Eighteen

At last Toinette was where Erik had wanted her for weeks. She writhed beneath him, full breasts heaving as she panted, hips twisting with a power that belied their slim outlines, but he had her. Unnatural strength was one thing, but strength and size still weighed in the balance, particularly in human form—and just then, neither of them wanted to be anything else.

She was no easy prey, though. Almost as soon as her back hit the ground, she was whipping a hand up toward Erik’s head. Whether she meant to claw his face, gain leverage to reverse their positions again, or just pull him down for another kiss, it didn’t matter in the end. He caught her wrist in one hand, grabbed the other, and pulled her arms up over her head.

That the new position tilted her long neck back and thrust her breasts forward hadn’t been his prime objective, but it was a very gratifying development, and one that made him even happier with the difference in their sizes. That difference let him hold Toinette’s wrists firmly captive while he palmed her breasts with his free hand, pinching the stiff nipples through the fabric of her gown as she called him obscene names in a breathless voice that only made his cock harder.

Careful not to loosen his hold, he bent his head and took one rigid peak into his mouth, lashing it with his tongue and then biting lightly. Toinette’s hoarse moan filled his ears as he moved to the other breast. Her arms went limp; if Erik had been less wary, he might have let go then, but one hand was enough to thrust beneath the ruins of her skirt.

“Best idea you’ve ever had,” he said, punctuating the words with more rough kisses to her breasts, roaming up to where her neckline bared skin. “Never wear long skirts again.”

Toinette opened her dark eyes to glare at him. “I’ll wear what I like, devil take you.” Both words and glare lacked some of the force they might have had, since her face was flushed with desire and her hands on his shoulders urged him back to his attentions.

He didn’t comply. “You’ve the taking right, pretty girl. But you’re wrong about who’ll do it to whom.” Beneath her skirt, her thighs were sleek and strong—and she squeezed them together at the first intrusion of his hand, as proper as any novice. “Stubborn, are ye no’?”

Toinette laughed, eyes gleaming and hair spread out on the ground like a glorious cloud. “If that’s a surprise, you’re duller than I thought.”

Erik bit her neck for that—not to her displeasure, judging by the way she hissed and arched—and lunged forward, prying her legs apart with knees and hand alike. With a mortal woman, he would never have dared, would have stopped at the first sign of anything that might be taken as reluctance, but this was Toinette, fighting him only because the fight itself was worth something.

It cast her arousal in its own light too. When Erik’s fingers reached the cleft between her legs and found it wet enough to dampen her thighs, he added the sin of pride to that of lust. “Eager,” he murmured against Toinette’s neck. “You can’t tell me otherwise now.”

“Neither can you,” she said, and canted her hips so that her thigh rubbed against his cock, a slow, hard grind that had Erik seeing stars and biting his own lip for some measure of self-control.

Every instinct told him to move, to rut blindly against Toinette for the short time it would take to satisfy himself. Barely he gained mastery, long enough to undo the laces of his hose with a clumsy hand. “Hold still,” he growled.

For once, Toinette did as he told her. He thrust inside her, sudden and rough. The way she caught her breath made him pause for an instant—she was no virgin, of course, and she’d been giving every sign of enjoying their roughness, though he didn’t doubt that even she had limits—but in that instant she’d wrapped her legs around his thighs and risen up to meet him.

“Well?” she gasped, a challenge and a demand.

Erik met it eagerly, drawing back only to plunge forward with the same savage motion. This time he kissed her, delighting in the parallel heat of her mouth and body, the strength with which she responded, the sting of her nails raking down his back, and the pressure of her thighs at his waist. There was no time for subtlety, no will for restraint, only lust as elemental and unslacking as the storm had been at its height.

Even with his mouth on hers, Toinette was crying out before long, making desperate guttural noises that rose in pitch as her hips pumped frantically against Erik’s. He cupped her arse in his hands to hold her against him and drive deeper, faster, until finally Toinette bowed her back and screamed, inner muscles clenching over and over again around his cock.

Had Erik needed further sensation to find his own climax, that would have easily done it. As it was, he had only to let go for pleasure to twist its way upward from his bollocks, pulsing outward in a lightning strike of ecstasy that hit over and over again.

Slowly the world settled back into its expected form around him, and Erik looked down into Toinette’s pleasure-hazed eyes. As long as the moment had been in arriving, he couldn’t quite believe it had finally happened—and in such a way—but neither could he regret any detail.

* * *

“Do you think they heard us?” Erik asked, glancing over one naked shoulder toward the path that led to the beach.

Toinette stopped combing pine needles out of her hair and shrugged a nonchalance she wanted to feel. “Doubt it,” she said, and meant that. “You didn’t hear us when we were fighting the plants, and we were louder.”

“You were further away.”

“Not that much further.” Actually, they’d stopped a good distance from the gravesite—neither of them being fool enough to spar, let alone swive, where blood-drinking vines might still be lurking—but sound often carried further than people thought. “They’re likely making noise enough of their own, and we don’t hear that.”

