TheKingsViper (14 page)

“Nothing. I just hadn’t expected you to be so…responsive.”

“That’s not bad, is it?”

“Bad?” His voice had sunk to a whispered growl that seemed
to throb in his chest and made Eloise’s skin prickle. With a heave he raised
himself up on his arms, just enough to swoop down upon her belly. His lips slid
across her bare skin, making her squirm with fearful ticklishness. She sank her
fingers in his hair. Then he did something then that
nobody
—not a single
one of the servant women who confided and advised over the pickling crocks and
the sewing frames in the Keep of Venn—had ever remotely suggested a man might
do to woman, sliding right down between her thighs and nuzzling between them.
His open mouth met the cleft of her sex, both of them wet.

Eloise shrieked outright in shock. Nobody had ever said—and
oh by all the Saints of Heaven they could not, they could not have told her,
because there were no words at all for the wonderful sensation of his mouth on
her, for the lap of his tongue on her clit and the way he was sucking her and
the way her body was surrendering to that impossible pleasure. The sight of his
head and shoulders bulked there between her spread thighs took her breath away.
For long moments she went still, a helpless prisoner of the pleasure gripping
her body. Then as the waves rocking her grew deeper, she began to move. First
she stretched down to take his head in her hands, raking her fingers through
his thick dark hair and pulling him down more firmly upon her mound. Then she
began to move against him, heaving her hips in counterpoint to the rhythm of
his supping mouth.

“Yes!” she whimpered, and it was a
Yes
she meant more
than she ever had done in uttering that word, repeating it over and over so
that he would understand how much she wanted and needed what he was doing to
her, so that he would never stop, so that he would keep on kissing and sucking
and licking her like that forever. Then, all of a sudden, it became a different
Yes
altogether—not a plea but a cry of triumph, something wild and
fierce. Her nails raked his scalp. She bucked and thrashed under his mouth,
clawing at the sheets beneath her and digging her heels into the mattress as
she pushed herself up like she was trying to force herself down his throat.

Her collapse afterwards was just as sudden. Wide-eyed, her
chest heaving for breath, she stared down the length of her torso at the man
who had done this wonderful thing to her. Had he wanted her to cry out like
that? Had she shamed him? Had she hurt him in her struggles?

But she met a smile of such dark satisfaction that all her
uncertainty fled.
I please him,
she thought, awed.

Severin heaved himself briefly to one side to wipe his face
on the coverlet, then knelt up, moving with the care of a man carrying a great
burden by the edge of a very deep drop. Eloise found her bent legs draped over
his thighs, and his perfectly erect cock jutting up like a lance between them,
pale against his hair, dark with congestion when seen in contrast with his
skin. He ran his fingers up the length of his shaft, rolling the ruddy head
free of its cowl of foreskin.

“Touch me,” he told her.

She had to reach down the length of her torso to take his
erection in her hand.

“Yes. Good.” He guided her fingers, squeezing them about his
flesh surprisingly firmly. Then he took the time to caress her lower body. His
hands easily framed the narrow span of her hips. His gaze swept her from groin
to eyes, but his own seemed to be focused oddly, as if he were looking somewhere
deeper than her skin. His voice sounded thick and dreamy too. “Do you know what
happens now?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

He slid his left arm under the crook of her leg, lifting
that one higher as he shifted forward over her. “Tell me.”

“You’re going to…” She stopped.

A glint of teeth. “Say it.”

“Have me.” A whisper, a secret.

“Say it properly.”

“You’re going to fuck me, Severin de Meynard.” Her voice
wobbled over the taboo word, and he laid a finger warningly upon her lips.

“Shh. Quietly with that name.” His weight was bearing down
upon her pelvis now, the blunt head of his cock bumping against her hand and
the underside of his shaft sliding over her clit as he rocked in her welcoming
slit. She could feel the unquenched ember of her desire glowing into new life.
“Give me your fingers. To my mouth.”

Obediently she lifted her hand to his lips and he sucked her
fingers into his mouth one at a time, slicking them. The hot embrace of his
tongue felt disconcertingly intimate and deliciously ticklish. A flick of his
glance sent her wet hand back down to embrace his cock, her fingers slithering
over its smoothly domed helm.

