It was a dark and heated promise, the sheer burn of his eyes scalding her skin. Suddenly she could picture herself unraveling quite completely at his command. She left her skirt in a puddle on the floor and turned to show herself to him as she ran her hands over her skin once more. Now she was truly beginning to appreciate what he was trying to show her. Her whole body was alive and aware, zinging with stimulation and effervescent warmth. She wondered if it felt the same for him, or if he was restricted because he couldn’t touch himself.
“Are you thinking you would like to touch me?” she asked him curiously. “Is that why you’re so tense? Because you can’t? Or because you can’t touch yourself?”
“I don’t want to touch myself,” he ground out, his expression dark and savage, “I want you to touch me. What I want more than that, though, is to have my hands all over that sweet skin of yours. Drenna, do you know I can smell you from here? I know you’re wet and excited. It’s driving me crazy.”
“Really?” She sat on the bed and slowly reclined in profile again, her whole body teasing him mercilessly even as she narrowed sultry eyes on him. “Would you prefer we stop the lesson?” She drifted her fingertips over the rise of her breasts, fascinated by the way his attention became fully riveted to what she was doing. Every instant, every movement, she was learning more, gaining power. She began to wonder just how far she could push Magnus before he broke and crossed from observer to participant. She never even questioned what would happen after that. She just wanted to do it.
“I’m fine,” he said, looking and sounding anything but.
Magnus knew he was being played, but that was all right with him. He would do just about anything to watch her sexuality continue to blossom with this amazing speed. She was a natural, and she was the perfect blend of cunning and innocence so that she figured things out quickly and instinctively, but hesitated every so often as she marveled at something new or doubted what she wanted for a moment.
Now she was teasing him as she teased herself with the very tips of her fingers on her chest and breasts. She slid her hands up her throat and against her lips, and he knew the very instant she resisted the instinct to take a finger into her mouth.
He felt blood throbbing through him as if powered by thousands of pistons. His heart was raging for speed. Most of all, his cock was being throttled within the confines of his clothes, begging not only for freedom, but for Daenaira.
Dae finally brushed over her nipples, and she seemed a bit startled. She hadn’t been expecting it to feel so strongly sensitive, nor so arousing, he was betting. She was so focused on teasing him that she had forgotten she was also teasing herself.
“If you think that feels good, you should try the scrape of your nails, K’yindara. Or even better, take a nipple between your fingers and lightly pinch yourself. If it were me, though, I would have my mouth on you. I’d suck you until you were drenched with wet and moaning for me.”
Daenaira gasped as the pull of her fingers seemed to suddenly become the pull of his mouth to her mind. Her eyes shot to his, wide with surprise and pleasure.
“You see, K’yindara? This temptation works both ways.”
Dae realized how true that was. Suddenly she craved what he had just promised, craved to know what it would feel like to have his mouth drawing at her breast. Her eyes roamed over him and she remembered the heat of his mouth and tongue. She remembered the teasing flirtation of his fingers on her sex.
“Magnus?” she said, her breathless confusion so beautiful on her flushing features.
“Come untie me, Dae. Untie me and I will do it. I will do everything,” he promised hotly. Yes, he could easily have fought his Bonds and won, but what he was really asking for was permission.
She shook her head, closing her eyes as her body squirmed.
Magnus rode the buck of wild frustration, shaking it off.
“Then slip your fingers into those damp little panties of yours, baby, and tell me how wet and hot you feel. Just tell me that.”
Without even missing a beat, she did exactly as he asked, her fingertips skimming low on her belly and disappearing beneath the band of her underwear. Watching her touch herself, seeing the slow progression of her fingers beneath that midnight blue fabric, just about unmanned him.
“Bituth amec,” he gasped, unable to catch his breath to save his life as he watched the change come over her face and body. She writhed gently, frustration and confusion warring with her rushing pulse and the washes of heat she experienced. “Tell me,” he demanded fiercely.
