She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and grabbed his elbow to pull him down to her level, but he refused to budge, and pulled her up by the hair instead. She’d barely had time to protest his rough treatment before he pivoted around and pushed — more like flung — her against a tree.
Janet’s eyes went wide. On one hand, it was great that he was getting into the spirit of the thing. On the other, if this was how people did it scores of years ago, it was nothing short of a miracle that humanity hadn’t gone extinct. Perhaps that was where the preference for curvy women had come from; they’d be the only ones with enough padding to withstand all this throwing.
“Easy, tiger!” she scolded him, smacking his shoulder for emphasis. Tam Lin growled at her, actually, unironically growled at her, which left her gobsmacked for a moment or two. Janet couldn’t even focus on the fact that he was giving her knickers the same treatment he’d given her shirt, because she was too busy side-eyeing him. He wasn’t acting . . . well, normal, as far as there was a normal that could be applied to someone like him.
The look he had on his face right now was the kind her father got on his bad drinking nights, when the alcohol unhinged him instead of slowing him to a crawl. At the same time, though, it was nothing like that. Her father’s default unhinged state was rage. Tam Lin’s was lust. Pure, unbridled lust, all of it directed at her person.
Realizing it was the scariest thing she had ever experienced. It was also the most arousing thing she had ever experienced, but she wanted to focus on the scariness first. Janet was fairly sure that he’d been his own stern self when she’d gone down on him — until he had gone and tried shoving the whole thing down her throat, come to think of it. Something had happened to him then, and the more she stared at him, the more she convinced herself that it hadn’t been natural.
Hold him while he goes from man to beast . . .
Janet smacked her own forehead and swore. That! Crap, of course it would be that! Hadn’t she herself thought he was acting beastly just some moments ago? Bloody fairies with their bloody metaphors.
“Earth to Tam Lin!” she exclaimed, waving a frantic hand in front of his face. He didn’t blink. His eyes were trained on the vein just below her collarbone, which pulsed, betraying her fear. She couldn’t go on without knowing what had happened to his head, or more accurately, what was happening inside of it. She had always said, promised herself a thousand times, that if helping someone — she’d been thinking about her father then, but the same principle should apply to men imprisoned by supernatural creatures — brought her to a point where continuing would put her in danger, she’d stop. And beasts were dangerous, weren’t they? They killed and maimed people. Were well known for it, in fact.
“Janet.” Her name brought her back from the brink of terror. Her name, but she wasn’t convinced that he was asking for her. Probably the other one, the one who had Done Him Wrong, and who he was still hung up on even though by all accounts, the hussy had left him in that tree and gone on her merry way. If she stopped him now, she’d be the same. Another Janet gone by, although in her case she’d at least been nice enough to plague him with a damn fine blowjob.
Then she realized: he’d said a word. And beasts weren’t known for talking.
His hands were gentle when he parted her legs, though less so when he moved them to her behind and lifted her up. Janet yelped in surprise and clung to him with teeth and nails, her feet searching for solid ground where there was suddenly none. He pushed her against the tree bark, which dug in her back but offered some precious, needed support, slid his hands to her calves and pulled her legs so that each was on either side of him.
The head of his cock nudged the inside of her thigh, reminding her of two important details: one, she hadn’t gotten around to telling him that she required proof that he wouldn’t bash her head in and drag her to his cave before things went further. Two, she was still ridiculously, obnoxiously wet. Her juices had leaked out and made the whole area around her pussy so slippery that she couldn’t move an inch without hearing her body producing soft squelching sounds. She wanted him. Badly.
But she also wanted to know for sure that she’d be safe.
“What are you right now?” she asked. He didn’t answer. He didn’t seem to understand the question.
A breath later it didn’t matter anymore, because he was inside her, and the part of her that had been nursing some reasonable doubts about the whole business was shouted down by the part of her that had been gagging to be filled. Safety was out of the window; if his sudden, brutal entry hadn’t torn her, his next thrust did — she felt that one in her stomach. She was, however, also finding that safety was overrated in at least this situation. The alternative felt too delicious to pass up on.
The forcefulness that had made giving him head a difficult chore was serving him well now that she was getting something out of it too. She rocked her hips against him, encouraging him to thrust deeper and faster, and crossed her ankles behind his back so that she could use her legs to help him set a reasonable pace. He appeared to want nothing to do with the word ‘reasonable’, however, and ignored her cues in favour of relentless, punishing strokes. Janet gave up and threw her head back, giving herself over to his onslaught.
Her first orgasm came quick and unannounced. One moment she was breathing out and psyching herself up for the next pounding, the other she was going off so hard she saw white. She screamed her pleasure to the treetops, and he snarled, brought his mouth down on her shoulder and dug his teeth in. Her whole body tensed like a harp string as her brain tried, and failed, to catch up with what had just happened. There were too many sensations to take note of, too many aftershocks of actions and too many chemicals running laps in her bloodstream. They ended up blending together, and she couldn’t seem to focus long enough to take them apart.