“Eloise de Venn,” he breathed, leaning down low over her,
his arms braced wide on the bed, his voice so soft it could not have been heard
by the mice in the walls. “Believe this—I want you. I want you now.”

Appetite flared in the deepest core of her. “Do it. Take
me.”

He bared his teeth.

“Do it. I want you. Fuck me,” she whispered frantically, his
cock jabbing between her fingers and feeling bigger and harder than ever.
“Please—fuck me!”

That was too much for him. She understood that even as it
happened. “Ah!” he cried, as his seed gushed out and spattered over her.
Blaspheming, he ground his hips hard, rubbing her clit into fire while jet
after jet of his semen pumped from his cock. Then he fell forward, trying to
save her from the bulk of his weight and partly succeeding, his body sheened
with a sudden gloss of sweat.

Oh God
, she thought.
That’s how it is. I know now.
I know.
She was dizzy with the import of her new understanding. The whole
world had changed. She saw her fingers steal out and sift through his hair,
like white fish swimming through a dark sea.

Coming back to himself, Severin turned his head to catch and
kiss her fingertips. Then he rolled off sideways and lay beside her, his chest
heaving. Like a broken necklace, the pearly splashes of his ejaculate lay all
across her lower torso. One had even leapt far enough to lie now in the cusp
between her quivering breasts.

Eloise stared down at herself for a long time, letting the
sight sink in, feeling a new and unfamiliar sense of completion. Her blood was
slowing little by little, but still pounding so hard that she could see the
pulse jumping in her belly. Finally she looked at the man beside her. That
still felt strange. He looked just like the Severin de Meynard she was familiar
with—that bitter, grave and unyielding man—yet somehow he was naked and
stretched out on his side next to her, eyes half-lidded, his mouth hooked in a
rueful and disbelieving smile, and she found it all but impossible to reconcile
what she saw before her eyes with her memories.

She ran her tongue uncertainly across her upper lip. Was she
supposed to say something? What should she say to the first man to lie with her?

“Look at you, little mouse,” he murmured. His hand looked
very dark against the pallor of her hip. “You’re beautiful.”

Such tender intimacy was unnerving, coming from him. “This
mouse finds the serpent fair too,” she answered shyly.

His eyelids lowered in acknowledgement. “That’s her
tragedy.” His hand lifted, stroking the tufts of her pubic fleece, hovering
over the plain of her belly. He touched the milky spill of his seed as if
mesmerized by the sight of those splashes on her skin. Then he brought those
fingers up and brushed the swollen nubbin of her left nipple, wonderingly,
painting that tip with semen. Her dusky pink areola glistened with his moisture
as he played, drawing circles on the firm cushion of her breast.

Emboldened by the sight, Eloise drew her own fingertips
through another of the splashes he’d bestowed upon her, testing the slippery
stickiness for the first time. She lifted them to her face, breathing the most
intimate scent of him—a grassy green odor, she thought, like trampled haycocks
in the rain—and without thinking stuck her fingertips in her mouth to taste it
too. Rather too late, she cast Severin a quick glance to check that she had not
offended convention, and froze with her fingertips between her lips.

He made a strange noise, deep in his chest. Suddenly he was
leaning over her again and kissing her once more, his tongue unlocking her
mouth to slide inside, and she knew that he was tasting himself in her just as
she was tasting her own sex on him. Meanwhile his hands moved on her body,
rubbing the slick trails of his semen into her skin from throat to hip, all
over her breasts and belly, an action unmistakably proprietary and possessive.

I’m his.

Then he rolled onto his back and flipped her on top of him.
For a moment she felt like she was pinning him, she was kissing him, she had
him at her mercy—and then he pushed her upright so that she was sitting astride
his hips. She looked down, touching herself between the breasts, then running
her hands over his ribs and chest. His flesh was hard and furred in places—so
different to her own. His nipples were dark and flat. She could feel the
striations of muscle just under his skin. She felt drunk with wonder.

