by Gail Dayton
He groaned, his head falling forward. He opened his mouth over her shoulder, licking it first, then suckling once more. He flattened his palms over her breasts, rubbing them in little circles that made her nipples tingle and the lightning spark again. Amanusa felt her nipples pucker against her hands, but her hands were over Jax’s. His hands were on her breasts.
She tried to pull back, to give Jax the privacy of his mind, but he… grabbed hold. Shared the sensations with her. For half a moment, she wondered if he should be able to do that, but the sensations swelled in a wild raging flood and swept her thoughts away like so much rubbish.
He moved to the other shoulder, licking, sucking, kissing. Amanusa shook with the pleasure of it. Then, carrying her hand along, he slid one hand down her stomach. The other plucked lightly at her nipples, making her want to hurry his downward journey. But he seemed determined to prove this was no race, for he took his leisurely time, stroking his fingers over every inch of her skin, capturing her fingers when they slid down to twine with his, circling her navel before delving in.
Her body screaming with anxiety, Amanusa twisted her head and bit down on Jax’s ear. Just a quick, sharp nip before licking over the bite. He jumped, which she expected, but she didn’t expect his hips to surge against her bottom, or his passion to surge into her through the magic of her blood in his veins. She burned, hotter, wilder than before, and she bit him again, sharper.
He moved his ear out of reach. “Easy, love.” His amusement made her want to bite his other car. “Patience is a virtue.”
“Jax,” she moaned. Or was it a whimper? She wanted.
She tightened her grip on his hand and tried to shove it lower, to that oh-so-anxious part of her. For a moment, he resisted, then gave in to her urging.
“Whatever you want, you know I’ll give it to you,” he said into her ear.
“I don’t know what I want, exactly. I just, I—”
“Shhh—” He slid his hand lower and lower, toward that part of her that… Why would it be anxious? Why would she be damp there when she’d never been before, except after—after—
Jax shushed her again. He caught her ear in his teeth, catching her attention with the gentle nip. “Look at me, Amanusa. At me. Think about me. Think about us, here together. It’s me touching you. You have hold of my hands. You can stop them. You can move them where you like. Whatever you want, love.”
Love. He’d called her that more than once tonight. It was just a word, the way he used it, like Mihai had called her “dearest.” But she liked hearing it anyway.
“All right?” He kissed beneath her ear.
She nodded, and Jax slipped their hands beneath the precariously balanced edge of her nightgown to touch the. pale curls hiding her sex. The gown slipped, caught briefly on her bottom, then on his wrist, before it slid slowly down to crumple around her feet.
“Beautiful,” he whispered. “Magnificent.”
He combed his fingers through the crisp blond hair over her mound until she relaxed again—as much as the anxiety would let her. This was Jax. He wouldn’t grab. Wouldn’t gouge or pinch or twist. He would—oh heavens—he would make her feel good. She didn’t know how, but he said it was possible for her to find pleasure in the act and she trusted him to show her.
The gentle stroke of his fingers felt good already and he hadn’t gone beyond the surface. Slowly, gradually, he pressed harder, just where she felt the most anxious, and it felt even better. Better than she’d thought possible, and yet the anxiety still gripped her, still feared—no, wanted. It wanted and she didn’t know what it wanted, except more.
She saw herself in the mirror, head thrown back, body arched against Jax, her breasts thrust high as she strained for something. She let go of Jax’s hand on her breast and reached up to grab a handful of his hair, but she didn’t tug on it. She needed his face where it was, where she could see it in the mirror, for it was his face she focused on.
She needed to see his face—his green-blue forest-lake eyes and his wide, mobile, full-lipped mouth. His rough-carved features and hard-set jaw. Jax. Her Jax.
His finger slipped, plunged between her netherlips and touched something, a nubbin that sent pleasure vibrating through her. She cried out, Jax’s cry echoing hers. He stroked over the nubbin—a thing she’d never known existed though the body was her own—and it happened again. Intense pleasure built higher and higher, drawing her up onto her toes as she reached for it.
