Kiss Across Swords (Kiss Across Time Series) (7 page)

Taylor could feel her body starting to tremble and respond to the stimulus even though she had just come. Her breathing hastened and her hips flexed. She clenched at the furs, trying to ride it out, to let Veris have his experience. But she shuddered and writhed desperately at his slow, gourmand pace.

“Veris!” she warned.

He gave a low laugh and she knew he’d been aware of her growing desperation all along. He’d been teasing her. Riding her. “Is it that you want to come, Tyra my lovely wife?”

“Damn your eyes! You know I do!” She gasped as he slid back into her, angling himself to kiss her clit with the base of his cock.

He thrust both arms out, his hands on either side of her head. “Well, then,” he said simply. He pushed his cock deep into her. Fast. His blue eyes locked with hers. “Come around me. I want to feel you come again.”

His voice, the low command, his cock inside her, brought her. She climaxed with a harsh cry that Veris smothered with a kiss.

Afterward, he lifted himself up and she realized that he had been careful not to rest much weight on her at all. He helped her un-tuck her strained calves. Then he stood and unbuckled the belt around his waist. “I’ve discovered something else about being human that I’d long forgotten—on a personal basis, anyway.”

“What is that?” she asked, kneading her lower legs back to life.

“Sweat.” He grinned and dropped the belt, then pulled the tunics over his head. He unstrapped the boots quickly and pulled them off, then the leggings and undergarments.

“You don’t have any scars, either,” Taylor observed.

Veris straightened up, dropping the last of his clothes on the pile at his feet. His cock was still ramrod hard and the head was beating against his stomach. She realized that he had not climaxed.

“The scars are yet to come,” Veris said, looking over his shoulder to his back. “I leave the village two days from now and become a mercenary for the highest bidder anywhere, now I know that Marit is truly secure. Scars are part of the trade.” He turned and walked straight into the water with no hesitation about how cold it might be. He hissed a little at the temperature, but that was all.

The pond was deceptively deep. It looked small and shallow but a few steps beyond the shore, Veris sank down to his shoulders. He bathed with quick economy and emerged, streaming water from all over his body. His erection had not survived the dip in the cold water, but there was a light in his eye that told Taylor that was a situation that would soon be remedied.

She sat up as he climbed onto the furs.

“What do
you
taste like as a human, hmm?” she asked and pushed at his shoulder.

Veris lay down on the furs, letting her push him there. Taylor spread his thighs and snuggled between them and hid her smile as his cock twitched. She ignored it and instead leaned over to slide her tongue over his chin. She was momentarily shocked to feel the rasp of whiskers. Then she licked down his strong neck and throat to his chest.

Veris drew in a breath.

“What?” Taylor asked, hesitating.

“Just more overwhelming sensation,” he told her. “Your tongue, your lips, your hair, your hands, your breath.” He smiled. “The heat of your body, the wind blowing over both of us… Should I continue?”

She laughed. “No.” She bent to her work again, sliding her lips farther down his long body, toward his cock which was now fully erect with anticipation and arousal. His cock was exactly as she knew it to be and Taylor was intimately familiar with Veris’ cock. She slid her lips over the head, letting it stretch her mouth open.

His hand touched her hair. Lightly. She felt his hand tremble.

“Have mercy, Taylor. I’m only human. Finish me quickly,” he begged.

Like he had finished her?

She took her time. After four years, she knew exactly how to drive Veris crazy with her mouth. The seam on the underside of his cock was particularly sensitive for Veris, even when he was a vampire. Now, in human form, it drove him mad. Taylor spent minutes stroking the seam with her tongue as her lips bumped up and down over the ridge of flesh that made the head of his cock. At the same time, she cupped his testicles and reached underneath to stroke his perineum.

Occasionally, she flicked her tongue inside the eye of his cock.

She kept her rhythm nice and slow, enough to have him tugging at the furs and rolling his head back as he made hard, low sounds in the back of his throat, his chest heaving as he gasped for air. He could barely keep still.

When Taylor judged he was close to the point of no return, she spread herself over his hips and lowered herself upon his throbbing, distended cock.

He gave a cry as she slid down upon him, his hands clutching at her hips.

Taylor swiveled her hips, clenching around him.

“Ah dear
güd
.” Veris thrust up into her. Once, twice and with a shout he came. She could feel his seed spurting into her in hot jets as his hips lifted her.

He fell back onto the fur and Taylor relaxed, but with a growl he flexed up into a sitting position without using his hands, showing the promise of the strength that ten years of mercenary work would bring to the fore. His hands, still on her hips, lifted her and flipped her around so that she was on her hands and knees.

Taylor’s hair fell down around her shoulders. She barely had time to brush it out of her face before Veris spread her knees and his cock slammed back into her, almost as hard and hot as before. Within three thrusts he was hard again. “I’m not done with you yet.” His voice was thick with arousal and just the sound of it was enough to trip off Taylor’s own barely subsided needs. Veris was feeding them, somehow. His insatiable hunger was sustaining her own.

His fingers slipped into her cleft and stroked her clit. Taylor gasped at the electrifying pleasure his touch sent bolting through her. He stroked, making her wriggle and her hips buck. Then, when her climax neared, he changed his thrusts to hard, heavy, deep ones. His fingers on her clit began to gently pull.

