When he was finally satisfied he had his cock sufficiently slick, he stepped toward her. The long shaft swung with the motion, and she stared at it, helplessly fascinated.
Arthur laughed, the sound more than a little sinister. “I find the look of terror on your face perversely satisfying.” His grin broadened. “But I’ll wager I’ll find actually fucking your tight little hole even more delicious.”
He grabbed her by one hip and flipped her over onto her stomach, then pulled her onto her hands and knees. His hand landed on her neck, collaring it in long fingers and forcing her head back down. “Arse in the air, darling. That’s better. Now, brace yourself.” His voice dropped to a growl. “This will hurt.”
TEN
Gwen felt the smooth heat of Arthur’s cock press against her anal opening.
“Don’t tense, push,” he told her, his voice all dark velvet seduction. “It’ll hurt less.”
She laughed. It sounded strained even to her. “I’m not even going to ask how you know so much about . . . Wait, how do you know so much about this?”
“A man hears things.”
“Mary, from whom?”
But he was already sinking inside, despite the instinctive resistance of her anal muscles. Her flesh strained and stung as he forced his cock deeper by slow inches, stuffing her mercilessly. Gwen’s eyes watered at the hot, edgy pain.
He felt huge, thick. Overwhelming. Yet something about the massive impalement struck her as incredibly erotic, especially bound as she was, his big hand wrapped around the back of her neck, pinning her for his use.
“I think I like this,” he rumbled, when his balls finally rested against her bottom. “You have a very tight arse. Does it hurt?”
“Do you care?”
“Not especially.” He began to withdraw.
In contrast to his entry, the exit stroke felt delicious. And he knew it, too, because he pulled out slowly, spinning the pleasure into a long, golden thread of delight. He drew all the way out, his cock leaving her like a cork from a bottle. “I think you need more lubricant,” he told her, a note of dark anticipation in his voice. “I’m going to want to fuck you deep and fast, and I want a slick ride.”
“You just like cramming that club of yours up my backside.”
He laughed. “You do know me well.”
“I thought I did.”
His voice chilled. “Yes, I suppose we both found ourselves unpleasantly surprised this night.”
She winced. Keep your foolish tongue behind your teeth, Gwen.
Strong fingers clamped down on her cheeks, prying her open. She heard the pop of the cork leaving the oil bottle, then felt the cool trickle of oil into her opening. Again, she suffered through the nerve-wracking wait as he coated himself with the lubricant. Her breath came faster until she was all but panting.
Arthur entered her arse even more slowly this time, purring in pleasure as he impaled her. So slowly, so deliberately, she knew he was making sure she felt every massive inch of his invasion. “If you fight it, it will hurt more.”
“Which is exactly . . .” She stopped to pant as he worked in another burning inch. “. . . How you want it.”
“Do you deserve anything less?”
His voice held such silken menace, she shivered. “No.”
Damn her, she didn’t have to sound so bloody lost.
Any other woman would have played to his ego and lust, Arthur thought, exaggerating her submissiveness to blunt his rage. Gwen defied him, though she must know she was saying exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.
Yet just when he was about to lose control completely, fuck her as mercilessly as his lust and fury demanded, that faint note of broken pain in her voice reminded Arthur this was his Gwen. His wife.
His love.
The stark agony in that thought made him want to howl like a wounded wolf.
Luckily her arse felt delicious, so exquisitely tight, the pleasure made a fine distraction from the brutal pain in his chest. And why not? Why not ream her so hard he forgot everything else? If he hurt her only a fraction as much as she’d hurt him, so much the better.
Still, Arthur fought the clawing hunger until he could thrust smoothly, carefully. Sliding slowly up her delightfully snug passage until he was in to the root.
There he paused, admiring the sight of the pale, perfect curves of Gwen’s arse, with its silken flesh and shadowed cleft, impaled on his massive erection.