“Oh, hell yes!” she howled, blessing the fact that they were in a forest and there was no one around to hear her be as loud as she wanted to be. She almost didn’t need to do any work anymore, except keep her arms around his neck and legs around his hips so that she wouldn’t fall. He seemed happy to have her rest passively against him and let him do as he wanted. It was uncharacteristic behaviour for her, but Janet felt that she could be excused this one time. It was his freedom at stake. He could stand to contribute some.
Abruptly, he stopped, and took a few steps back while she scrambled to put more strength into her hold on him, lest he drop her. She knew, oddly, as she wasn’t in the mood to be very observant, that his transformation had concluded. Gone was the man. In his place stood the beast, fully realized, desiring or aspiring to nothing but to fuck her into next Sunday.
He threw her on the ground — luckily it was moss, which blunted the impact somewhat — and came down on her. Janet rolled herself out from under him before his weight smothered her and lifted herself on her hands and knees. She wasn’t trying to escape him, but either he read it that way or the wild force that had taken him over had separation issues it needed to work through, because in a blink, he was on top of her again. It took her a foolish amount of time to figure out what his next move would be, but when she did, she all but purred, and eagerly parted her legs.
He took her from behind, the new angle allowing him to brush every part of her that he hadn’t been able to touch before. Her own noise deafened her. Shrieks followed moans followed mewling followed pleading, kitten-like cries. She couldn’t think — thinking would require her to use her brain as something other than a siphon for the pleasure she experienced. She couldn’t stay still, either. She had to move, get rid of the excess energy that she could feel crackling between them.
Her hands flailed, free — she’d stopped holding him, but that was no matter, she could always claim she’d understood that part to be a metaphor too — until they found his forearm, which she grasped as if her life depended on it. The world thinned as she closed her eyes to slits, and disappeared in an explosion of stars as his next thrust hit home.
She was bodiless, swimming in hot, white bliss. It shouldn’t have lasted, because it hardly ever did — her best orgasms had been the ones she’d given herself, and even in the privacy and quiet of her own room Janet had never been able to preserve that fragile state for more than a moment or two. This one, however, went on. And on. It took her breath — it might have stopped her heart — and yet it refused to dim in intensity. It was like being high, only a thousand, million, billion times better.
When it finally shattered and she was hauled back to her too warm, too used, too spent body, Janet felt like weeping. Through not for long, because it didn’t take her long to peak again. It was easier, now that her body recalled the sensation with such immediacy. He hardly needed to do much to set her off now. A little more contact, a touch in just the right spot, and she was lost once more, bowled over by a tidal wave of delicious frissons. At some point, she stopped counting how many times she’d been ignited.
She was, and would be again, and that was all that mattered.
Still, like all good things, it eventually had to come to an end. She knew it had arrived when, in one of the increasingly shorter intervals between orgasms, she noticed that Tam Lin’s hands had gone from pawing at her every spare ounce of flesh to caressing her shoulder blades, when his bites became apologetic kisses. She did her best to ignore it and climb to that impossible height one last time, and succeeded, although she was so exhausted it nearly killed her. It lasted only the briefest of seconds. It seemed that kindness and candour weren’t as good a fuel for rapture as unchecked animal passion.
The beast was gone. The man — the free man, hopefully — took his place.
He fell off her, and she fell on him, an exhausted puff of breath escaping her mouth. It took her a minute, but at last Janet summoned the courage to look down at herself. She might as well have been wrestling a wolf — which in a way, she had — going by the state she was in. None of the cuts were serious, and she guessed she could easily explain those with a claim that she’d tripped into a ditch full with brambles, but there were tender spots all over her body that would turn into bruises given a day or two. That, and the bite mark. She felt a smile touch her lips. Even if she couldn’t make up a convincing story for that, they’d be easier to explain than the fact that she was coming home with a man-shaped prize.
“Are you . . . normal?” she asked, prodding Tam Lin’s back with her finger just to make sure. He blinked at her, as worn out as she was, and ran a hand through her tangled hair to smooth it down. Reassured, Janet snuggled against him. That was one advantage the man had over the beast. Snuggling would never be a viable option with the latter. “Well. What now?”
“We wait,” he replied hoarsely.
Janet nodded. Her clothes were some distance away, and she couldn’t be bothered to get up to retrieve them. Besides, it was unlikely that there’d be enough of them left unshredded for them to be worth the bother. She rubbed her thighs together, moaning when the friction made her core heat up all over again, and gave him a shrewd look. Since whoever was expected to come around and check if the toll had been paid was taking their sweet time, she might as well help herself while they waited. The question was, would he be up for it?
She turned to him, held his gaze and brought her hand down to his groin to verify. Yes. Yes he was.
“So, do you want to . . .” she began, again only to make sure. Tam Lin didn’t give her a chance to finish. He dipped his head and met her mouth with his lips and his teeth, and bit down. She squealed and checked his eyes for signs that the beast had returned, but they remained warm and dark and soft as a summer night.
Just a man, then. One with interesting ideas that she wanted to experience more of.
One of the corners of her mouth quirked up, and a moment later she was being toppled back in the grass, and his hand was riding up her thigh, skating over the wetness that had trickled down and spread between them. In another moment, he was spreading her wide, so wide that her very bones ached against his hands, and plunging all of his length inside her.
