the truth. She grappled for some explanation that might soothe his ego. How to soften the blow that she’d faked orgasm?
His hands cupped either side of her knee. Relief, or something more potent, turned her legs to water. She had to lean against the doorjamb to stay upright. Her banged knee a perfect distraction or perfect excuse. Either way she was saved.
He blew gently on the wound—a sweet, soothing sensation that only fed the urge to redirect him to higher ground. She wrenched away instead.
“I said I’m fine.” She limped ahead of him, the knee feeling suddenly stiff and stubbornly unresponsive when she tried to get away. She hugged the towels as if they were a life raft that could keep her afloat in the sea of lust threatening to pull her under.
“Nonsense,” he said, coming after her and scooping her up, his tone sharp and crisp as a winter morning. “When did this happen? How?”
“Put me down, Ronin. I mean it.”
He didn’t.
* * * * *
Even in the soft light of an oil lamp, there was no denying her knee was more than scraped. She did anyway.
“It’s not a big deal.”
He stopped dabbing the abrasion, which itself wasn’t a very big deal, and just stared at her.
Maille squirmed, uncomfortable sitting on the exam table where her grandmother had treated injured animals. Doubly agitated by the force of being at eye-level with Ronin. She dropped her gaze. A deep, black bruise, the kind that formed quickly around the site of bleeding bone, surrounded the cut.
He dipped the towel back into the enamel basin of water and antiseptic solution and wrung it out. “How?”
She shrugged. Her thoughts traveled backward. Memories were lost in fog, as if her subconscious were trying to shield her from that knowledge. Okay then, what was the last thing she could remember before the fog?
Sunshine. Bright, beautiful sky, so perfectly blue it hurt her eyes. Spring morning with birds singing. And the sound of the surf. Hadn’t that been just this morning?
Bare feet padding across the kitchen floor yanked her attention back to the present. The mirror on the right wall gave a clear view of Ronin rummaging in the freezer compartment. He’d tied a towel around his waist.
He wore it well. Very well.
The power was out. Unlike the newer, solar-powered bath house, the cottage was a relic from another time. The oil lamps had been filled and at the ready in the kitchen and great room. The old propane stove and fridge were still in place.
The still room hadn’t changed either. Cabinets of healing supplies. Shelves of ceramic jars. Brown glass bottles stoppered with corks. Handwritten labels detailing the contents. The wobbling exam table where Ronin deposited her.
Odder than the fact the room’s contents hadn’t been disturbed was that it hadn’t disturbed Ronin at all to discover a still room between the back porch and kitchen.
It shouldn’t be the same. The house had been rented in the years since Gram’s death. It wasn’t possible that all their personal belongings were still in place. It was as if the past was superimposed on the present. Or entangled with it. She didn’t know how to put it right.
Ronan wrapped ice cubes in a towel, returned to press it against her knee. “I’m waiting for an answer. Out with it or I’ll have to devise a way to make you talk.”
His eyebrows did a good impression of a devious wiggle. She ducked her head to hide a smile. Which time did Ronin belong to? Did she want to know?
“Maille?” His voice had taken a stern, schoolmaster tone. It made her wet. Wetter. She still ached from the unfinished session in the shower.
“I don’t remember,” she said
.
He slipped a finger under her chin, tipping her head back, searching her eyes. “Don’t remember? Have you hit your head?”
His free hand slid into her hair. His towel brushed her inner thigh when he leaned in. She swallowed hard, keenly aware of the growing bump under the terry cloth.
It was suddenly, stiflingly hot. She grabbed his wrists, dragging his hands from her hair, forcing him backward to gain some space. “I didn’t hit my head.”
He reached for her again.
“No. Wait,” she said. “Let me think a minute.”
He backed off, sitting against the scarred desk directly across from the exam table. The towel inched up his thighs.
Thinking was humanly impossible with him half naked across from her. The scent of herbs and press of spirits in the still room crowded around like weeds, choking off the memories she was reaching for, exchanging them for the ones she didn’t dare unleash.
She lifted the makeshift icepack away and slid from the table. “Sorry, I just can’t think here.” She limped into the kitchen and a mason jar on the counter checked her, compelled her to come closer. Blue glass gleamed in the soft light. Picking it up, she turned, eyes searching and finding the battered stepping stool, wood darkened to black with age. The first time she’d filled this jar she’d been almost too short to reach the faucet even with a stool. Her fingers tightened on the cool glass, the raised logo pressed against her palm. Her fingers itched to fill it with water and fresh wild flowers.
It always had fresh flowers in it. Picked on morning hikes.
Hikes like the one she’d taken that morning, starting not at the cottage, but from a room at a B&B in Wolf Harbor.
Why? She couldn’t let the whys get in the way of memories unwinding. Couldn’t allow Ronin to distract her when his hands settled on her shoulders.
“What is it, Maille? Tell me.”
“The weather here can turn in the time it takes a fluffy cloud to glide across the face of the sun. It turned on me. This morning.”
She swiveled to face him but didn’t look at him, or resist when he boosted her up to sit on the counter. “You shouldn’t put weight on that knee. Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt? No wonder—”
