But as she obeyed he turned away from her, kneeling up and groping around at the head of the bed. Eloise craned her neck, confused. He was examining the small pottery lamps that had been set on the board there, checking the contents of the unlit ones by removing the rag wicks and tipping the olive oil over his fingers and rubbing them together, turning his hand this way and that as he frowned. Eventually he found an oil that seemed to satisfy his requirements, and he moved back down to kneel behind her. Fresh yellow-green droplets hung from his fingertips.
“Oh—you are just perfect, Ella,” he said under his breath, his left hand slippery on her hip. Now she could smell the sharp new olive oil. “Now, raise this leg.” He pushed her uppermost thigh up the mattress toward her chest, opening up the split of her sex and bottom.
“What are you going to do?” she asked in a tiny voice.
“I’m going to do what you asked me to.” His breath was warm on her ear, his lips a feathery caress, his voice black as ink. “I’m going to put my cock in you, Ella. Deep and sweet and hard, in your perfect ass. And you’re going to fall, impaled on my cock, full of my spend.” His thumb, slippery with oil, found the secret pucker of her anus. “Do you trust me?”
Her mouth formed an O as round as her wide eyes. “Severin!”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes,” she whimpered. “I trust you. Please.”
“We’re going to take this as slow as is necessary. I’m going to be gentle. We have the whole night if we need it. But I am going to fuck you—just as you begged me to.” His fingers were firm over her sex, soothing in their weight, but his thumb was a kiss, a caress, a tickling tease on her sensitive rosette. “You only need to relax. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Let your body open to me.”
“I don’t know how…”
“Shush. Let it go. Close your eyes. Just feel.”
It was so easy to surrender to him when he spoke like that. Every part of her already longed to yield to him, but when he spoke in that tone—hushed and tender and implacable—she felt as if her whole body were melting. While his left hand played with her most intimate flesh, his right moved to rub her back, sliding up and down her lower spine, both firm and soothing. It was easy to let him. Easy to yield even when the delicate and almost playful probing of his thumb became more insistent, and he slid in through her unguarded portal to the hot tight chamber within.
A long shiver rippled through her—shame at the breaking of such a taboo, more than anything. Her rear entrance, she’d discovered to her shock, was just as sensitive to the touch as her clit. She squirmed and clutched at the bedding, aware that her palms were damp.
“Patience,” Severin murmured. “Take a moment to get used to it. How does it feel?”
“Scary,” she confessed. “What if I…?”
“You won’t, don’t worry. I’d be able to tell. Does it hurt at all?”
“Not hurt. It’s just so strange.”
“Put your hand down and touch yourself. Keep doing that. It’ll counter the discomfort. Just don’t let yourself go all the way and fall, because if you do then you’ll clench up on me again.”
He was right about the touching herself. As her hand found her clit the physical panic eased almost to nothing and her spasming ring of muscle relaxed. The feeling that she was under invasion became the sensation that she was being caressed inside as well as out. As he’d promised, there was no hurry. His movements were slow and gentle. Eloise let her eyes lose focus, staring into the firelit shadows as the waves of sensation ebbed and flowed through her, building and falling away, her breathing becoming deeper and louder.
When he withdrew his hand she missed it horribly—but only for a second. The thumb was replaced with a finger, no thicker but longer and more flexible. She let a tiny moan slip from her throat, acknowledging it as he reclaimed old ground and sought out new.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
The room was golden-orange with wavering firelight, the shadows blurred. Nothing had sharp boundaries any more. There was no hard distinction between inside and outside, discomfort and pleasure, dread and delight. Sometimes Severin stopped rubbing her back in order to tip a little more oil over his hand. Sometimes he murmured encouragement. “You’re doing so well, Ella. Is it good, little mouse?”
Her reply was one long exhalation, “Yes.”
She began to lose all track of the division between her and the oil, between the oil and his hand.
Then, “That’s two fingers.”
“Oh,” she moaned. Her own efforts with her clit were raising her in slow, sweeping spirals of arousal. Her head was full of dancing lamplight and her bodily sensations seemed both her whole world and also infinitely far away.
“That’s three.”
There was no resistance left in her. She welcomed every push of his wrist, every twist of his knuckles. She murmured wordlessly when he slipped his hand slowly out to the tips of his fingers, until he’d almost withdrawn from her—then repositioned himself, kneeling up, a rough thigh close up against hers. He bent to brush her left ear with his lips.
“Let me have you, Ella.” Then he was pushing in again, still slick with oil but blunter and broader. Cock not fingers. She rediscovered then how tight and strong was the muscled iris of her rear, but he was patient—extraordinarily patient—and unstoppable. She gasped and whimpered just to vent the pressure, each little cry like the giving up of a gift.
Then she felt something new inside her, an inner gate fallen perhaps. A change, a shift, a surrender. The threat of pain was quite suddenly gone. Severin stilled against her rear. His right hand slid up the bed to tangle in her hair and caress the nape of her neck and the back of her head.
“I’m inside you now, little mouse. You can feel it, can’t you?”
“More,” she gasped.
He laughed in his throat. “I thought you’d say that. You’re incredible—you know that, don’t you? My wanton little virgin. You want so much. And I want to give you it all.”