“Jax.” Her hand convulsed in his hair, her eyes wild and frantic.
Another stroke and another, and time froze for an endless, ecstatic moment. Then the pleasure exploded, cascading through her in astonishing waves.
“Amanusa!” Jax’s body echoed the arc of hers and he pulled her tight against him as his hips thrust into her bottom.
She could feel his cock throbbing inside his trousers as he spent, but more importantly, she could feel his pleasure, feel that same explosive peak as it blasted through him. It made her cry out again.
He staggered. He caught himself, then caught hold of her, swinging her around and out of her crumpled nightdress to collapse together on the big wingback chair to one side. They gasped for breath, Amanusa sprawled as much over the chair as over Jax. After a while, he stirred, lifted her more properly onto his lap and settled straight in the chair rather than twisted to one side. He tipped his head forward so Amanusa could put her arm behind it. across his shoulders. She nestled in, her naked breasts plumped against his bare torso.
“What just happened?” Amanusa leaned her head against the wing of the chair to look to him. “I could feel you, feel what you felt. Was I supposed to do that?”
“I have heard of it being possible.” Jax struggled to assemble his shattered reality. Too many impossible things, things that should never have happened, had. He owed her information, explanations, but he had none, not even for himself. He did have truth, however, and that was the least of what he owed her. “I could feel what you felt ‘as well, however. And that has never happened. Ever.”
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The greatest impossibility—”Amanusa, when you reached climax, I—”
“I know. You climaxed too. I felt it.” She frowned at him. “I thought you couldn’t do that, if I didn’t—”
“I can’t. Or—I couldn’t. I shouldn’t have been able to.” He hid his face in her shoulder, unable to look at her, to see the suspicion rise in her eyes. “I lied to you, Amanusa, when I said that I was a eunuch. I can be aroused. Yvaine allowed me that much, to rise and harden. I should have told you, I know, but—”
“You didn’t want to frighten me.” She stroked his hair, pressed her lips to his head. She wasn’t angry over the lie? “I understand.”
Jax held her tighter. Could a woman be any more perfect? No wonder he loved her. “But I should not have been able to spend. I don’t know how that happened. I swear I did not lie about—”
Amanusa put her hands on both sides of his head and lifted it, until he couldn’t avoid her crystalline gaze. “It’s all right, Jax. I’m not angry. I’m not going to punish you. I’m not Yvaine, I’m your wife. Not your owner.” She searched his face for a long moment. “Do you believe me?”
“Dear God, we are a pitiful pair.” He felt the smile in his depths, thought it reached his eyes, but couldn’t bring it as far as his lips. “If you’re not stumbling over your past, I’m crashing into mine. It’s a wonder we’re both whole and sane.”
“I’m not so sure we are.” Amanusa wrapped her arms around him and kissed his forehead as she pulled him in again for a cuddle. “Either whole or sane. But we’re broken together, and we’re mending what was broken, even if it might take us the rest of our lives together.”
He brushed his lips over her collarbone and let his breath sigh out, reaching for contentment. It stayed just beyond his grasp, all the unanswered questions niggling at him.
“Actually,” Amanusa said before he could ask any of them. “I’m glad it happened,
that you could spend without me having to unbind anything. Even when I was still a little afraid of you—and I was never very afraid, because I never sensed any cruelty or meanness in you, even at the first. But even then, I thought it was a terrible thing to do to a man, though it was a relief to me. So I’m glad you were able to free yourself.”
“Yes, but how?” Jax sorted through his various worries, now the gears in his mind began to fit themselves together again. They all boiled down to one. “Are the bonds between us raveling? Am I—?”
Losing you? He couldn’t say it aloud, couldn’t let his desperation show. Not because she would be angry or annoyed, but she might laugh. Or worse, pity him. And if they were coming apart—”Can you still use me as your servant? What will happen if you can’t, if they come against you in this test and you can’t access the magic we just called?”
