Rainlashed (14 page)

He raised one skeptical eyebrow. “Other selkies can command the water and it obeys them?”

She nodded. “Stronger selkies than I shall ever be can stir up the waves and settle them again at their will. It is a great power to have at your command.”

He eyed her with a new respect. “You would like to wield that power?”

“Who would not?” She shrugged, as well as she could in her bonds. “But I cannot and never will. The best I can manage is to tell when a storm is coming and when the storm clouds will clear and the warm sunshine will return.”

He looked at her as if seeing her in a new light. “That in itself is a powerful ability.”

She dismissed his praise with a sniff. “Any common fisherman can do the same nearly as well as I. One just has to watch the winds and the tides and get to learn their moods and their patterns. There is some skill but little magic in it.”

He looked at her silence for a few minutes, examining her dispassionately. “Are you satisfied with being a selkie?”

It had never occurred to her to be dissatisfied. She was a selkie and that was all there was to it. “What do you mean?”

“You are not…not fully human.” He sounded almost embarrassed to be stating a simple fact so clearly, as if he were telling her that she had a harelip or some other disfigurement.

“Why would I want to be? I take human form when it pleases me and return to my seal form when I am tired of being two-legged. I am equally at home on both land and sea. Few humans can say as much.”

“Can selkies never become fully human?”

“Some selkies have forsaken their kind and taken a human husband in the kirk. Once they are wed to a human they can never return to the ocean.” She shuddered at the thought of the sacrifice the poor selkies had made to be with the man they loved. It was a poor sort of love on the man’s part, she had always thought, that would require a woman to make such a sacrifice.

The master clearly did not share her views. “If that is all it takes to make you fully human,” he asked with some incredulity, “why are you so anxious to get your skin back? Why do you not marry me in the kirk and become a true woman? I will wed you gladly if that will make you lose your craving for the sea and leave you content to live beside me on land.”

He did not understand her. Maybe he deliberately
would
not understand her. She challenged too many of his deeply held beliefs for him ever to accept her as she was, rather than as he wanted her to be. “I have to much seal in me to become one of them. I will never lose my craving for the sea.”

Truly he was to be pitied. “I am not the lesser for being a selkie, as you seem to think. I am the greater. I do not wish to become fully human forever just as I do not wish to become fully seal. Human and seal are equally mixed in my nature, and are equally a part of me. I cannot deny what is in my blood even if I wanted to.”

“You like being a seal?”

She laughed out loud at the foolishness of the question. “Of course I do.”

“So much so that you would not wed me?”

“I would not give up half my life to wed any man.”

“You like the chill of the water? You like living with danger around every corner? You like living in fear of fishermen waiting to catch you and club you to death or of the fierce teeth of killer whales eager to make you their prey?”

She closed her eyes, imagining she was free of the bonds that held her tight and back in the deep blue of the ocean where she belonged. “I like the slice of my body through the water. I like the ease with which I can move, gliding through the water as if I were flying through the air. I am not bound to the ground as I am in my human form, but weightless in the water, able to rise or fall with a single flick of my powerful tail.

“I like the thrill of the hunt when I am hungry—the wheeling and darting of the silver-bellied fish, the sheer giddy fun of chasing them and scattering them in all directions. I like my speed and agility which makes a lone straggler easy prey and the snap of my jaws as I sink my teeth into its sweet flesh. I like the joy of discovering a field of pink-tipped jellyfish hovering in clear water, a feast laid on for the seal folk by Neptune himself.

“I like the gentle waving of seaweed in the current and the tide. I like to see it waft back and forth and I like to lie in the current and feel my body move with the same forces.

“I like to swim idly along the bottom of the reef on a moonlit night, nosing the sleepy fish out of the caves and hollows they hide in when daylight has gone and tugging gently at the seahorses clinging with spiny tails to the tendrils of seaweed.

“I like to find the shells of sea creatures, intricate whorls of bright blues and pinks hidden among the rocks and weeds. They are the true treasures of the deep, not the pallid, lifeless gold that lies abandoned in shipwrecks on the ocean floor.

“I am a creature of the ocean waves and of the rocky shores, not a creature of the grass-covered hills and snowy mountains. The sea is my first home and I am heartsick for it.”

Iain looked down at her, helpless on the bed and considered her words. They touched his heart as nothing had for many years.

He too, had once loved the water with almost equal passion. As a child he had spent hours in his uncle’s small boat peering into the water, wishing he could see better what lay beneath the calm waters. He would peer endlessly through the distortion of the ripples on the surface, watching the seaweed gently swaying, the occasional dart of a small silvery fish and the beautiful shells just out of reach.

What it would be to swim down there, he had always wondered, amongst the creatures of the deep. To play with an octopus, to feed a fish from his hand, to watch the crabs go about their mysterious business. As a boy he had longed to grow gills and to join them, even for a day. He smiled briefly at the memory. He had not thought of his boyhood fantasies for many years.

No wonder that he had always been fascinated by the selkies. And it was no wonder that he had fallen in love with his prize. For he did love her, he realized in a sudden flash of certainty. It wasn’t just her beauty or her spirit that drew him inexorably to her. It was that she was part of the ocean, just as he had once wished he’d been.

“You speak of things of true beauty.” Her honesty and her eloquence genuinely moved him. “Things that lie beneath the waves that are so ignored by my kind unless they have some value to humans. Then they are dragged from the sea, to turn to ugliness on the land.

“I too have enjoyed the feel of the water on my skin, floated weightless while the swell lifted me gently in its arms. Until you spoke of these joys I had not thought of them far too long. What is it that you have awakened in me?”

