The ever-loyal Shin had never taken another lover after the young king’s death. How often had Shin stood here, staring at the young king’s empty bed, wishing he could undo the past? With his eyes on the woman in the king’s bed, Dye shook his head as he fingered the braid just above his elbow. After several washings, the twist of hair was now nearly as blue as the ribbon it was twined with.
He’d not spend the rest of his life wishing, he decided. “Wed me, Martigay.”
“Wed you!” she exclaimed, her smoke blue eyes going wide. “Why should I?”
“Why!? Because you love me.”
She cocked her head at him expressively, waiting for more.
“Because I love you.”
At that, she took a moment to smile—there was faint, fleeting triumph in it.
“I love you,” he repeated, with words that felt as though they scraped over his heart on their way out of his mouth. “I love everything about you. I love the feel of you, the touch of you. I love the smell of you on my skin in the morning. I love to walk out of this bedchamber and down the corridor—through the halls—with your scent following me all day, a reminder of how I spent the night with you.
“I love the touch of you, love your pulse on my lips when I wake in the night to find my mouth pressed behind your ear. I love the feel of your breath against my lips, hot and damp just before I cover your mouth with mine. I love the sounds you make when I open your mouth with my tongue and thrust it over the rough edge of your teeth. I love the taste of your tongue, the taste of your skin, the taste of your sex when I kiss your clit and eat you into orgasm. I love the flavor of your arrival—when you spill into my mouth. Wed me, Martigay.”
“What about Bruthinia?”
“You know how I feel about the princess.”
Martigay’s eyes were melancholy as she nodded then made a face of reluctance. “You can’t do that, Dye,” she said quietly. “You can’t break the wedding contract. It would mean war.”
Dye groaned. “Don’t go all noble on me, Martigay. It doesn’t suit you.”
She laughed, then stopped to smile at him kindly. “You’re King. King of the largest country on The Middle Sea. You can’t wed a mere captain.”
“I could wed a lieutenant,” he smiled, lifting an eyebrow. Pushing off from the wall, he headed toward her.
She shook her head at the bedsheets, smiling soberly as she took a deep breath. “Why did you think I’d wed you?”
Dye stopped in mid-stride, staggering a bit as he backed up to lean on a table in the middle of the room. “Because you love me,” he said, his tentative smile losing momentum.
“Not all weddings are love matches,” she pointed out gently. “You know that as well as anyone.”
It took several moments for the smile to leave his face completely. “Don’t play with me, Martigay.”
“I’m sorry, Dye.”
“You…you were prepared to wed Pall the morning after, when you thought it was he in your tent. You said—it was the best sex you’d ever had.”
“And it was,” she admitted with a sigh. “And I take sex seriously, you know that. But I’d not have wed Pall any more than I’d have wed you. I’m a Raith, Dye.”
“What does that mean?” His mind raced to sort the input as he tried to process what she was telling him. “That I’m not good enough for you? Leader of the largest country on the Middle Sea and I’m not good enough to wed a Raith?” He started to laugh, but it wasn’t very convincing. He snorted. “So I’m to believe you don’t want me. That it was just sex.”
“Good sex,” she interrupted.
“That you don’t love me.”
She didn’t answer.
“That you’d never wed outside your race.” He shook his head. “I’m not buying it.”
She shrugged and pinned him with her eyes. “How do you think our children would turn out?”
He returned her uncompromising stare. “I think they’d be beautiful,” he said quietly. “So do you.”
She shook her head. “They wouldn’t be Raiths.”
Leaning back against the table, he grabbed the edge with his fingers and wondered where all the oxygen had gone. For the umpteenth time he wished he could sense her feelings. He was certain she was doing this for his sake, for the sake of his country, but she seemed so cool about it. So untroubled. Even cheerful.
He thought he was going to be sick.
“The ability to dematerialize would be diluted—perhaps even corrupted—when it was passed down to our children. A few generations of Raiths wedding outside of our kind and there won’t be any more Raiths. I wouldn’t mind seeing you,” she offered, carefully. “After you’re wed.”