“I…” She exhaled a soft sound of aching need. “I feel hot. It’s like…warm syrup.” She looked at him, distress and desire battling each other in the depths of her wide eyes. “I don’t understand.”
“When you get sexually excited, your body prepares itself for the penetration by your mate. It will ease the way, relieve friction, and, I promise you, drive me out of my fucking mind. Untie me, Dae.”
She withdrew. She turned her head away from him as she pulled her hand back, breathing hard and trying to stop the uncomfortable demand of her body that she couldn’t figure out how to satisfy, yet was afraid of at the same time. For someone who had known so little pleasure in life, it must be overwhelming to her.
“Gods,” Magnus groaned, leaning back and shifting uncomfortably himself. She heard him and looked at him, her eyes roaming his body with slow intensity. She looked like she wanted to nip and nibble at him for a few hours. And he would never deny her. When she sat up and then rose to her feet, he lurched forward toward her approach. “Untie me, Dae.”
She shook her head again, her hair swishing everywhere at her vehemence. Just the same, he watched as she knelt down between his feet. He became suddenly nervous, a feeling he wasn’t used to. She reached for the ties of his boots and quickly worked to slide them off his feet.
“What are you doing?” he asked, swallowing hard when she rested her hands on his thighs for a moment.
“Making you more comfortable.”
She reached for his belt and he almost ripped himself out of the chair right then, making her startle.
“Don’t!”
She blinked in confusion. “Why not?”
“I-If you touch me, Dae, I…”
“You won’t like it?”
“Drenna,” he hissed. “More like I will like it so much I will embarrass myself. Please…just untie me.”
“No. Can I touch you or not?”
How could he deny her when she was kneeling so beautifully naked between his feet like some kind of concubine? How could he say no when he was screaming with need to feel her any way he could?
Magnus gave her a sharp nod, tightened his grasp on his chair, and braced himself for hell.
She slid open his belt with a touch so light he could hardly feel it. But that didn’t matter in the next second when she pushed up his tunic and deftly unfastened his pants. She rose up, bending over him so close he could smell the sweetness of her skin and hair.
“Lift up,” she instructed as her hands slid into his slacks and against his skin. He did as instructed, and she smoothed the fabric away from his body, freeing his suffocating erection and stripping him from the waist down. She laid his clothes aside and returned to her kneeling position before him. By now he was gouging his nails into the wood of the chair’s arms. When she reached out to touch his bare thighs, he thought he was going to lose his mind.
“Dae. I swear to Darkness, you better untie me. I won’t let you do this to me again!”
“Do what? I’m just touching you.”
“Daenaira, you’ve seen what you have the power to do to me just by touching me. The next time I come for you, baby, I am damn well going to be inside you at the time. Do you understand me?”
“I’m probably not ready for that,” she noted almost clinically. But there was nothing clinical in the feel of her fingertips brushing along the underside of his engorged penis. “This is so amazing,” she marveled. “You are as hot as
I am, only not wet. Except right here.” She rubbed her fingertips over the weeping tip of his cock and he threw his head back as the racing agony of lightning-sharp pleasure scorched through his body.
“Fuck! Dae!” he gasped for breath as she closed her hand around him. “Don’t. Gods, I am begging you.”
“But I like this. I like seeing you react this way. You should feel what it does to me.” She smiled as she thought about how he had said he craved the taste of her. It made her think of how to show him what she was talking about. She stood up on her knees and reached to slide her fingers between her legs. She couldn’t help the shudder and moan that came over her as sensation spiked into her heated systems. She flicked a gaze of pure aroused passion at him as she withdrew her touch and reached to rub a wet fingertip over his lips briefly before dropping her hand into his lap and encircling him with the sample of her drenched state that coated her palm.
All Magnus could do was strain against his bonds as he licked the taste of her onto a famished tongue and surged into the slick noose of her hand when she slid it wetly up and down his throbbing shaft.