Maya looked at him with surprise. Of all things, she had not expected this.

“We humans take from the sea,” Iain continued, “with nary a thought that the bounty might be not as limitless as we suppose. I am as guilty as the rest. More so, in fact. We sail our ships over the surface of the seven oceans, and rarely think what lies beneath. Creatures of fluid grace, such as seals. Delicate seahorses of such bizarre shape that they defy description. These things are part of our world, and yet not.”

He looked down at her with disconcerting tenderness. “Just as you are part of this world, and yet not.”

He bent down and kissed her with such tender intensity that Maya thought she was back in the embrace of the sea. “I am indeed a foolish man to think I can capture you with these physical bonds.”

As he spoke, he released the straps that held her legs to the corner of the bed. As he released each leg he gently caressed up her calf, over the knee, up the smoothness of her thigh. He brushed lightly at the short, soft curls that lay the top, causing Maya’s breath to catch in her throat. He moved to release her arms but Maya shook her head as she moistened her lips. She liked this new mood of his. “Leave the restraints. Take off your clothes and lie on me. I want to feel bound with your skin next to mine. I want to taste you. I want to look at you while I lie here strapped to your bed.”

Iain stood beside the bed and Maya watched the play of light on his chest as pulled his shirt over his head. He shyly turned his back and removed his trousers, giving her a tantalizing view of his hard buttocks and haunches. Misguided as he was, and cruel as he could sometimes be, he was a fine specimen, this human lover of hers.

When he turned around, she moved her knees apart and bent her legs making her cunt open in invitation. A thin line of liquid seeped out and disappeared between her ass cheeks.

Iain stared in lust at her obvious excitement. “You want me to make love to you? Even though I have treated you like an animal, kept you captive and tied you to the bed?”

Even with all that, she could not resist him. “I want you to make love to me.”

She looked at the purple head so tantalizingly close to her mouth. “I want to taste all of you.”

He moved his cock closer to her mouth, just letting the tip rest on her tongue. Every little lick caused his swollen cock to jump repeatedly, each time getting harder and harder.

She strained her head off the bed to get as much of his cock as she could.

He knelt on the bed close to her head and looked at her cunt, so invitingly open and wet. She was a prize, this selkie of his, but she was not his to own. Never had he realized that so strongly as now, when she was tied to his bed and waiting for him to fuck her.

“I want to taste all of you,” she repeated.

There would be plenty of time in the morning to castigate himself. It was time now to give himself over to her pleasure. He straddled her head, moving up the bed allowing the head of his cock to rest on her lips as he faced her feet. And if her pleasure involved sucking his cock, so much the better for both of them.

She licked the underside, trying to take him in her mouth, trying to wrap her lips around his hard and throbbing cock. She greedily licked his balls, gently taking each in turn into her mouth. Then she moved her head and licked between his sac and his ass, causing him to gasp in pleasure.

As her knowing tongue caressed from his asshole to his balls, he stroked his cock slowly, his eyes locked firmly on her cunt. He wanted badly to fuck her, to plunge into her body and claim it as his own.

Unable to take much more, he lifted his ass out of her reach as he bent down and spread her cunt even wider with his firm fingers. He rested his tongue on her clit and smelled her musky woman smell. The sheet beneath her was wet.

He had to touch her, to tease her and to make her gasp with desire for him until she came for him. With a finger either side of her protruding clit he rubbed vigorously. The pressure caused Maya to drop her head to the bed and arch her back in exquisite agony. Without mercy he roughly massaged her clit while she writhed and strained at her bonds.

Her breath in short gasps, Maya cried out as the inescapable climax took over her senses, shutting out the world to everything but her center of pleasure.

Giving her no respite, Iain spun around on the bed to face her, lifted her head and roughly forced his cock past her lips and into her mouth. With slow deep strokes he moved his cock over her tongue, aching as her warm mouth enveloped him.

She moved her head forward to get as much of him as she could but the bonds that held her arms over her head restricted her movement. How tantalizing it would be for her to want him so much, yet for him to remain out of reach.

He felt her strain against the leather straps and pulled back, his cock just out of reach of her mouth. Moving his hips slightly, he teased her with the tip of his cock. She continued to strain to reach the heavily swollen head, glistening with her saliva, as he relented and lay a salty drop of his own excitement on her lips.

Her head fell back on the bed as she savored the taste. Kneeling at her side, he brushed his cock over her closest nipple and with his hand tweaked the other. He looked down at her, her eyes closed as she enjoyed his ministrations on her breasts. “Do you want me?”

Her eyes opened and looked at him, right at him. “I want you. You and I are as one. I am of the sea first and the land second. You are of the land first, then the sea. Together we are equally of both worlds, which are really just one. Like us.” He had never seen such intensity in her gaze or heard such intensity in her voice.

Her master no more, Maya’s lover lifted her knees and sank his cock completely into her hot cunt, her legs over his shoulders from where his cock could reach fully inside, to claim her as his own. He pushed into her then withdrew, and pushed again. He looked steadily into her eyes as he drove his cock again and again deeply into her welcoming pussy.

As their pleasure rose, Maya’s body seemed to take on a glow. Outside the wind started to moan, whistling around the house. Suddenly a heavy squall of rain lashed at the window. Maya and Iain continued their rhythmic embrace while the sudden storm increased in ferocity outside.

His climax approaching, his face contorted with the rush as he increased the speed of his fucking until he could hold himself no more.

As her pussy muscles started to clench around him in the beginnings of an orgasm his body froze and his cock spurted his seed into his selkie love.

Outside the storm reached its own climax, with lightning immediately followed by thunder signaling the closeness of the sudden storm.