Erik smiled, distinctly smug. “We werena’ paying very much attention, were we?”

Undeniably, he had a point. Toinette couldn’t even reprove him on the grounds of overconfidence, especially when his smile still retained a trace of sensuality and the afternoon light slanted alternate patches of brightness and shadow over his muscular chest, giving the crisp hair there an even more intense glow.

“No,” she said, going back to her hair. The pine needles were legion. That only supported Erik’s argument that Toinette hadn’t noticed any of them insinuating themselves. “But it doesn’t matter. Mortal hearing’s far shorter than either—and it wouldn’t distinguish the sounds we were making from, say, animals crashing around.”

“Not too far off, at that.”

“Speak for yourself,” she said. “And most men take their shirt off before bedding a woman. Just a piece of helpful advice for your future.”

Erik shrugged. The muscles in his back rippled, a sight that commanded Toinette’s attention almost long enough for her to miss his response. “I was hot,” he said, “and you hardly gave me time.”

“Hmm,” she said. Since she’d not bothered with her dress except to let Erik hike up the skirt, she had no real response, save for bending down to find the cord she’d used to bind up her hair. In so doing, she missed Erik tying his hose—a pity, both to miss it and that it happened. The soreness around her ribs gave her an idea. “They’ll believe we were sparring, if we tell them. Especially with your lip. If they did hear anything, which they didn’t.”

“You know a great deal about mortal hearing.”

“I know how to pretend it’s the only kind I have.” The cord was broken. Of course. Toinette sighed and shook out the remains of her skirt. “If your senses are too good, people think you’re odd.”

“I suppose they might,” said Erik, sounding as though the thought had never occurred to him. “My whole family is odd, if you ask their villagers—either at Loch Arach or my father’s keep.”

“Yes,” she said, “I heard. A few times, in my youth. Never seems to do your people any harm.” Toinette fought to keep bitterness out of her voice.

It was an easier struggle than it had been at other times. As Erik had perhaps intended, at least where the sparring was concerned, everything that they’d done in the clearing had helped. Toinette had lost herself in the moment, in pain and pleasure and the mix of both. Action had burned off her nervous energy and broken her mind out of the sharklike circles in which it had been moving.

“Anyhow,” she said, “if they do know what happened, what does it matter? They know everything else now.”

Toinette tossed her hair back as she spoke and thrust out her jaw. She could speak boldly enough, as though she didn’t wonder what further doubts such knowledge might cause among her crew. She could go halfway to convincing herself.

Yet, when they returned to the beach, she took care to stand some ways apart from Erik.

The men fell silent at their approach. Samuel looked to have been silent already: he sat on a rock, staring out across the ocean at the setting sun. Sence and Marcus, building the fire, likewise probably hadn’t been talking, knowing Sence, and Franz was crouched by their shelter, rosary moving steadily and slowly between his fingers. His lips stopped moving as he looked up, but that was all. John kept cleaning fish, but Raoul, to whom he’d been talking, let both knife and flesh dangle from his hands.

Toinette had gone most of her life without being the object of uneasy stares. It had happened twice in the last week, and it felt no easier than it had at thirteen. As she’d learned to do, she kept her head up, her shoulders back, and her hands dangling loosely at her sides, badly as she wanted to do otherwise—cover her neck, for instance. She doubted that Erik had left any marks, and surely he hadn’t left any that would stand out in the dim light of early evening, but she couldn’t be certain.

All of the crew were alive. Except mayhap Franz and Samuel, all of them seemed capable of keeping on with the tasks that would let them stay that way. None had attacked her.

One had to start somewhere.

Toinette started by standing and waiting, with the last light of the sun coming down over her shoulder and the waves washing up the beach. She stood with empty hands and let the men decide when they would speak to her, if they would speak at all. She didn’t look at Erik.

There were such moments: you stood at the wheel and watched the storm, knowing that it would break or not, and you’d weather it or not, and you’d done all you could. Gamblers spoke of letting the dice fall, and riders—which Toinette had never been—of letting the horse have its head. At times, any action but waiting could only hurt your cause.

Her stomach rolled. She felt sweat collecting under her arms and behind her knees. Nobody could see any of that, so it didn’t matter. She thanked God for fifty years’ practice not being sick.

“What do we do now?” Sence asked. At first, a human voice sounded almost alien, and the words might have been Greek. But he went on, asking without panic or complaint, simply acknowledging that the future hadn’t vanished, only changed. “Do we live out our lives here?”

“We eat first,” said Marcus, and bent a gimlet eye on Raoul. “If we’re not too busy gawping to get the food ready, that is. I told you: it’s better to make plans with everyone who might have knowledge, and it’s better still to make them on a full stomach.”

“Can we help with the fire, then?” Erik asked.

Sence shook his head. “Just about done, m’lord. Best sit down.”

Toinette was glad he’d suggested it. She wouldn’t have liked having to ask, and she wasn’t at all sure how long her knees would hold her.