Dye chewed on the inside of his mouth. “So I’m not good enough to wed, but I’m good enough for the occasional fuck?”
She smiled sorrowfully. “I wouldn’t want you to lose your sanity.”
“I won’t cheat on my wife,” he announced in a soft voice of menace.
Martigay accepted this statement without comment.
He nodded, staring at the ground, still unconvinced. “Don’t do this to me, Martigay,” he said in a voice like splintered glass. “I’m King of Thrall.” His hand fisted in the parchment on the desk to crumple several ancient maps inside his fingers. “King of the most powerful nation on the Middle Sea! Don’t tell me I’m not good enough for you! Don’t tell me you’d not wed an ordinary man!”
“You’re anything but ordinary,” she told him gently. “And you’re a great lover, Dye. I’d not trade you for anyone…except perhaps Brand.”
His head came up to meet her eyes. For a long time he searched her unflinching gaze. “You’re lying,” he said finally, but his emotions seethed nonetheless, seethed to the point of curdling with bitter, green, violent jealousy.
“Why do you think so?”
“Because I refuse to believe that I could have been sucked in by such a coldhearted bitch!”
“Don’t be upset,” she soothed.
“I’m not upset!” he answered quickly—too quickly—and he was glad, then, that she wasn’t Slurian and couldn’t read his feelings. “I just feel like a bit of a fool.” He nodded to himself. “He doesn’t love you, you know—Brand.”
She made no answer.
“After all we’ve been through together—how can you just walk away?”
She sighed. “It isn’t easy, believe me.”
His nose pricked and he pressed a bandaged wrist below his nostrils as he looked at the room’s huge double doors. “I won’t let you go, Martigay.”
Somberly, she smiled, nodding at the ground. “You can’t stop me, Dye. Honor your wedding contract, My Lord.”
He stared at her, his eyes an intense blue fire. A tight, painful, knotted ball of rage pulled his stomach back to grate against his spine.
“Fine,” he said suddenly. “Fine, Martigay. You’re right. It was just sex. I’ll wed Bruthinia, if that’s how you’d have it.” His mouth was a thin, determined line in his face. “On one condition.”
She raised her eyebrows in question.
“You be there at my wedding.”
“If…that’s what you want,” she answered.
Her lack of regret rattled him. “Smiling. If you’re there smiling during the binding ceremony, I’ll go through with it. I’ll wed the…pronking…Vandal princess. One woman’s as good as the next, I suppose.
“And now I have things to do,” he told her abruptly, grabbing up his clothing and quickly dressing, forcing his erection behind his ties as he tugged, viciously, to close his doeskins. “Let yourself out.”
Once through the huge doors, he stalked down the wide, tiled corridor. Lost in a dark storm of anger, he almost ran over his sister as she stepped through a doorway into the hall. Behind her, Davik stood in the open door, half-dressed, tugging at his ties and smiling at his wife.
“What’s wrong?” Petra asked after the briefest of looks at her brother. “Dye! What is it?”
&nbs
p; Dye strode past her before he halted, his fists clenched at his sides. He turned slightly to flick a glance down the hall in the direction of the royal bedchamber. “Martigay,” he said.
Petra folded her arms on her chest. “She has a right to be upset, Dye. You’re wedding Bruthinia tomorrow.”
Dye shook his head. “I asked her to wed me. Her! Martigay! She won’t have me!”
“What? Nay, Dye, that’s not possible. That woman’s in love with you!”
Dye stared angrily at his sister.
“She…she…when you’re with her, she can’t keep her eyes off you!”
“That’s not all she can’t keep off me,” he grated.
Petra gave him a blank look.
“It was just sex!” he exploded. “Just sex! Perhaps you don’t understand that, Petra, but it’s a concept I’ve no little experience with. You were right all along! The little bitch has no feelings!” He turned and continued on down the hall, yanking the linen bandages from his hands and flinging them away from him.