She made a soft, anxious sound, tinged with pain. That whimper had the effect of soothing his prowling anger. He smiled, and suspected there was more than a little savagery in the expression as he began to pull out. She caught her breath. This time he detected a note of pleasure in her whimper, a reluctant enjoyment. He reached the head and pushed deep again, as slowly as he could stand.
Again he pulled out, a delicious glide through Gwen’s tight, slick depths. “God, you feel so good,” he gritted through his teeth. “Tighter than a strong man’s fist.” He forced his cock deep again. “Utterly perfect.”
“You . . . you feel so damned . . .” She broke off. “Hurts, but it . . . feels good.”
“Then let’s see how long I can make it last.”
Clawing for control, he fucked her, one hand locked around her neck, keeping her pinned and helpless while he plundered her rectum. Her pulse leaped against his fingertips. His fangs ached with the need to bite into that soft, soft skin. The thought of possessing her so utterly she would never again forget whom she belonged to—God, it tempted him. He wanted to feel her pulse leaping against his lips as he fucked her, drinking her blood.
It scared the hell out of him.
The craving for blood—Gwen’s blood—was so alien, yet it seemed to reverberate in his bones. A black, aching need he couldn’t resist. Couldn’t deny. A hunger that had throbbed in the background of his mind since he’d last had her, too many days ago.
He’d fought it, feared it, refused its demands. Yet when he’d learned what she’d done, his anger had intensified his thirst until it slid right out of his control. Somehow he’d managed to turn it into lust, like a man dragging on the reins of a runaway horse. Forcing it to find expression in his plunging cock and Gwen’s tight arse.
Arthur needed blood. He could feel himself growing weaker. The hunger roared so loud in him now that it was hard to think. A taste. The words seemed to pound in his heartbeat in time to the thrusts of his cock. Just a taste.
God, her arse felt so tight, so slick. And her pulse beat against his fingertips.
A taste a taste a taste . . .
The next thing he knew, he’d released her throat, slid a hand under her right arm and across her chest to lift her upper body as he sat back on his heels. Dragging her up onto her knees, he rolled his hips and speared his cock into her arse. She cried out, her voice high with blended pain and pleasure. Her head fell back to rest on his shoulder. He turned his head to the pulsing artery just under her silken skin. He could hear its seductive thump, feel its heat. Almost taste it.
God’s balls, his mouth was dry.
Arthur tried to stop, tried to fight the clawing need, but he knew he was damned to lose like a soul being dragged into hell.
A desperate idea flashed into his mind. “Use your magic to link with me,” he growled just above his wife’s taut skin. “Now.”
Gwen jolted, her arse tightening deliciously around his cock. The sensation poured oil over the flame of his hunger, making it leap. “Arthur, no—if I died, you . . .”
“Do the magic, witch,” he snapped, fighting to hold himself back in spite of the impossibly arousing temptation of her sweet pulse. “Truebond us. Your husband—your king—orders it.”
“Arthur . . .”
“Now!” His fingers tightened around her throat. His fangs ached savagely, their points brushing the banging vein as he spoke. “Do it.”
With a despairing cry, she lifted her bound wrists. The belt around them vanished in an explosion of sparks as she flu
ng her arms apart. Golden light poured from her fingers, raining sparks over their shoulders. A bright braided cord flashed into being, snaking from her head to his. He felt something warm flood his consciousness, something kind and tender and . . . Gwen.
“Arthur. God, Arthur, forgive me. I can’t bear your anger. Please God, let him forgive me. I will die without him. I know I don’t deserve it after what I’ve done . . .”
Guilt and despair hammered him in an agonizing flood that made him cry out.
“God, Arthur . . .”
I’m feeling her pain. This was Gwen’s guilt, Gwen’s despair. Emotions so strong, they drowned even his burning anger. Tears pricked his lids in the kind of unmanly display his father had always beaten him for.
Time to give both of them something else to think about.
He bit her.
Blood flooded his desert-dry mouth, triggering an explosion of lust that stiffened the cock that had damned near gone limp from her suffering. In five hot heartbeats, his shaft was hard as a sword blade again. He thrust upward . . .
