~ 12 ~
She’d tugged my shirt loose from the belt and had her hands on my chest, raking me with those deceptively rounded nails. I hissed, pushing between her legs and no more able to stop than if I were a wild and rutting beast. Every moan and whimper of hers fired my blood. She wrapped her legs around me, vising me in place, but the velvet mass of her skirts got in the way.
“Put your arms around my neck,” I told her, and she complied, deliciously yielding. No longer needing to brace her, I yanked down the pretty neckline of her gown, freeing her naked breasts. A growl tore out of me, a sound of base need. Round and fair, pink nipples so tightly drawn up with her arousal that the areolae barely showed, the sight of her breasts shoved me over the edge of reason. Bracing a hand under the curve of her lower back, I feasted on those perfect breasts and fantastically hard nipples.
She arched back, offering herself to my mouth, her mewls firing me onward as I licked and bit at her. With her hands in my hair, she hung on, chanting my name and incoherent encouragement. At last she bent so far back her head touched the table, so I let her relax onto it, a feast for my lust. Her hair spilled like liquid fire over the dark wood, her skin impossibly fair against the deeper hues, her turgid nipples and swollen mouth beacons of flushed pink. Like her sweet cunt would be.
I had to see it, to expose her, taste her, have her. Pushing up her skirts, finding volumes of lace underskirts in different shades of violet, I parted her slim white thighs. Found her naked beneath. Rose-gold framing her pinkness. Hot. Slick.
Needing the taste of her with the desperation of a drowning man, I pushed her knees wide and fell on her, drinking in the sea salt sweetness of her body. The delicate folds of her sex slid under my tongue, her urgent cries driving me on. She climaxed, crying out my name in a hissed wail that sounded like anguish, her passage clamping on the finger I’d thrust inside her. She shuddered under my hands and I held her tight, loving the way she came apart for me, loving her cries of despairing pleasure as I drove her up again, not letting her down from the peak but pushing her further and harder.
When she was close, when she strained and struggled against me, panting as she begged, I freed my cock and drove it home. She climaxed around me, so primed that being filled undid her. Convulsing in the orgasm, she arched, arms thrown over her head in sensual abandon, eyes half-closed and mouth contorted as she cried out. I filled my hand with her breast, pinching the nipple hard so she writhed, calling for more. Her legs clamped so tightly around my hips there was no chance I could slip out, not to mention the way she milked my cock with her internal muscles.
My Ami might look angelic, but she possessed an uncanny mastery of the sensual skills. Another gift from the goddess of love. I slowed, stroking into her and savoring the way she enveloped me, so warm, an embrace like coming home. She watched me now through slitted lids, blue burning through the lace of fire, her moans like purrs. I bent over her, taking her nipple in my teeth and flicking my tongue that way that drove her crazy. She grabbed my head, bringing my mouth to hers, sucking my tongue in and biting hard enough to draw blood.
I snarled, losing what little gentleness I’d been able to muster. Holding her in place, pounding into her, my vision blurred into a red haze. A whirl of jeweled stars exploded in my brain, and with a shout of near agony, I wrenched my mouth from hers, sinking my teeth into the vulnerable curve of her neck. The climax vised through me, a rumbling thunder of need that rattled and rocked me.
Holding onto her like a drowning man, I dropped into oblivion.
The pain in my arm finally made me move. Trapped between us, the still-bruised flesh and knitting bones protested being pinned. Reality crashed back with it. I’d fucked the Queen of Avonlidgh on the grand table in the main hall of Windroven. An abysmally bad decision, even for me.
As if there’d been any thinking involved.
I groaned for my stupidity and started to lift myself, but Ami held on, imprisoning me in a web of white limbs and velvet like a midnight sky. “Not yet,” she murmured and kissed my temple. “I’m not ready for this to end.” She flexed her hips, inner muscles squeezing my sensitive post-come cock almost painfully.
A harsh laugh escaped me. “The servants might come in.”
“They’d better not. I threatened to send them out into the blizzard if they so much as cracked the door.”
I lifted my head, levering up enough to see her face, despite her grumbling protests. “You planned this.”
She returned my accusing stare evenly. “I hoped.”
I dropped my forehead against hers, then had to kiss her, with her enticing mouth right there. “We can’t keep doing this,” I scolded her, even as I fell again and again into kissing her. My arm throbbed and I didn’t care. I never wanted to leave the sweet embrace of her body.
Which was a real problem, as I had to.
“Why not?” she was saying, holding on and finding my mouth when I tried to pull away. “This is good. This is everything. Why can’t we have this?”
One of us had to put a stop to it. “Because my arm hurts like hell.”
