by Moira Rogers
Oddly, the words made her laugh. “And you could cross the room and snap my neck with your bare hands. How do you think I became spoiled, Ennon? Malrion defied family and tradition to let me live free of royal expectations. To be a girl who climbed trees and fought with swords and had the childhood no one allowed him. He won’t disown me.”
It gave him hope. “Even if you marry a thoroughly unsuitable cad?”
“I imagine that would depend on if the unsuitable cad planned to make me miserable. He’d be a fool to marry me if he intended to continue being a cad.” Kisri didn’t smile. “Do you?”
“Plan to marry you, or plan to keep being a cad?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she looked away, her shoulders slumped, her entire posture full of defeated misery. “I could love you so easily, Ennon, but in this I have no desire to be spoiled. If you have a care for me at all, do me the favor of following your heart. Rejection will sting far less in the long run than having you choose me out of duty or fear instead of desire and affection.”
Somehow, his foolish, clumsy words had confused her. “My duty and my fear would drive me to leave you be, Kisri. To let you live a life free of me.”
A shiver made her entire body tremble. “And your heart?”
He could not lie. “My heart? My heart is yours,” he confessed hoarsely.
“Follow your heart, and you can claim mine.”
Could it be so simple after all? No more complicated than making the choice to try? Ennon took a step closer. “Marry me, Kisri.”
She tilted her head and considered him, the first hint of a smile playing around the edges of her full lips. “You’re a cad and I’m a spoiled brat. Are you brave enough to see if we can simply be a lion and lioness in love?”
“If you’re certain it’s what you want.” That was the one thing on which he could not bend, the one thing that would break him. “I cannot be a mistake you wish you had not made.”
Kisri rocked onto her toes to frame his face. “I can’t predict the future. Not for either of us. But you are not a mistake to me. Not today. My mistake was almost letting you drive me away.”
And his mistake had been to try. “Do you think Mal left us hoping that I would leave, or that I would stay?”
“High Lord Malrion does not hope for people to leave.” Her hands slid to the back of his head and dropped to his shoulders. She hopped up easily, her legs around his hips. “My cousin wraps his royal hand around the backs of their necks and drags them wherever he thinks they should be.”
And, this time, Ennon had no choice but to agree. “His methods may leave something to be desired, but this time…”
“Disband the army,” she whispered against his jaw. “Do your duty as the First Warlord, and if you still want me when it’s over…” She pressed her next kiss to his ear. “Mal will be pleased to be able to celebrate victory with a royal wedding, and doubly pleased if it isn’t his.”
“A worthy list of tasks to be completed.” He licked her earlobe. “What of right now? This moment?”
She moaned softly and rocked against him, her legs tightening. “I believe you owe it to me to make love to me again, now that I know I need not hold myself back. If I had not been so frightened of losing you, I might have noticed the mating bond.”
“Here? In the High Lord’s dining tent?”
“Can you clear a way through the guards for us?”
He bit her ear with a growl and lifted her higher. “Hold on.”
They drew more than their share of astonished looks and snickers from the guards and soldiers milling about the camp, but no one dared stop them until they reached her tent, when a stone-faced elder warrior stared them down.
He didn’t move. Not until Kisri leaned over his shoulder and gave him a winsome smile. “Did my cousin bar the First Warlord from my tent?”
The guard cleared his throat. When the tips of his ears turned pink, Ennon laughed. “Stand down, man. I haven’t dragged her here against her will.”
“You can report to the High Lord if you wish,” Kisri offered. “However, since he left me in Ennon’s care in the first place, it’s entirely unnecessary.”
The man’s blush deepened, and he stammered out an apology and stepped away. Inside, Ennon surveyed the tent. Though it contained the same spare furnishings as his own, rich fabrics and cushions had been strewn about.
Ennon dropped Kisri onto the cot. “Your cousin is quite serious about your guard detail, it seems.”
“Are you surprised?” She scrambled to her knees and reached for the fastenings on his vest, fingers nimble and determined. “The first guard he assigned to me was you.”
He drove his fingers into her hair. “And, in a way, the last.”
“No.” When his vest hung open, she jerked at his tunic until she could reach underneath. “The final assignment is mine.”
“Is it, now?”
“Mmm. I choose the man who will guard me for the rest of my days.” Her fingernails dragged over his chest. “Teach me what it means to be mated. Surely there’s more to it than a bond I can’t feel.”
“There is…if you accept my claim.” He dropped to his knees beside the cot. “Do you, my love?”
The gentle endearment seemed to thrill her. She wet her lips and nodded, deadly serious instead of playful. “With everything in me.”
He ran one hand up her leg to her thigh. “Feel it when I’m inside you, and you’ll see. You’ll feel when the magic makes itself known.”
She pounced on him, riding his body as he let her knock him backwards onto the plush carpeting. She straddled his legs and reached for his pants. “Then I want you inside me.”
Ennon gripped her wrists. “In good time. Like after I’ve made you scream my name.”
She laughed. “In the middle of my cousin’s camp? A better goal would be to make me moan it into a pillow.”
He flashed her what he hoped was a wicked smile. “My evening won’t be complete until I’ve embarrassed all of your guards.”