And the sensation of a huge cock ramming up his arse almost made him choke on the blood. He froze in pain. Christ!
Amusement rippled through him like quicksilver. A distinctly feminine amusement. “Not quite as much fun being on this end of the dick, is it?”
He started to pull out, only to freeze again at the sudden hot pleasure.
“Then again . . . Oh, Arthur, that’s lovely. Do it again.”
Slowly, warily, he began to withdraw. She was right. The pleasure of her tight anal grip, the way it milked his cock . . . He thrust deep in sheer reflex and sucked in a breath at the thorny pleasure.
“Sweet and brutal,” she thought. “Like you.”
“Whereas you are just sweet.” He swallowed another mouthful of that deliciously intoxicating blood. And began to thrust again, far more carefully. Afraid he’d hurt her, tear her, big as he was. If he’d realized sooner how it had felt . . .
“You’d have fucked me like this anyway. You’re so angry, Arthur. So hurt.”
He growled against her throat as his prodded rage roused like a dragon in its cave. “Shut up. For God’s sake, shut up. Please.”
Pain and guilt cut through her so sharply, it hurt him far worse than the sensation of his cock in his own arse. “I never realized I was quite this well-endowed . . .”
“I’ve certainly never complained.” Despite the arch humor in the thought, her suffering made the link between them vibrate like a plucked lute string. “I never meant to . . .”
He didn’t want to hear it. Punishing both of them now, he started fucking her hard. Despite the pain, pleasure began to lash them, waves of it as he drank from her in deep, hot swallows.
Merlin was right. The Truebond kept him aware of her, kept him from losing control.
Orgasm hit them in a great burning wave, so intense it was impossible to tell who’d come first, since that climax triggered the other almost simultaneously. The power of their shared orgasm was greater than any delight he’d ever known, blazing hotter and brighter until they burned, Gwen screaming, his own cry muffled by her throat as he shot and shot and shot into the tight, slick depth of her arse.
• • •
They woke together. Gwen lay curled in the shelter of Arthur’s big body. His softened cock had slipped from her arse, just as his fangs no longer pierced her throat. Yet their minds remained joined.
“Why? Why did you do this to us, Gwen?”
The answer flashed through her consciousness like the blinding illumination of a lightning bolt, so fast and intense he could make no sense of it.
“What? I didn’t catch that. Remember. Show me what happened.”
Fear shot through her—not for herself but for . . .
“I won’t kill him. How can I fault him when I did the same? I came back with no recognition of you, either.”
Arthur remembered that much. Or at least, he thought he did. Misty, vague recollections of a beautiful blonde, soft pale breasts, the tight grip of cream-slick flesh . . .
So Gwen showed him that night with Lancelot. Showed him the way she’d paced the corridor in pain and despair at her conviction that Mordred would kill Arthur. Showed him the moment she’d seen the maid flee Lancelot’s room, and decided to feed him herself. Even showed him the moment she lost control of her own desire in the face of Lance’s handsome nudity—and how he’d tricked her by feigning injury.
“Dammit, he did force you! I’ll kill him!”
“No! Yes, he took advantage of my distraction. But you know as well as I do he would never have done such a thing to any woman if he’d been aware of himself. He certainly never would have done it to me.”
Despite his anger, Arthur knew she had a point. And that made him angry all over again. “So why does he believe you somehow forced him as part of some stupid scheme to drive me into a Truebond?”
“Because I panicked.” She showed him the spell she’d cast, and the reason she’d cast it.
“Dammit, Gwen! Did you truly think me such a jealous, stupid fool, I’d murder my best friend without listening to you?”
“Well, you did just threaten to kill him.”
“I also listened to you tell me why I shouldn’t.”
“The politics . . .”
“Fuck the politics. The politics wouldn’t be a problem if you hadn’t made the situation so much worse by trying to cover it up.”
“Yes,” she admitted, “I’ve wished a thousand times since then I’d kept my mouth shut, my spells to myself, and simply sneaked out the door. No one would have had to know anything, including Lance. He probably wouldn’t even have remembered I was there.”