Janet shook her head, amused. Perhaps the beast hadn’t been something alien to his nature, but just his nature unleashed. She didn’t know what to do with that thought. She liked it, but she didn’t know what to do with it. As a matter of fact, she didn’t know what to do with any of him, although she’d have to think of something eventually. The world had surely changed lots since he had been put in that tree, and she wasn’t about to dump him in it and let him figure things out for himself. She could, but she wouldn’t.
She was keeping him. Holy hell, was she ever.
“I suppose you . . . ahn . . . could live in the attic,” she breathed out, and felt inordinately pleased at the thought. With a strong man who owed her his freedom hanging around the house, she wouldn’t need to fear her father’s drunken lash outs. And maybe she could persuade him to do other things, too.
There was a sudden scream of trumpets. Tam Lin’s head whipped around, and he swore — archaically, which would have amused her too, if it weren’t for the fact that all the blood had drained from his face, and, annoyingly, from his cock. He went soft inside her and removed himself, propping himself up on one elbow to look at her with petrified eyes. They ran down her body and lingered over the blood that stained the bare triangle between her legs. His brow furrowed, confusion flooding his expression.
“They? Why would they come for us?”
“They?” Janet repeated, somehow knowing that he didn’t mean the cow-creature and some of its friends, coming to give them their blessing to leave. The terror in his voice was strong enough to infect her. “What do you mean? Is there a problem? Are we in trouble?”
Tam Lin kept staring at the distance. A wind began to blow from the tall fairy forest as the sound of hounds and horses drew nearer. The trumpets had been silenced, having done their job of properly heralding the riders’ approach. Janet turned her head and saw them, although she wasn’t too sure of what she was seeing.
They didn’t come out of the trees. They formed where the trees ended, black mutts and black mounts with black riders astride them, each of them springing out of the air with the transparency of a ghost and landing on the ground solid, though not very. There was still something about them all that hinted they were not from this world.
“The Wild Hunt.” Tam Lin’s voice blew in her ear, icy with fear. “But I don’t understand. You bled!”
“Uhm,” Janet said, warily watching the riders as they turned faceless helmeted heads towards them. Cold sweat broke out in the small of her back. “You see, uhm, anyone would have bled if they got the treatment you gave me, really. I mean, it was good, very good, but also rough. Very rough.”
“You were not a maiden?” He stared at her, white with horror. Janet could only nod. She was slightly worried that he hadn’t noticed until right then, but felt that they had bigger reasons to concern themselves at the moment. Tam Lin sucked in a breath and rested his chin atop her head, taking her shaking form in his equally trembling arms. “Oh, my Janet. I would have told if you had asked: there is no tricking tricksters like the fae. And now the Queen’s guards are here, and it won’t be long before she blows in. You should have left me while you had the chance. The punishments that she can think—”
“You know what? Sod it!” Janet turned in his embrace and seized his arm. “Let’s just run!”
She only managed to pull him a few steps, although they were wide ones, before the riders closed in. From up close there was nothing ghostly or unreal about them, or the spears and bows they carried, or the sharp mouths of the hounds. Janet gulped, repeating to herself that it had been worth a try, that there was an infinitesimal chance that they were only there to see them off.
Mostly, though, she thought that she didn’t want to spend the next two to five hundred years tied to a tree. It might mean that she’d live two or five hundred years, which wasn’t that bad an idea in theory, but they’d be the dullest centuries ever lived.
>
Tam Lin’s hiss and the tightening of his hand on her waist was her only warning. The horses went still, and so did the wind, although the latter took its time doing so. Two of the horses neighed and trotted out of the circle they had made around them, leaving an opening that, Janet felt sure, would close in a wink the moment they tried to run through it.
It was meant for someone else.
She thought she understood, now, the reason why Tam Lin’s voice broke with terror every time he mentioned the Queen. The woman had yet to appear, and already she could feel her presence like ice rubbed over her bones. Was this what magic felt like? If so, she couldn’t think why anyone would want anything to do with it. It was special, but in the same way being caught by a hurricane would be special. Powerful, certainly, and impressive, but also frightening and unquestionably dangerous.
Finally, the wind ceased blowing entirely. The Queen of Fairies formed just like the riders had, bit by bit. First the hem of a dress, impossibly green like the grass it spread over. Then the rest of the dress, also green, and glistening with either bits of glass or diamonds or morning dew. Then a slit that came all the way to the Queen’s thigh and showed a vast expanse of alabaster flesh. Then a bodice, studded with blue feathers, and a delicate neck, and finally, a face framed by long raven hair.
A face.
“Who dares to trespass and steal from my l—” The woman’s long-lashed eyes, which had been closed for dramatic effect, shot open, and the melodic notes of her voice died in her throat. She took in the sight of them. Then she looked both sides of her and back again, quickly, as if trying to decide if it wasn’t too late to sink back in the aether from which she had formed. An instant later she gave up on that and faced them again.
Twist (A BDSM & Romantic Erotica Boxed Set) Page 25