He pushed his hips, sliding deeper into her.
“Oh!” she squealed, no longer caring for dignity or propriety. “Yes!” He was inside her, and she was round him, and they were so close, so meshed, that it felt to her that they were becoming a single body. “Pull my hair!” she gasped, the words flying from her lips before she had time to think better of them.
“Hm?” Severin grunted, but he had heard because his fingers tightened in her curls, pulling her neck back. She was lying on her side but her upper body was twisted round enough that she could look up at him. She saw his saturnine grin. “You like having your hair pulled, do you?” he asked, rocking her with each surge of his hips.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever told anyone else?”
“No. Oh God.”
His eyes narrowed, almost feral, and his fingers tightened. Each thrust, each tug, perfectly in time. Eloise was struggling to keep up, her numb fingers slipping over her clit. But that didn’t seem to matter now, because there was a peal of sensation gathering in her scalp and her ass, something familiar yet entirely new. Her head rolled back, exposing her throat to the man laboring above her, and a noise issued from that stretched throat that sounded like the wild harsh cry of a seabird riding before a storm. She had no control over her voice, or of the things happening to her body. She felt as if her skin were sewn with tiny silver bells and that with each stroke of his cock in her ass their chimes were rippling out in circles from her stretched hole. She began to mew frantically.
“You’re mine,” Severin growled as he thrust home. “Mine first—mine always.” And she didn’t mind now that he was plowing her hard and steady, with all his strength. She needed it, in fact. Her climax started, not at her clit in familiar fashion, but at the plugged ring of her anus. It pealed through her whole body, striking white fire from her cunt, her clit, her breasts, her head. Falling, she screamed, and then Severin f
ell after her like a great dark wave that rolled over her, filling her with salt spume.
It seemed hours later that the tide ebbed and cast her up exhausted, breathless and shocked that she was still alive.
She opened her eyes and looked up into Severin’s dark gaze. His hair hung in rats’ tails and sweat was pooling in the cups of his collar-bones. Eloise thought she could not bear such a strange and hard-fought beauty, and she shook her head helplessly.
Bracing himself on his left arm, he touched her face gently with the tips of his fingers, a line forming between his black brows.
“Oh,” she whispered, wrapping her hand around his larger one.
“Did I hurt you?”
“No!”
“You’re crying.”
“Am I?” She was genuinely surprised. “I’m happy.”
The line faded away. He smiled, and it was a soft, sad, wondering smile that she had never seen on him before. “Happy?” he whispered. “If it were that easy, Ella…”
She caressed his cheek. His sooty lashes, like the wings of black moths, fluttered down upon his lower lids. In the dancing lamplight his eyelids looked dark and sheened with exhaustion. “Lie down,” she whispered. “Hold me.”
“Yes.”
Easing gently from her grasp, he curled up behind her, nesting her in the warm embrace of his arms and body. She’d woken in this position on many nights, she reminded herself, but this was the first time she’d lain down with Severin in this way. The first time they’d sleep naked together.
He made her feel safe, and warm, and replete with joy.
“We are going to need to get washed all over again,” she pointed out, slurring a little.
“Uhuh,” he agreed, nuzzling into her hair but sounding half-asleep already. “Later.”
“Mmm.”
“You smell like springtime,” he said indistinctly.
She felt herself slipping down into the warm darkness and knew that there would be no more Later that night.
* * * * *
Eloise slept in the next morning almost all the way to noon, and it was only the sound of a door shutting that woke her then. She raised her head to find herself alone in the bed, with the sunlight lying across the sheets and her bare ass. A small heap of clothes—her own, cleansed of muck and blood and smelling only of the wood fires they’d been dried over—lay at the foot of the bed, and nearby stood a new bucket of hot water.
Rolling onto her back, Eloise stared at the roof beams. Slowly she broke into a grin, one that built until she wriggled with sheer delight. Memories danced through her inner eye and Severin’s words of the previous day echoed in her head. I tumbled you in the hayloft, did I? I hope we both enjoyed it. She sobered a little as she remembered what that fiction implied. In Ystrian custom, just as in Mendea, a seduced maiden could demand that the man marry her or pay her off.
Except that that wasn’t what had happened here, was it? He’d not seduced her. She’d offered herself to him. Unequivocally.
But that whole subject was too ominous to think about. She wanted to feel, not to think, so she shook off the clustering inner voices and lifted her face to kiss the sunbeams. As quickly and neatly as she could she scrambled to make use of the water. Her wet body gleamed, abuzz with a sense of well-being. Across her left hip was a scattering of tiny bruises, the imprint of gripping fingers, and the sight filled her with wonder and joy.
I lay with him. I lay with him, and he was good to me, and he liked everything about me, and it was wonderful. It was a little shocking too, what they had done, but even that made her feel a giddy glee.
When she was dressed she went outside. Severin was sitting in the courtyard below, in line of sight of the door. He paused momentarily as she came into his view, then went back to cutting a wedge of cheese and laying it upon a bread trencher.
Eloise felt lightheaded, almost unreal, as she descended the stairs. What did one say, the morning after? Things were now so different between them—surely nothing could be the same? Surely the words must be altered, the looks, the gestures—everything.