“I won’t use you, Jax. Not like Yvaine did. Never like that.” She held him tighter.
So tight, he had to turn his head to breathe. That put her rosy pink nipple right before his lips, and the temptation to put his tongue out and taste it was too great to resist. Amanusa’s gasp had him tasting again, and from there, it was only a fraction’s shift to pull it between his lips and—
Chapter 25
Jax stood and set Amanusa on her feet. “You are far too distracting for conversation when you are without clothing, and we need to know what has happened. It could be dangerous. It could indicate that the magic is coming unraveled, or worse. Put something on so I can think, and—” He looked ruefully down at his probably ruined trousers. “I’ll go clean up.”
He left the room without looking back, before he could get distracted again. He left the trousers for the hotel valet and pulled on a fresh pair of knee-length drawers, but he couldn’t make himself dress further. It was still his wedding night.
He shrugged on his dressing gown—Amanusa had insisted he be fitted out with a wardrobe when they’d ordered hers—and hurried back to find Amanusa swathed again in’ her layers of raw silk ruffles. He hoped she’d put her nightdress on underneath it. The more layers, the more likely he’d be able to think. He’d already spent himself once, but it didn’t seem to matter. It had been a very, very long time, after all.
“I think I know what’s happening,” Amanusa said, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed.
Jax sat on the chair, where it was safe. Somewhat. “Go on.”
“I think, because I’ve tasted your blood, it has given you back some of the things Yvaine took when she bound you. It’s given you the ability to choose.”
He shook his head. “I could choose before.”
“Not very much. You couldn’t choose to leave me, to go somewhere else. You couldn’t choose to—to spend.” She turned an adorable pink. He hoped she never stopped blushing when she talked about sex.
“But now—” She snapped her fingers at him. “Jax, are you listening to me?”
“Yes.” He dragged his attention away from her blush, away from remembering just where it began.
She gave him a skeptical look, then dragged the coverlet up to wrap around her. He hoped it would work, but he didn’t think so. She could be covered up so that only her face, only the tip of her nose showed—covered so that nothing showed—and the sound of her voice would arouse him.
“This afternoon,” she said, “when we were building that warding wall, and I reached for the sex magic we called, it seemed as if you had to—to open yourself and let me gather it. And last night, when you wanted me to give you the blood magic from the fight, I couldn’t get in. I couldn’t get inside you until I told you to take the magic. And you said yes, and that’s when I could give it to you.
“I think, when I tasted your blood, you gained the ability to lock me out. I think it made us more truly partners, in every way, because now we have to work together to accomplish what we have to. You have to be willing every time.”
Jax stared at her, unable to wrap his mind around the concept. “But—we’re still bound? Sorceress and servant?”
“Sorceress and familiar. And I think we’re bound closer than before. You’re bound to me, but I’m now bound to you in return. The power isn’t all on one side anymore.”
“That bitch.” Jax threw himself from his chair and stalked to the window to stare out at the night, hands clenching into fists over and over again as he fought down his rage.
“She’s dead.” Amanusa spoke from close behind him, letting him know she was there before she laid a hand on his shoulder. She treated him like an angry man who needed soothing to be safe.
He liked it. He would never, in another three hundred years, do anything to harm this sorceress—his sorceress—but he liked, after so long, being treated like a man. Someone with the right to be angry. Someone with the power to act on that anger.
“She’s dead,” Amanusa said again, “and I’m glad she is, because if she wasn’t, you wouldn’t be mine. But I wish, just for an instant, she wasn’t. So I could kill her.”
Jax spun around and hauled Amanusa into his arms, needing to hold her, to know she was real, and here. And his.
He held her tight. Too tight, likely, but she didn’t object, so he didn’t let go. The anger seeped away with the ticking of the mantel clock. He took a deep breath. “It required my time with Yvaine to make me worthy of Amanusa. You wouldn’t have wanted the man I was.”
“I want the man you are now. I need you.”