“Darkness and Light,” he choked out, agonized tears pricking harshly across his eyes as he began to tremble under her stroke. “Un-fucking-tie me, Daenaira! Gods! Stop! You don’t understand!”
Two hundred years. It was too long. Too long between feeling like this. From famine to feast in sixty seconds, and he couldn’t bear it. He was going to shame himself with his lack of control. She was too damn intense and so perfect! It wasn’t fair. He had wanted this to be about her. Her discovery. Her power. Her pleasure. She had turned it around on him and she wouldn’t listen.
Desperate, he wrenched against his bonds, hearing the satisfying crack of wood. Daenaira just looked up at him through her lashes, that little smile of hers flirting over her lips. It was a challenge. Could he free himself before she had her way? To tilt the odds in her favor, she imitated the stroke she had seen him use on himself in the bath.
When he got free, Magnus thought wildly, he was going to kill her. One orgasm at a time! She was going to pay for what she was doing. He pushed out against the arms of the chair and wood creaked ominously. But the strain of his efforts only thrust him into her clever hand, and he knew he was in big trouble. Huge trouble.
“Dae, I swear to Drenna and M’gnone, if you make me come like this, I will keep you locked in this room with me for two whole nights paying you back for it.”
“Uh-huh,” she acknowledged with an uncaring shrug. She was too focused and having too fascinated a time at his expense.
Dae could almost hear the last of his control snap. He threw back his head and began to surge up into her strokes, his whole body lifting to thrust through her fingers. He groaned savagely, his cock oozing heavily from the tip and making everything slippery and quick. She felt him, so thick and straining in her grasp, and she could tell he was close to climax by the raging of his breath and the animalistic sounds grinding out of him.
“I swear,” he gasped, “you’re mine after this. You’re mine!”
“Yes,” she agreed softly. “I know.”
It was like igniting gunpowder, the way he suddenly seized when she said that. If he hadn’t been so close already, the mere sound of her capitulation would have driven him over anyway. Just knowing she was finally going to give herself to him was enough to send him screaming into release.
Magnus felt his whole body surrender at once, breath, heart, and ejaculation exploding out of him in a burst of wild, fitful spasms. She was so delighted with her supremacy over him that she forgot to guard herself from the hard spurts of liquid release coming from him. Hot ejaculate dashed across her chest, and she actually laughed at the new and rather sticky sensation. The sight of it made the orgasm all that much more extreme for Magnus and he gritted his teeth together as his balls strained to paint her as much as possible.
Drained at last, he collapsed back in the chair.
“Stop,” he begged her hoarsely when she continued to stroke him gently. “It’s too intense.”
“Okay,” she said almost soothingly. She let go of him and sat back on her heels, reaching to swipe a finger through the sticky substance on her chest. “This is so…so…”
“Messy?” he supplied a bit breathlessly.
She giggled. “Well, yes. There is that. But I was thinking more about the scent of you. It’s thick and…I think I like it.”
“Good,” he sighed. “Because in a few minutes, I’m going to start marking you with it until everyone will be able to know you’re mine.”
“You already started,” she noted with a laugh.
He lifted his head and narrowed a look on her. “This was your way. Now I’m going to do it my way. First, though, you better untie me. Then you can use one of the cloths in that warmer to clean off.” He nodded to the little black box about the size of a small refrigerator. She ignored the command to untie him and went straight for the box. The wet, hot cloth was perfect for the task, and it felt wonderful besides.
Magnus was done being bound and ignored. With a single vicious wrenching, he ripped one of the arms free of the chair. He had his wrist free of the sari binding him in a heartbeat and was out of his seat in another.
It was time to settle the score.
Chapter Nine
Tristan was so angry with himself that he could hardly see straight.
He was the co-ruler of an entire species. He was a king, a prince born to a noble house and raised in a noble tradition. He had started a war to end all the petty bullshit bickering that was keeping his people living a backwater existence while other Nightwalker races flourished beyond them and looked down on them like they were the embarrassing black sheep of the Nightwalker family. He was loved and paid loyal homage by his twin sister, who trusted him and had an undying faith in him to be so much better than he probably was. He had killed for her, run for her, lived for her, and almost died for her.