She approached within a few paces of Severin before he met her gaze. His expression was one of glacial calm. “Have you packed?” he asked.
All the air left Eloise’s lungs. She wanted to throw herself into his arms. She wanted to tangle her fingers in his hair and kiss his lips. She wanted all the passion and possessiveness he’d shown her last night—or at the very least some acknowledgment of that. But his words were like a warning flag. She felt the blood draining from her face.
“What’s the plan?” she asked huskily.
“I think we’ll take the Cheam road.”
So they did. And later in the afternoon they left the road and climbed into the rough country, keeping to the steep little valleys choked with willow and away from the skylines. For the rest of that warm autumn day they kept moving, and didn’t even approach the river again until after sunset.
In all that time, Severin barely spoke a word to her. When he did, his voice was clipped and uninviting and he barely glanced in her direction. All the while, Eloise walked in a fog of humiliation and misery. She wanted him to embrace her, so much so that she could feel it as a grinding in her belly. Sometimes she wanted to shout at him, and then a moment later she wanted to sit down and weep, but she bit the inside of her cheek until it was raw and didn’t do either. She couldn’t bear the thought of the cold contempt she knew she would provoke.
He thinks I’m a slut. A slut, a whore, or else a desperate foolish little girl—but either way, a traitor to my husband and my people and my king.
When they stopped to eat she mumbled her food with a dry tongue, not tasting anything, forcing the crumbs down. Her churning, unarticulated emotions made her feel nauseous. Severin had to remind her to drink.
He said I was his, she told herself over and over. He said I was his for always. How can he say that and then treat me like this? But she already knew the answer to that. She could imagine exactly what he would say if she threw his words back in his face, and that knowledge curdled in her belly like bile. What lesson do you learn from that, Ella?—that the words of any man who’s aiming to shoot his load up your ass are hardly to be trusted. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.
In the deep gloaming, Severin finally signaled her to stop and rest, under the shadow of a boulder and the canopy of a split, half-dead tree. She could hear the rush of the river somewhere off ahead. Just the sound made her shiver.
“We’ll wait here ’til the middle of the night,” Severin said, leaning against the rock.
Eloise ran her fingers across her face, trying to ignore the hot tears that were leaking out onto her lashes. By now she’d stopped wanting him to make love to her, and she’d stopped wanting him to be kindly. She just wanted him to speak to her again. Anything would do. She felt so desperately lonely that even words of contempt would be something.
“Are you angry with me?” she asked, her voice quivering.
“Angry? Why should I be angry with you?” He was furious. She could hear it in his hoarse whisper.
“Because I…” The word seduced seemed feeble. She bit down on the kernel of all their troubles. “Because I made you betray Arnauld.”
“Made me?” There was a long moment’s silence. “I chose.”
Oh, there was his pride showing. “And chose badly,” she finished off for him, since he was too coldly polite to say it. “That’s the truth, isn’t it? You regret it with all your heart.”
“And you don’t?”
She caught the inside of her cheek with her teeth again, tasting blood, and lifted her chin. “No. I do not.”
“Ella—” He bit his words off.
“I’m a fool, aren’t I?”
He said nothing, neither denying nor confirming the accusation. Instead he sank down on his haunches, his back to the rock, his eyes narrowed. She could feel her soul burning up under his regard. Her throat grew dry, closing up. Not a fool but a faithless whore
. That’s what he thinks.
“I’m not angry,” he said at length. “I’m frightened.”
Oh. She flinched inside. Oh, that wasn’t the same at all. Severin de Meynard—frightened? What did he mean? Her mind raced. “I won’t betray you,” she promised. “I won’t! I’ll keep quiet, whatever happens.”
“You’ll try.”
“I will not tell!” she hissed. “I’ve trusted you all this way, haven’t I? And you can trust me!”
His mouth pulled strangely. “But that’s not what’s scaring me.”
“Then…?”
“Ella…it’s me.”
“You?”
He shook his head slightly. “All these years, I thought I knew myself. I thought I knew exactly what I could do and what I couldn’t. I honestly thought my loyalty unbreakable. Then—it broke. It turns out I’m not as strong as I believed I was.”
“Severin…” His words both scared and elated her. She clenched her fists. She was so used to his confidence in himself—it was what had sustained her belief in him. Now she saw a hollowness behind his set jaw. He was no longer invulnerable.
“Now I’m frightened that I don’t have the capacity for this after all. That I’m not strong enough to get us over the river. That I don’t have the wits to get us past the guards. That I’ll break under questioning. Ella, I don’t trust myself anymore.”
She felt a moment’s pure, dizzying hope. “Then,” she said raggedly, seizing her chance, “don’t cross the river at all. Stay in Mendea. I want to stay with you. You may love the King but I don’t. I don’t. Do you want me to say it out loud? I want to stay with you.”
He looked away. “Ella. That’s not possible for us.”
“Yes it is. We could—”
“Does money grow on trees, Ella, or under rocks? We are landless, lordless and guildless. We’re living hand-to-mouth now, in harvest season. What will happen, do you think, when winter comes?”
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