“And what do you intend to do?” She lifted her hips, inched forward and settled herself firmly on his lap. “Wouldn’t this be so much more pleasant without our clothes?”
Even the banter was fun, joyous, because she was his. Ennon lifted her onto the cot once more and unfastened her pants. “You should most certainly be naked.”
She obliged him by loosening the ties on her tunic and slipping it over her head. Underneath, her skin was pale and bare, gilded in light that came from expensive lamps instead of sooty fires. “You’re incredibly bossy.”
“If you tell me you don’t like it, you’ll be lying.” His mouth went dry at the sight of all that bared skin, and he hurried to pull off her pants.
“It has its occasional charms.” The first time she’d stood nude before him, self-consciousness and uncertainty had twisted her features. Now she was bold, shameless as she reached for him and began to tug at his tunic.
He let her pull it over his head, then urged her legs apart, his ardor making his hands shake. “Lie back.”
“Bossy,” she whispered again, but she obeyed, relaxing back against the cot with her body stretched out before him.
In time, he would tease her slowly, take her inch by inch with his tongue and with his body. For now, he parted her with his thumbs and stroked through her slick wetness. “Beautiful.”
“Impatient,” she retorted hoarsely, her fingers groping for his hair. “Ennon, I want you.”
“Shh.” He touched his tongue to her clit, circled it gently.
She muffled her helpless moan against the back of her wrist as her hips rocked up toward him, and he watched her as he eased lower and thrust his tongue inside her.
Another moan—more frantic, this time, though still muffled—and then her hand fell away from her lips. “I want your cock inside me. I want you to put me on my knees and bend me over this cot and show me how a lion claims his mate.”
“You want it more than my tongue?” he whis
pered, knowing she would hear.
Her fingers tightened painfully in his hair. “Yes.”
Ennon urged her over to her stomach, kissed the small of her back. “I love you.”
Unsteady breaths fell from her lips in rasping pants. “I love you too. I want you.”
He fumbled his pants open, but instead of driving into her, he went slowly, thrusting into her bit by bit.
Her back bowed. Her dark hair flew wild around her body as she fisted the covers and pushed into his slow advance. “I—I don’t know how to submit. Help me.”
He trailed his tongue up her spine, between her shoulder blades, and whispered against her skin. “You know how. Accept me, darling. Let me in.”
A fine trembling shook her body. “I’ve been protecting myself too long. Even from you.”
Ennon didn’t stop until he was buried to the hilt inside her, and he unleashed a tiny bit of magic as he leaned over her. “Let me in.”
This time she arched, pressing her back to his chest with a soft whimper. Skittish, as she’d been in the woods the first night, so eager to test herself against him.
And eager to be won. She gave in to him with a sigh, her steely defenses crumbling as she opened her heart to him with the boldness and bravery that defined her.
The satisfaction was nothing compared to the tenderness that suffused him. “That’s it, darling. Nothing to fear in this submission.”
“Just to you.” She bit his jaw, a quick teasing nip followed by a low laugh. “As long as you earn it every time.”
He would, with every breath. “Every time.” He punctuated the promise with a hard thrust.
A moan escaped her, unchecked, as she spilled forward. Onto her elbows at first, then lower, muffling her noises against her forearm as the sharp angle of her hips let him take her deeply.
Deep, and every thrust hit a spot that made her clench around him. Ennon gritted his teeth and slowed to a careful, intense rocking grind. “Every time, love.”
Her pleasure spilled free and he felt it, her giddy joy and her sharp relief, emotions that flashed through him in the moment of total acceptance. The ache inside him vanished, replaced with her, prickly and warm, then wild as her muffled cries filled his ears.
His self-control couldn’t stand against such an onslaught of ecstasy. One more thrust and his body tightened, spilled with a pulsing, helpless pleasure that made his head pound with the echoes of both their hearts.
He pressed his forehead to the back of her shoulder and panted for breath. “Kisri?”
Turning her head, she rested her cheek against the rumpled blankets on her cot. “Is that what it felt like for you the first time?”
“Yes.” There were no words for it, no way to describe the completion of it.
She didn’t try. Instead, she made him a promise that warmed his heart and brought peace to his soul. “When the army has disbanded, come to the palace. I’ll marry you.”
He said it because the words felt good on his tongue. “You’ll be my wife?”
“Until you cannot stand another moment in my presence.”
He laughed. “That will never happen.”
“So confident.” Smiling, she twisted up to press her lips to his. “We’ll talk again in fifty years or so.”
“A hundred?”
“So you plan to chase me into the next life as well?”
“I’ve been chasing you from the beginning, Kisri. It’s become something of a habit by now.”
“Then perhaps I’ll let you catch me from time to time.” She arched lazily and all but purred, the satisfied rumble of a lioness who had been tamed…for now.
He would never tame her completely, and that suited Ennon just fine. She suited him, perhaps more than she knew, and he would gladly use every one of the hundred years she’d promised him showing her how much.
Epilogue
Sweat stung her eyes. Her arm ached, fingers very nearly numb from their desperate grip on her practice sword.