And now he was failing her.
Miserably.
He had never been so afraid in all of his life, and he was ashamed for himself because of it. To make matters worse, his behavior these past months had made his sister frantic with worry and concern for him. She knew he wasn’t himself. She knew something was disturbing him. As if she didn’t have enough stressing her right now? Rika, her best friend and advisor, had gone blind, the disease that ravaged her body destroying her optic nerves and promising to destroy much more than that before it was through. They were a breed of fast self-healers, but there were diseases like Crush and Jilk that were impossible for them to fight and had no cures. And why would they have cures? They were ’Dweller diseases, affecting ’Dwellers only. The only way such things could be analyzed and perhaps cured by conventional technology would require things like blood samples that would not only expose them for the supernatural creatures they were, but would expose that blood to things like microscope lights, which would burn it up into ashes instantly.
So now his sister was facing the imminent death of her beloved Rika, stressing with fear for a brother who was acting too unlike himself, and now, he had to tell her the government she ruled was going to try and force her into a loveless joining with…gods knew who.
He had wanted better for her. He had thought that when the clans were dissolved, the archaic way of marrying sons and daughters off to each other as a way of obtaining truces would no longer be a fate she would have to face; that she would finally have the freedom of the below-classes to marry purely for her emotional needs.
But no. The prick bastards in the Senate had uncovered an archaic tradition, using the twins’ own tactics of reviving the monarchy against them. Tristan knew it was no coincidence this had happened just as they were uncovering traitorous Senators and unexpected deception in Sanctuary. If Baylor, a Senator, had not tried to recruit Trace against Tristan, they would never have known. But when Tristan’s vizier had explosively denied the bribe, Trace had almost lost his life to Baylor’s dagger in h
is ribs. They would still be in ignorance had it not been for Ashla and her miraculous ability to heal, which had saved Trace’s life.
Now Trace had the worries of a new wife and coming child, added to his regular duties and concerns in their political world, and this was why he had turned to Magnus. That and Tristan knew his sister trusted the priest and her faith beyond anyone else but himself.
And he had ruined that. Dread, cold and terrible, told him that. Perhaps if it had been only a month—maybe even two. But that had to be stretching it as it was. She could have forgiven him that much. But how would she ever forgive him for half a year? How could she forgive him for not telling her before Senate session had restarted? Magnus was right. He should have warned her. Prepared her.
But Magnus’s sassy little handmaiden had been right, too.
Tristan was afraid of losing her to another life. To a new family. Children. A husband she might love. He had been so damn selfish it was unconscionable.
“Coward,” he hissed to himself.
He had killed men with his bare hands. Fought off everything from sickness to fire and lived to tell the tales to any doe-eyed woman who cared to listen to his pompous arrogance, but he was a coward where it counted.
Tristan looked at the double wooden doors in front of him, the carvings so beautifully wrought and depicting a warrior princess standing in triumph over her enemies with her twin brother by her side. The doors to his chambers were duplicates of the design, only their positions were reversed. In both, the doors latched closed right where their hands and fingers were woven and interlaced together, signifying the Bond between them that had never been broken no matter how hard others had tried to come between them through the long years.
He glanced toward Xenia, who stood, as usual, silently contemplating her charge. She was the most brutal and efficient killer he had ever known, except perhaps for Guin, her counterpart who guarded his sister’s life. Though she was a woman and it was highly irregular for him to choose an intimate guard of the opposite sex, he had insisted. Her quietude was one of the reasons why. Oh, she obviously had her opinions, but she kept them to herself for the most part unless they were meant to save his hide. Occasionally, though, she would make offhand remarks when she wanted to and always managed to make him feel stupid and moronic in the process. He had needed to be kept that humble, he supposed. Plus, he had promised Malaya he would choose the best to protect himself, and he had.
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