“Oh!” She immediately let me go. I slipped out of her, grabbing for a linen to catch our fluids. Once again I contemplated the horrific possibility that I might have planted my seed in her clearly fertile soil. She steadfastly refused to take precautions. Always I resolved not to fuck her again. Always I failed in that resolve with a pitiful lack of self-discipline. When we’d first become lovers, she’d been pregnant with the twins. She’d even used that to coax me, a low-life criminal, into taking her lovely body, saying I couldn’t get her pregnant. Then she’d been healing from labor. Then, somewhere along the way, she seduced me into fucking her again, only laughing when I cautioned her that any child of ours would be a bastard.
Not what people would think, that the belle of Ordnung and darling of the Thirteen Kingdoms flaunted convention so carelessly. And yet also so very Ami.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Ash?”
“I’m fine. Here.” I gave her a clean cloth, a bad idea as I had to look in her direction. She sat on the edge of the table, dark skirts mounded around her, one knee drawn up so her pussy showed pink and open, beautifully framed. She hadn’t fixed her dress either, so her breasts flowed generously over the dusky velvet, bite marks and scratches showing clearly on her fair flesh, particularly the purpling imprint of my teeth at the juncture of neck and shoulder. I rubbed a hand over my head. I’d totally lost control in my lust, yet again.
“I know that look,” Ami said coolly, cleaning herself without any hint of shyness. “You better not be about to apologize.”
“I hurt you.”
“No more than usual,” she replied crisply, then jumped off the table when I winced, pressing my hand over my eyes. “Ash.” She wrapped her hands in my shirt, making me face her. “How many times do I have to tell you I like it?”
I touched the deep bite at her neck, summoning the healing energy, and she yanked away, dancing back. “No way. No healing the marks.”
“Ami,” I protested. “Don’t be ridiculous, let me fix it. It’ll show. People will see.”
“Good.” Her eyes flashed with satisfaction and she patted the mark, then lifted her breasts to survey the others. “I like having your marks on me. It’s not something wrong that needs to be ‘fixed.’” She began tucking her breasts back into their velvet nest, and I watched, helplessly rapt.
“I hope I didn’t ruin your dress.”
“Why do you always worry about my stupid dresses? They don’t matter to me. You’re always trying to fix the things that aren’t important and ignoring what is.”
“All right.” I had no doubt she was correct. I’d always had a gift for making bad situations worse. “What is so important that I’m ignoring then?”
“Us!” She nearly shrieked it. “What we have together.”
“We can’t be together, Ami,” I told her in a low voice. “We decided.”
“Did we?”
“You know we did.”
“I’m not so sure of that.” Calming herself, she ran her fingers through her disheveled hair, plucking out the few remaining star pins. I picked up a couple scattered on the floor and handed them to her. “I’ll just leave it down,” she said, tossing them on the table. “My hair’s at this weird in-between stage where it’s so long that it gets in my way, but not quite long enough to braid or stay put up, even without you tearing at it, and—what?”
“What do you mean you’re not so sure of that?” I said, sounding reasonably rational, which I wasn’t. Since my throat was dry, I poured some wine into a crystal goblet. The other one had been what broke, so I gave the intact one to her and retrieved my mug from by the fire. “You sent me away.”
“I let you go,” she corrected. “Because you said you wanted to leave.”
I took a deep breath. And, thrice curse it, refilled my already empty mug. Glorianna give me patience. “What I want doesn’t matter. You and I know this has to end sometime.”
“I don’t know any such thing.” She tossed her hair defiantly. “I hear you natter on about it, but you’ve never given me one good reason why.”
I gritted my teeth. “I have so. You don’t listen. To me or to anyone.”
“Then tell me again. Right now. We love each other. Explain to me why that’s not enough for you.”
“It’s not about me!” I gripped the mug so hard I thought the metal might give under my hand. “Love isn’t some cure-all. People can love each other and it still destroys them. Better we end this sooner, before we cause irreparable damage.”
“Damage to who and what?” She demanded.
I shook my head, unable to explain the hugeness of it, growling at her, incoherent with all those things I could never explain.
“Won’t you talk to me, Ash?” Ami asked, in a much softer tone. She eased closer, her hand out, like she might with a wild dog. She laid her fingers on me, gazing up with eyes full of compassion. “Trust me with this. What is this terrible thing that might happen? Is this about your parents?”
I put my hand over hers, pressing her hand to my heart, still unable to find the words. I couldn’t escape that gaping sense of vulnerability, of never being able to explain to Ami how my father’s love had killed my mother, how I’d been so bent on avenging him that I left my mother alone and unprotected. I’d loved her with all my being and I’d let her die, too.
I must have been disoriented, because it felt like the stones moved under my feet. Except that Ami flattened her mouth into an unhappy line, glancing at the ceiling. Something muttered in the background of my mind, a lonely howl beneath the roaring of the Mornai storm. The scent of scorch and decay wafted past—but in my mind, because the candle flames stayed straight and serene.
“Glorianna save us,” I whispered, reflexively drawing Her circle in the air.
Ami inclined her head. “I’ve certainly been asking Her to. Though you might appeal to Moranu—I suspect awakening dragons falls to the goddess of magic and shapeshifting.”