Across from her, Mal held his own weapon easily. “Your fingers are going to fall off if you keep clutching the hilt like that.”
If she admitted that it was the only way she could keep it in her grasp, he might call a stop to their sparring. Not that there would be shame in that—she’d lasted several rounds against the High Lord himself, for all that he’d pulled his more punishing blows. But the nervousness twisting in her belly would only be relieved by physical exhaustion.
So she eased her grip—just a little—and launched her attack.
Mal met it easily. “If you’re too tired to spar, we should stop. You could injure yourself.”
“I’m not going to injure myself,” she ground out between clenched teeth. But after he parried her next three swings with equal laziness, she had to admit that being too tired to spar and being too tired to spar with a warrior trained from birth might be two entirely different things.
Besides, her pride was beginning to sting as wickedly as her eyes. “Very well,” she panted finally, lowering her sword to the dirt. “I admit defeat.”
He plucked the dull blade from her hand and shook his head. “Never. This was practice, you know. No one loses here.”
“I always lose,” she countered as she began to pace, stretching her legs out so they wouldn’t grow stiff. “But I don’t mind so much. There’s no shame in losing to someone of your skill.”
“You flatter me, cousin.” But his tone made it clear he had no doubt her words were truth.
Arrogant ass. Even as she thought it, she knew the words as a lie. The only man who could hope to best Malrion in single combat was Ennon. And he was the reason butterflies had taken up residence in her midsection, tormenting her with their wild, giddy dance.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow, he would reach the palace and put an end to the tedious month of worry and longing. If missing her family had been heartache, missing the man whose magic had twined with hers was a pain that grew day by day until every sleepless night was an agony of loneliness.
“He’ll be here, Kisri.” All traces of teasing humor had faded from his voice. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you. He would let nothing stop him.”
“Because we’re mated,” she whispered. “I didn’t know it would hurt so much, to be apart. How do people tolerate this, over months and years? All of your soldiers who went to war and left mates behind…”
“Everyone sacrifices in times of war,” Mal said matter-of-factly. “You were lucky, yes? To discover your mate in a time of newly minted peace?”
She had been lucky, fortunate in ways that she unspooled in her mind a hundred times. If she hadn’t escaped their uncle… If her charm hadn’t broken in Ennon’s camp, with one of his trustworthy soldiers close enough to summon him quickly. If she hadn’t found the courage to ask him for something insane at a time when sanity was returning to their people.
So many ifs, and the biggest one of all stood before her. “Thank you. Thank you for forcing the family to give me freedoms, and for letting me choose the man I’ll spend my life with. Thank you for everything.”
Mal’s eyes went suspiciously bright. “You’re welcome.”
Her resolve broke, and she threw her arms around her cousin and hugged him. “And promise me that you’ll spoil your own daughters just as much. I want unmanageable nieces.”
“That will be a long time yet.” But his arms came around her, and he hugged her tightly.
“Looks like I missed sword-fighting practice.”
Kisri jumped so quickly she knocked her forehead into Mal’s chin. A curse spilled from her lips as she whirled and found Ennon standing there, a growth of beard on his jaw and his pack on the ground.
She was in her worst leathers, covered in sweat and dust. Her hair was no doubt frightful, with flyaway strands stuck to her face. All her careful plans crumbled into ash. No soaking in her tub tonight, no dressing herself in silks and satins and pretending, if only for a few hours’ time, that she had it in her to be a great lady.
No, Ennon had come home to find her every bit as grubby and uncivilized as she’d been in the midst of an army camp, and now there would be no pretending. Her feet carried her two steps forward before she checked herself, unaccountably shy. She had to wet her lips twice to speak. “Ennon.”
“Come here,” he rasped, moments before sweeping her off her feet. His smile turned to a laugh, and he pressed his lips to her ear. “I missed you.”
Nervousness broke in a rush of relief as he silently filled all the aching, empty places inside her. Warm magic, twisting and beautiful, until she wanted to laugh at how glorious it was to be a lioness in the arms of her mate. “I missed you too.”
About the Author
How do you make a Moira Rogers? Take a former forensic science and nursing student obsessed with paranormal romance and add a computer programmer with a passion for gritty urban fantasy. To learn more about this romance-writing, crime-fighting duo, visit their webpage at www.moirarogers.com, or drop them an email at [email protected]. (Disclaimer: crime-fighting abilities may appear only in the aforementioned fevered imaginations.)
Look for these titles by Moira Rogers
Now Available:
Red Rock Pass
Cry Sanctuary
Sanctuary Lost
Sanctuary’s Price
Sanctuary Unbound
Southern Arcana
Crux
Crossroads
Deadlock
Building Sanctuary
A Safe Harbor
Undertow
Wilder’s Mate
Sabine
Coming Soon:
Cipher
Hammer Down
A curse can erase her from his mind, but never from his heart.
Sabine
© 2011 Moira Rogers
…and the Beast, Book 1
After three years at war, the High Lord of the Forest returns to his lands, a victorious wolf leader intent on claiming his mate. Instead Ciar finds an empty bed and a court with no recollection of the woman he loved. Following her long-cold trail proves far easier than facing what awaits him at the end.