Petra watched her brother’s receding back as he flung his hands into the air with a sample of the uncontained violence that made him a deadly force on the battlefield. “It was just fucking sex!” he shouted.
As Petra turned to her husband in the doorway, Davik ran a hand through his bed-tousled mop of hair. “Mithra!” His eyes followed Dye’s back. “Is it too late to save the man?”
“I’ve sent for the twins. If they can get here in time, I’m hoping they’ll take the throne before Dye has to wed the Vandal. Maybe that will give him the time he needs to sort this out with Martigay.”
“You think one of your cousins will take the princess off his hands?”
Petra started to laugh. “You haven’t met the twins,” she stated.
Smiling uncertainly at his wife’s laughter, Davik shook his head.
“Wedding won’t be an issue anymore, after she meets Dannik and Dal. Twenty minutes alone with those two idiots and Bruthinia won’t be able to tear that contract up fast enough! She’ll be on her horse and heading north before the twins even start drinking.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rain bucketed out of the sky to pour down on the King of Thrall. Slashing squalls of mean weather battered him cruelly as he stood, drenched to the skin, his flame of hair plastered to suck at the edges of his lean face. Unkind rivulets washed over his hard features as he reached up a large, rough hand, drawing it down his face and clearing the stream from his volcanic blue gaze. The nasty weather suited his mood, he decided broodingly as he stood outside his palace, at the bottom of the steps, in the yard where his army camped—his eyes on Martigay’s tent.
The tight, painful knot in his stomach wouldn’t permit him to eat and the vise that crushed his heart barely allowed him to breath. If this was how it felt to care for a woman, he decided, he’d be sure to avoid making that mistake again in the future.
A strong gust buffeted him from behind and lightning cracked overhead. Unbalanced, he was pushed a step forward—toward her tent. The same blast of wet wind whipped at her tent as Dye watched, volcanic eyes blazing out across the night to slash at the place where she slept. He wanted to slash at her with more than his eyes, he recognized. He wanted to hurt her as much as…
Another blast of wind hit him in the back and he stumbled forward, glaring at the tent and everything it held. The wind behind him continued and he let it push him and his anger toward the sleeping girl. Hadi help her if Brand was with her, or any other man, for that matter. Only a miracle would stop him from killing the man she slept with tonight.
His steel was out and he staggered as he allowed the gusting wind to rush him toward her, the vicious wind battering man and tent, whipping both into a frenzy. With a jerk upward, he sliced through the ties straining to hold the tent closed and protecting the girl inside. Falling to one knee, he tore at the opening and let the storm have its way with the tent’s flaps as he entered the small shelter, dragging with him all the cold rage of the violent storm.
She was crouched at the tent’s end, tucked into the corner, her arms wrapped around her folded legs, forehead tight against her knees.
And he realized. It was dark. For her. It was dark in the stormy, cloud-blotted night. The surly overcast weather had dogged them for days. She hadn’t been able to recharge her glow stone. Drawing herself into a tight bundle, she shivered in the corner.
He almost threw himself across the tent to get to her.
Overcome with the reflexive need to protect and shelter, his throat closed to nearly choke him as he dragged her into his arms. She screamed at that first contact, pulling herself into a tighter knot. But his arms clamped around her as he pulled her into his body, shielding her from the weather that slashed in through the open tent flaps. With his hands, he soothed the chill out of her bare arms.
His throat was so tight he could barely speak. “What are you doing alone in the dark, Martigay? Why didn’t you come to me?”
“Dye?” she whispered as though a prayer had been answered.
“Where’s Pall?” he asked stupidly, angry that her friend wasn’t there, though he would have killed the man only a moment earlier.
Martigay shuddered against his chest and he tightened his arms around her. “He’s been in the city all day,” she stammered. “He thought I’d be with you tonight, in the palace.”