For the magic. He heard the words, even if she didn’t say them. She couldn’t need him for anything else. Not the way he needed her. Not like his next breath.
But it was all right. She’d married him. She’d given him back his manhood, made him into a man rather than a thing. She’d bound them closer than ever. He wouldn’t lose her with his neediness.
“Take the magic.” He loosened his grip and lifted his head to see her strong, beautiful face. “Build your shields.”
This time, he somehow sensed Amanusa reaching toward him, and just as she arrived, he thought yes, and the channels inside him, the ones where the magic hid, opened up and began to flow. He could feel it pouring out of him into her, a fiery cascade that felt as good as it hurt.
She gasped when the magic hit her, turning it into the whispered spell, building armor plating around them both, solid, protective, light as air.
“Jax?” Her voice quavered.
“What is it, love?”
“Was there supposed to be so much?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head, wishing he did know. “I’ve never been much good at reading magic, even after I was bound. Head-blind, remember? Why?”
“It feels like more.” She tilted her head and her fingers twitched, as if feeling something. “Or maybe it’s simply that it’s stronger. A difference in quality, rather than quantity. It’s definitely different.”
“How can you tell? We’ve only raised sex magic by kissing before.” He wanted to believe in a difference, but feared to.
“Still the same magic.” Amanusa gave him a teasing look. “Who’s the sorceress, and who’s head-blind?”
He laughed, joy bubbling up from the blood they shared. He was himself again, or more himself than he had been in a long time. He could say yes, or no, and mean it. He could choose.
“Amanusa—” Did he dare ask?
“Mmm?” She seemed to still be playing with the magic.
“Do you think I really can keep you out? If you want in?”
She looked up at him, eyes sharp. “Try it.”
“Are you sure? I don’t—” He sensed her reaching again, angry this time, predatory. So much like Yvaine that he braced for the pain, jaw tight and hard, while his mind cried, No!
And nothing happened. He was alone inside his head, inside his body. He felt cold. There was no warm presence snuggled in beside him. His vague awareness of magic was utterly gone, and he missed it. “Amanusa?”
“You did it.” She smiled at him. “You’ve shut me out.”
/> “I don’t like it.”
Her smile wobbled. “I don’t either. I can’t feel you.” Her hand closed into a fist, touched her heart. “Here. I can’t feel you here, inside me.”
Jax’s hands tightened on the arms of the chair to keep from lunging across the room at her. He wanted to be inside her, in every way possible.
Yes, he thought, and the warmth seeped back in. He could sense the magic in the air and inside himself. One more answer and he would be done with asking for tonight at least. “When you reached for the magic that time, it felt like Yvaine.”
“I meant to. I tried to think like her, that I was entitled to the magic and you were only a tool, a thing.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t like it.”
“Because that’s not who you are.”
“I could be. The power is tempting. That’s why I didn’t like it, because the magic doesn’t care. It just wants to be used. Maybe Yvaine didn’t start out the way she was. Maybe the magic made her like that. I wanted to be sure—I wanted you to be sure that if I ever become like Yvaine, like Szabo—so devoted to a cause or an ideal that I don’t care who I hurt—I wanted to know that you could stop me. Keep me away from the magic.”
He was out of the chair and moving toward her while she still talked. “You could never be like Yvaine.”
“I could.” She wouldn’t look at him.
Jax crawled onto the bed and pushed her flat onto her back as he moved up over her. “Never. Not even before you tasted my blood. Your past wouldn’t let you become what you hate. But if my blood in you does what you say, I’ll be better able to watch over you, to help you. Give you what you need.”
He let his weight settle over her. Her eyes went frantic, began to dart this way and that, as if hunting escape. “Look at me, Amanusa,” he said then. “Look at me.”
He waited until she looked, until she began to relax beneath him. It thrilled him that she would react that way to him, to his face. He lifted just enough to drag the coverlet down and untie her dressing gown again. She hadn’t put her nightdress back on, and a tremor shook his whole body when he realized it. Thank God he hadn’t known before.