“Ella,” he murmured, stroking her.

“Oh,” she answered weakly, as his thumbs invaded the
wildlands between her thighs.

“Will you tell me something, little mouse?”

“Anything.”

“Do you ever touch yourself when you’re alone?”

She looked away. Did he know? Had he guessed? “Yes.
Sometimes.”

“Show me.”

“Show…?”

“Show me how you do it. I want to see.”

Biting her lip, she slipped her right hand down over her
pubic fleece, parting the split there. One finger, her longest, dipped in to
find moisture and circled the flushed ruby of her clit. “Like that.”

“Do it,” he whispered. “All the way. I want to see you
fall.”

She blushed. She hadn’t thought he would make her blush,
after the first time, but what he was asking for made her feel self-conscious.
“What about this—isn’t it a shame to leave it unused?” she asked, wriggling her
rump back against his crotch and his raised thighs. To her surprise, he
laughed.

“Mercy, you wanton—you have to give me a chance to reload.
The older a man is, the longer it takes him to cock his bolt for another shot.”

“You’re not old!”

“Hh.” That laugh was more than half sigh. “I feel old, most
of the time.” He stroked his hands up her thighs. “But not now. Not with you. I
feel…” He bit off his words. “I’m not even going to pretend to understand what
it is you do to me, little mouse.”

She held her breath at that, shocked by the confession. Then
he tipped his chin up and she knew the subject was closed. “Frig yourself for
me, Ella,” he commanded, his voice like black silk. “I want to see it. I want
to…have it in here.” He touched his temple.

She understood what he meant by that. It hurt her. But it
seemed a small dim hurt against the great glow of her desire for him right at
this moment, and her delight in pleasing him, and the warm dance of the
lamplight on his face and body. With a faint nod she obeyed, sliding her hand
back down between her thighs.

Oh
, she said to herself.
What has he done to me?
She’d already climaxed twice, but it was as if his touch had heaped armfuls of
fuel upon the brazier of her desire and it took only a draft to set it roaring
again. Her clit was swollen, her tissues inflamed from his rough kisses. And
while every other time in her life this had been done furtively, with as much
stealth as possible, now there was no constraint. Through half-lidded eyes she
could see him watching her.

So she began to stroke herself, and as her finger worked in
little magical circles Severin touched her, very softly. He didn’t seem to be
trying to interfere or to take part. His caresses were too light for that. It
was as if he were trying to trace the path of the blood through her veins
instead, or read the rush of her arousal as it quickened in her skin. He laid
his palms flat against her belly as the muscles there tautened, and he stroked
under the lifted vault of her crotch as she raised herself on her thighs. His
hands rose to brush the sweet softness of her breasts, ghosting over the warm
silken flesh, learning the invisible pathways of sensation that made her shiver
and writhe and arch. Then as she grew warmer he sat up beneath her so that she
was cupped in his lap, and he could inhale the scent of her skin and hair as
his fingertips wrote poetry on the skin of her back. She lifted her lips to his
but this time he would not seize on them, would not wrest from her the command
of her pleasure. His kisses came no closer than his warm breath. His face
brushed hers so gently that she could feel the strokes of his eyelashes. Only
when she came to her final crisis and she rose up on her knees, trembling with
strain, did he slip his hands about her and press his lips to her throat to
taste her heat as her pulse throbbed against his lips.

As she subsided, panting, into her afterglow, she found
herself blushing from head to toe, shocked by how much she had shown him. His
hands drew her into a warm embrace, and then he lay back down so that she
rested upon him, her head on his chest.

“That was quieter than last time,” he murmured, running his
fingers up and down her spine in a caress that would have made her shiver until
now.

Eloise considered. “It’s different when I do it myself.” Her
voice was husky.

“Different?”

“When you do it to me, it feels like I’m out of control. As
if the rules don’t hold anymore.”

“Yes,” he whispered.

His heartbeat thudded steadily under her ear. Eloise lifted
her cheek from his breastbone and rested her chin there instead. “I’m thirsty,”
she confessed.

“There’s a tankard of beer over there on the chest.”