“Too bad he drank you unconscious instead. God’s hairy balls, I’m going to kick his arse!”
“Arthur . . .”
“Gwen, Lance and his bloody pride have plunged us all lip-deep in dragon shit. He just had to yell for Kay and rant until the whole damn fortress heard him. He knows better than that.”
“He would never have done it if not for my stupid spell.” She sighed, stirring her fingers through Arthur’s thick, curly chest hair. “But I truly believed he wouldn’t have been able to deal with what he’d have seen as a betrayal of you. It would’ve destroyed him sooner or later. I had to make sure he didn’t remember anything at all, that he thought it was my fault.”
“And as usual, you were too bloody efficient. Little martyr.” Arthur sighed. “Well, we’re just going to have to deal with the aftermath.”
“God help us.”
At least his lethal rage had been replaced by weariness—though damned if he knew what they were going to do about the situation.
• • •
With the exception of Lancelot—who was cooling his heels elsewhere—the Knights of the Round Table stood on the balustrade, tension obvious in the way every man held himself.
Kay sensed Arthur and Gwen’s approach first and turned. Arthur saw relief flash across his foster brother’s face when he saw Gwen. As if despite everything she’d done, he didn’t want her dead any more than Arthur did. A moment later Kay frowned, taking in the protective way Arthur circled her slim back with his arm, plainly seeing the political ramifications of the king’s sparing his adulterous queen.
Then the other knights turned and spotted them, and the same relief flashed across every man’s face. Arthur wasn’t surprised; Gwen had always been popular with his men, for she’d treated them with a kind of warm respect for their heroism and sacrifice, yet she never fawned over them. What did surprise him was their obvious expectation that he’d slay her out of hand. Did they think so little of his self-control, his basic chivalry? Arthur stopped and stared at them. “You expected me to kill my queen.”
“You were pretty angry, sire,” Gawain said, with his usual blunt honesty.
It took a moment for Arthur’s outrage to cool enough for him to see their point. “True enough,” he admitted. “And I have my father’s temper.
But I am satisfied my queen committed no treason.”
Anger flashed across their faces. Gwen mentally shrank back even as she lifted her chin and pasted an expression of royal hauteur on her face.
“Then Lancelot did force her?” Tristan demanded.
“No!” Startled, Gwen stared at them, realizing belatedly they were angry for her, not at her. “He didn’t know who I was. He didn’t even know who he was.”
Kay’s frown deepened. “So he did use force, then?”
“My wife said he did not,” Arthur growled, icy menace in his voice. “Suffice it to say I know exactly what happened. We are Truebonded.”
“Arthur . . .” Kay began in an involuntary protest that died the moment his king looked at him. The seneschal could get away with a great deal, but he also knew where the boundaries were. He knew to the inch how far he could push.
Arthur had been pushed entirely too far as it was.
• • •
Lancelot was locked in one of the cells for rebel prisoners in the barracks. Gwen hadn’t been happy to learn Kay had put him there, but Arthur had only shrugged. “He had to be locked up somewhere until I made a decision, and it kept the other knights from beating his arse. From what I understand, he wouldn’t have put up much of a fight.”
He had the guards open the cell and ordered them to withdraw. Judging from their expressions, the two men didn’t think that was a good idea, but Arthur gave them a look that sent them out anyway.
Gwen walked in on her husband’s arm to find Lancelot on his knees, his dark head bent. There was nothing in the pose that suggested fear, or anything except calm acceptance. Knowing Lance, that calm wouldn’t break even if Arthur drew his sword and prepared to behead him on the spot.
The king sighed. “Speak, du Lac.”
“I do not ask for forgiveness, my king. The crime I committed against you and the realm is unforgivable. The fault lies entirely with me—I forced the queen . . .”
“Am I my father?” Arthur snapped.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, Lancelot’s gaze lifted and met his before flying back to the stone floor. “No, sire.”
Wicked Games Page 15
