Authors: Bonnie Dee and Marie Treanor
Awakening Beauty (21 page)
Enjoy the following excerpt for
Dust of Dreams:
Pryseis watched the goblins leave the encampment and gave up trying to discern their intended target. Benilo was right. She curled up next to him. They both needed rest. At least she wasn’t alone. He pulled her into his arms, and she ended up half-sprawled across his chest. She stiffened and pulled away.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Does not hurt in the slightest,”
he said.
She felt no deception in his thoughts. And
she
felt better, surrounded by his warmth, his strength. His heart beat under her ear, slow and steady. She went boneless by slow degrees, matching him breath for breath. His scent curled around her, through her. That’s what had been absent afore, in her dream. He’d not
felt
real, for all they’d shared. Now there was solid warmth, hot male skin scented with sunlit ferns. She toyed with a lock of his hair—unexpected softness, a cascade of light. His calloused fingers caressed her back, and she shivered at the goose bumps that rose in their wake. Unbidden, her mind drifted back to the dream. Her breasts swelled and she flushed, embarrassed as her nipples tightened against him.
His fingers trailed over the curve of her backside. She tried to squirm away, but Benilo held her still.
“Shh, easy, beauty,”
he soothed, the brush of his mind in hers seduction itself.
“Do not fear me. I would never hurt you.”
“It wasn’t real,”
she denied.
“But it was, and this is. Look at me.”
Pryseis was caught in the hypnotic blue power of his gaze. Blue as the mountain sky, hot as the living fires within the earth. Open desire there for her to read, to feel. She gasped, and his eyes darkened. She reached out to trace his lips with her fingers. He captured her hand in his, raising it so he could tease, not her palm, but the sensitive skin of her inner wrist. It caused an unexpected tingle in her breasts, and she whimpered as her nipples tightened further, an almost painful arousal.
“This is crazy.”
“The sweetest madness.”
“Anyone could walk in.”
“Then we shall have to be quiet.”
Benilo rolled over so they lay side by side, raised himself up to nibble along the side of her neck. Her nails tightened on his shoulders when he found a sensitive spot, and he stroked her there with his tongue, suckling on her skin until she whimpered and wriggled closer. He curled a hand around her breast, circling her aching nipple with his thumb, and she gasped in his ear. He shuddered at the sound, and moved to capture her lips with his.
Pryseis opened to him, taking him deep, savoring the dark, wild taste of him as her tongue tangled with his. Every stroke of his tongue heightened her craving, her need. This was naught like the dream. It was so much more real. She felt herself swelling, softening, kenned he caught the scent of her arousal when he slid his muscled thigh betwixt hers, drew her leg up over his hip. Benilo bent his head to her breast, taking a long pull, teasing her nipple with the rasp of his tongue. She bit her lip to silence the cry that rose. Sweet Mother, how he made her ache!
“You make me burn, beauty.”
He drew her hand down to his erection, pulsing hot and heavy against the fingers she curled around him. His mind was a swirl of hot air, boiling water, pure fire. A chaos of pure need pulled her in until she drowned in sensation. Desire and need. The light of his passion drew her, but instead of burning, she took it in, took him in. It was a magic she’d never kenned, a joining she’d never conceived of. Body and mind. Heart and soul.
“
Dracken rue,
beauty, this is as real as it gets.”
Benilo sounded desperate as he thrust into Pryseis’ wet, willing body. She held him close, in her heart, in her mind. He surged into her body, again and again, taking them both higher until barriers shattered as the Light swamped them both.
“I bind myself to you. Whenever, whatever your need, I shall come to you. To you do I answer with body or blood. My life for yours. My soul to yours, ’til our last breath. Never again shall you be alone. You are mine, in this lifetime and the next. I shall ever be yours, for always. We are one.”
Pryseis shattered in a splendor of Light, and he took her mouth to silence her cry as she screamed in his mind and pulsed around him. His heart answered her back as he poured himself into her. Solid earth in his muscles, churning water in the trickle of sweat, the blood boiling in the fiery heat of passion, the air in their shared breath, his very life as he succumbed to passion. She took it all in and flew. The cold air of the mountaintops, the Mother’s very breath. The Light settled deep within their souls—sun, moon and stars.
Her net shone bright. She felt rejuvenated, almost as if she’d drunk from the pool itself. And Benilo…he felt whole. Healed. Balanced.
He gasped for breath. His eyes widened as he sensed the change in them both.
“Lady of Light, what have I done?”
“Umm…I think you healed us both.” She grinned. “Interesting technique, healer.”
“It is more than that. Give it a moment.” He looked wild and a little desperate as he took her hand and placed it against his stomach. “What do you feel?”
“Your skin under my hand.” She stroked her hand across his stomach, and she flinched as she struck a ticklish spot—on her own side. It was as if she felt her own touch. Her heart pounded in her ear—with his trepidation. “Wait…”
He reached out to run his fingers through her hair, and she shuddered as the silken strands slid across her knuckles. “Stop it! What did you
do?