Taylor arched her back, threw her head back and screamed as her climax seemed to rip her apart. Veris’ hand gripped her shoulder as he came with her. She could actually feel his cum inside her, pooling in her vagina like molten lava, even as her body disintegrated around him.

She found herself on her knees, her back against Veris’ chest, panting, as she recovered.

Veris turned her chin so he could reach her lips from over her shoulder. His were warm. “One of these days we will resolve this silly marriage issue,” he said.

“We’re already as married as you vampires count it,” she pointed out, tiredness tugging at her.

“I want to be married to you as we humans count it,” Veris replied.

“Not if I can’t be married to Brody as well, and not if you can’t be, too.”

“Brody and I are as married as two people can be,” Veris said.

“Then why can’t that do for you and me?” Taylor asked. She smiled sadly. “Because I’m human?”

Veris looked away.

* * * * *

Taylor blinked in the dark. There were street lights outside, but it was utterly dark here. She felt stiff and very sore.

“Taylor?” It was Veris somewhere next to her.

“Can you see where we are?” she asked. Her voice was stiff and scratchy.

“We’re on the upstairs library landing. Stay still. You’re all scrunched up with books around you.”

She heard movement. Then light came on. She was lying on the carpet on the upstairs landing, her legs at odd angles, surrounded by half a dozen old books. The same books she had been carrying when they jumped back to Veris’ birthplace in old Norway.

Veris, more able to overcome stiffness, hurried back to help her up and sit her on the padded stool against the wall. “We must have fallen to the floor and laid here for the day and the night we were back there,” Veris said, sitting next to her. “Instead of mimicking movements like we normally do.”

Taylor swallowed. Her throat was very dry. She looked at Veris.

His gaze slid away from hers. He went to get up. “I’ll get you some water.”

“I don’t need water.” She caught at his hand and pulled him back down to the bench. “Veris, stop.”

He sat back heavily. He stared at his hands.

“Veris.”

He closed his eyes. “Marit,” he breathed and put his face in his hands.

Taylor let her tears flow then. Veris wouldn’t have any to shed.

He looked up after a minute and touched her face. “Can you spare some of those for me?”

She nodded. “I thought you might need them.”

He pulled her into his lap and held her tight. “This is another compromise I hate, Tyra.”

“I know, Väinä. I know.”

His breath caught. After a moment, he began to breathe again. And after a while, he had the courage to let her go again.

Neither of them had the courage to tell Brody about that particular jump.

Taylor stared down at the diary entry as she finished her green tea lemonade. Veris was the father of her baby, then. It was ironic. He’d been missing for two weeks now. The lecture series had been over for ten days, but Veris hadn’t arrived home on the expected flight. The limousine had returned empty.

Brody had received the news in silence. His first reaction had been to glance at her. Then, nothing. No reaction at all. Taylor knew he was muffling his responses. Hiding them, for her sake. It both bothered and touched her.

But this news put everything into a whole new class of…not quite urgent. Importance?

What if Veris
had
gone off on one of his decade long breaks?

Taylor’s heart gave a queer jerk.

Brody’s tight-lipped silence about Veris wasn’t reassuring on that point.

She simply had to find out more from Brody.

A feminine hail, light and throaty, caught her attention. She lifted her head from the diary to look. The road the Starbucks branch was on served the hospital where her doctor’s office was located, not far from the main entrance—a very strategic location.

The sexy blonde woman was tall, lean and drop-dead gorgeous, wearing the latest in designer sundresses in dazzling, traffic-stopping red, that stopped just short of showing off what was sure to be the latest in designer underwear, too. Her legs were, Taylor admitted, gorgeous. Tanned, endless and finished with strappy stilettos even Taylor wouldn’t mind owning. Red, of course. Plus red toenails to match. She was leaning against a convertible sports car with the top down, wearing sunglasses and lipstick that matched her dress.

As Taylor lifted her head, the blonde waved enthusiastically toward someone emerging from the hospital to catch their attention. Then she dived between cars, causing at least one driver to stomp on his brakes and slam to a stop. She made the curb on the other side, flashing plenty of thigh, kept running and threw herself at the doctor as he stepped out of the second set of sliding doors. She wrapped one long leg around his thigh and kissed him with a thoroughness that told everyone within viewing distance that theirs was not a nodding acquaintance by any stretch of the imagination.

The doctor returned the kiss with enthusiasm, his hands on her ass. He slid one hand down her thigh and back up so it was under the dress.

Taylor could feel the green tea lemonade trying to come back up her throat.

The doctor was Dr. Edward Cruz, who had been so cut up about his wife’s malignant brain tumor.

Taylor watched Cruz and the blonde climb into the convertible. They shared another intimate kiss before the blonde pulled the car out from the curb and drove away.

Taylor closed her diary. It was time to go home.

All the way home she kept seeing Cruz’s hands on the blonde. The knowledge burned that he wouldn’t have pulled that stunt if Brody or Veris had been with her at the examination.

* * * * *

Brody watched Taylor walk into the library from his seat on the balcony and for a moment it was like watching a stranger walk into the room. She had lost weight, he realized with a start. Over the last few weeks of record heat and the stresses of her new job at the state library, she had lost more than a few pounds. Enough to be noticeable.