“Why didn’t you come to me?” he rasped at her roughly. Her hands clung to his sopping jerkin as she raised her face in the darkness. Tears made channels on her face and his heart went out to her in the midst of his anger. “Who will hold you, Martigay?” he grated at her, his voice tight with emotion, his eyes burning. “Who will hold you in the dark when I’m wed?”
Her little body trembled in his hold. “You, Dye.”
He shook his head, reaching for her lips with his at the same time. “I won’t cheat on my wife, Martigay.”
“I know,” she shuddered out just before his lips covered hers and reduced her following words to small, whimpering complaints of passion.
She would have been content, he knew, just to lie quietly in his arms, warm in the safe harbor of his sheltering love. But—for a man—love is too tightly bound to lust. And, at the moment, his love was a growing storm of passion far too huge to deny the lust that accompanied it. Like a blasting gust of rage, it whipped into that protective harbor where foaming whitecaps flecked madly at the surging sea of his emotions.
Dye had never before in his life felt so out of control. Finally succumbing to the savage passion he’d been fighting since the day he’d met the girl, her thin silk chemise shredded in his doubled fist as he tore at her clothing, desperate to expose her naked flesh to his violating gaze, desperate to have her this one last time—have her and take her as many ways as possible before the dawn stole her from him.
The storm beat at the tent, tearing the flaps, sucking the air out of his lungs, then billowing back inside the tent to fill the small, narrow space with cold, slashing rain. At the same time, his body battered the small slip of a girl trapped beneath his weight. With a jerk of his blade, he severed the ties that held back the surging mass of his erection, skimming his doeskins down his legs and over his feet, along with his boots. With a yank, his jerkin was over his head, and without preamble or foreplay, he pushed her legs apart, put his thick cock head at her opening and entered her with one long, hard, penetrating lunge.
He plunged ahead, his hips working above her body, his dick rasping through her tight hold as her unready flesh dragged at his attack and retreat, pulling at him with an uncomfortable tightness that he ignored, so hot was he to complete the fuck and release inside the hot, dragging grip of her reluctant cunt.
She tried to reach for his lips with hers, but he jerked away from her with a ripped snarl of refusal. The storm buffeted the open tent and the rain slashed inside to sting his back and legs. With his weight on his hands, and his arms stiff, he levered his chest away from her breasts and continued to punish her w
ith the pummeling thrust of his dick, with no thought for anything except to end the pain that built inside him, hardening his heart at the same rate that his arousal hardened the length of his shaft and turned his testes to steel.
At some point he found himself seated at the back of her cunt, his cock subject to a strange, warm fire that permeated his flesh to the thick core of his brutal length. There was an incredible, penetrating heat that warmed his shaft inside and out, followed by a crushing pressure on his length, followed by the strange, soaking heat again.
She was dematerializing on him, he realized only vaguely. The penetrating warmth he felt was when their bodies shared the same space, when she dematerialized around him. The crushing pressure on his shaft occurred when she rematerialized and his cock was forced back into her tight, narrow channel. He gritted his teeth to stop himself from flashing into her at that instant, so incredibly erotic was the sensation.
Only distantly was he aware of her legs creeping up beside his body, allowing him deeper access between her legs as she sought for a high place to hook her heels. Helping himself to the entirety of her sex, he sank himself into her depths and the tight, hot length of her cunt that wrapped around his cock like a fluttering wet flame.
“Fuck,” he groaned, realizing she was creaming around his cock, her cunt loving his dick with a carnal, grasping kiss of sliding heat. “Fuck,” he repeated in a falling voice of defeat, knowing he was a thrust away from spilling, knowing her soft, battered cunt was primed and ready for the rest of the fuck, begging for it to release on.
Pulling his cock, he blinked down at her face and confirmed this suspicion. Her head was tilted back and her breathing was unsteady as her body writhed and her cock-hungry pelvis lifted to find his shaft in a desperate search for completion.
Dye's Kingdom: Wanting It Forever Page 18