” Pryseis hissed, trying to keep her voice at a whisper. “Get out of my mind.”
“I cannot.” His voice was grim. His face, grimmer still. “I found a way to heal us, aye. But the only way to do so was to open up to the elements—and each other. I found a way for you to take my energy—by binding us together. As life mates.”
She felt him in her heart, in her blood. In her mind. The words of the vow came back to her, blessed by the Mother. Permanent. Irreversible. “I don’t believe this!”
“It was not what I intended to do at all,” he defended himself. “I did not even intend to kiss you.”
“Don’t you blame me for this!”
“I do not, but I believe there was a higher power involved.” He glared at her. “Without the pool, you would have died, Pryseis. I remember that much of my lessons. Faeries do not survive without a direct infusion of elemental energy. I can give you that. As much as you need, as often as you need.”
His conviction burned in her chest. His pure intentions. He hadn’t intended to bind them together, but it was the only way to do what they both needed doing. He’d needed healing as much as she had. And with the sharing, they were both stronger. She tried to recall what she kenned of elven life mates. They kenned what each other felt, thought. No secrets. No privacy.
“No loneliness,” he whispered. “Total support. A passion that just grows hotter with time…and practice…with a partner who kens what you need almost afore you need it.”
She shivered at his words, at the way his gaze dropped to her breasts. She could almost feel his mouth on her, there…
He groaned, and she felt her body—his body—tighten in response. “Careful, beauty.”
“Well, you missed one. ’Tis feeling neglect-
ed
.” The last part of the word was all but a squeak as he captured her nipple betwixt his lips. She felt the pull of it betwixt her thighs.
“So sweet…”
She caught Benilo’s thought, the wonder of her silken skin sliding against his body. She felt her tightly puckered nipple on her own tongue and panicked at the momentary disorientation.
“Easy, beauty.”
Benilo was right there with her.
“Do not focus on you, or me. Just go with the feeling, the sensations. It is
us.”
It was like the dream, but a hundredfold more intense. Wonder and awe, softness and hard strength, drowning in fiery need. She rained kisses down his stomach, no longer hesitating at the trail of flame that flickered across her own skin. He stroked betwixt her wet swollen folds, and she felt the hot cream coating her fingers. She ached to be buried in all that softness, feel all that hot, wet tightness squeezing around her. She took him in her hand, in her mouth, and the exquisite agony of her tongue circling the sensitive head of an organ she didn’t even
have
almost made her shatter then and there.
“Do it.”
His voice was rough, almost harsh, in her mind. He spun her about so she straddled his face. He buried his head betwixt her thighs, his tongue probing for the sensitive bud hidden in her folds. Embarrassment warred with excruciating arousal.
“Do not hold back.”
His need for the wet heat of her mouth, the intoxicating taste of her on his tongue, drove her to take him into her mouth, tracing the engorged vein that ran along the underside of his shaft. She moved on his mouth, rubbing against his tongue.
“Mmph!” Pryseis jerked as he suckled that bud into a point of pure fire and she shattered over him. Relaxing her mouth, she took him deeper, down her throat.
Benilo, too, was beyond words, at the wet heat of her tongue, stroking, pressing. She sucked him down, squeezed around him, and his body erupted. She started, gagged and then swallowed. The second shock of pleasure at that action all but knocked him senseless.
Awakening Beauty
Bonnie Dee and Marie Treanor
To fight this evil, they’ll have to make love. Lots of love.
Fairytale Fantasies, Book 3
Joel Thorne feels as if he’s been sleepwalking through his life. Wealth and success are his; now he’s at a crossroads. Politics beckons, a move that would be made easier with a loveless marriage of convenience to his ambitious friend and ally, Vee Gabor. During a long mountain hike to clear his head, he discovers a castle overgrown with thorns and, inside, a beautiful sleeping woman.
When Princess Aurora opens her eyes, Joel’s handsome face is imprinted on her heart—then she’s swamped with grief and loss. An evil fairy tried to take her pure blood to gain power, and though her other godmothers fended off the worst of the curse, she’s been asleep for a thousand years. Worse, she’s been erased from history and from the memories of all she loved. True love brought her back, but to what future?
Despite their instant, strong attraction, Joel’s practical nature wars with the possibility that magic is real. Yet with every touch, every kiss, the heat and emotion grow more real than anything he’s ever known. Their union also reawakens something else. Something darker. An evil fairy’s centuries-old vendetta that just won’t die.
Warning: Contains explicit, edge-of-your-dreams sex, a newly minted hero in training, and a fairy princess who kicks butt for the man she loves. No fairy dust was spared in the making of this book.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520
Macon GA 31201
Awakening Beauty
Copyright © 2010 by Bonnie Dee and Marie Treanor
ISBN: 978-1-60928-201-1
Edited by Linda Ingmanson
Cover by Scott Carpenter
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
electronic publication: September 2010
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
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