TheKingsViper (21 page)

He was still hard. He hadn’t come to his own crisis when he
took her, she realized. But he seemed to be ignoring the thick jut of his
erection, even now as he turned back to her at last.

“Ella,” he whispered. She stared, trying to read his
expression, but his face was as inscrutable as ever. Slowly he crooked the
fingers of his hand in a tiny wordless gesture. Whether it was invitation or
summoning was left for her to guess.

She was his wife now. What should she do but obey him? What,
in truth, had she ever done except obey him—other than once, in an inn in
Rounay? Sliding her legs over the edge of the bed, she dropped her heels to the
floorboards. But her legs were less dutiful. Suddenly wobbly, they refused to
take her weight and she sat back against the mattress. Severin was left to take
the initiative, and he closed on her until they were almost touching. Eloise
looked up, her gaze skating over his lean hips and his darkly erect cock, over
his flat stomach and the black-flecked spread of his chest. There was such
power in his frame that it made her feel fragile. Every part of him was hard
and unyielding and ominous, and though her body ached for him she was acutely
aware that she was more scared of him, now that he was her lawful husband, than
she had ever been when he was a stranger. These days she knew only too well how
cruelly he could hurt her—and that it would take nothing more than a word. Or
the refusal to speak. She looked into his face, caught by those dark eyes and
those wicked black brows, those narrowed lips that never gave anything away.
He’d always been almost impossible for her to read, his private life carrying
on unseen behind his visage as if in a house with all the shutters barred.
She’d glimpsed only in rare moments on their journey together his passion and
his anguish.

So it took her completely by surprise when he sank to his
knees before her, almost between her open thighs, and clasped her hips in his
hands.

“Ella.” His voice was hushed and strained.

She opened her mouth to speak his name but the word wouldn’t
come to her lips. She saw her fingers steal out to stroke his temple. Severin
grunted softly and bowed his head, burying his face between her breasts. She
felt his lips brush their inner slopes, and then the caress of his breath as he
exhaled, shuddering.

“I’m standing by a river,” he said.

Eloise had no idea what he meant but she could hear his
despair. She buried one hand in his hair as if she could pluck his thoughts
from his head, and wrapped the other about his shoulders, filled with
amazement.

“I’m standing by a river as darkness falls. I’m listening to
the sound of the water rushing at my back and you’re telling me that you love
me. Every word cuts me open. Every word, Ella. You’re telling me that you love
me. And I know that I have betrayed you, and it is worse than anything I have
done in my life. But I also know that this time…this time I will tell you that
I love you too. I will tell you that everything has changed. That nothing else
matters to me more. That we will leave the riverbank together and never look
behind us. That I will never leave you. That we will be together, however short
or long our lives.” His voice caught on something jagged. “I have been by that
river for six months, Ella. Every night in the darkness. Every moment I’m
alone. On the stinking floor in the royal oubliette under Kingsholme, with the
rats running across my feet. I have never left that riverbank.” His fingers
tightened on her. “I am still there.”

Stunned, she slipped one hand under his chin and tilted his
face up so that he must look at her. Her heart hammered now, so loud and fast
that she was sure he must be able to hear it. “Severin,” she whispered, the
tears slipping from her eyes and wetting his cheeks.

“Little mouse…I thought that my duty to Arnauld came above
all else. I was wrong. I made the wrong decision. Oh God…I should never have
brought you home. Can you forgive me?”

Forgive him? For all his pride and blind devotion and
obduracy? For all the hurt he’d put her through? Even as she moistened her lips
she was nodding assent. “I love you,” she whispered.

“I know,” he answered, just as he had done on the riverbank.
“And I love you, Ella. More than my life. More than my King. More than all the
world.”

“Oh!” she breathed, shaping the sound more than giving it
voice. Yet that
Oh
pierced into her, deep into her soul, growing greater
and warmer and brighter as it rose, until her whole being was alight and
trembling with the
Oh
of it. She wiped at the tears on his face even as
more of hers fell to join them, then bent to press her lips on his. It was like
finding each other after a shipwreck, it was like drawing air into throats that
had been choked with brine. In the many tearful kisses that followed—blurred,
fervent kisses that lingered and repeated and built upon each other, like the
lapping of waves—she tasted the sea’s salt. She tasted his pain and his
endurance and his terrible isolation, as bitter as her own. When their lips
broke apart she raked her hands through his hair and kissed his face all over.
“I never told anyone. Not a word. I did what you said, Severin.”

“I know. I know, my love, my little mouse. You were true,
you were strong.”

“I was so afraid for you!”

He let out an exhalation that sounded like agony and his
hand cupped her face. “You’re not afraid now, are you?”

“No.”

He wrapped his maimed hand about hers and kissed her palm.
“You mustn’t be. Not here, not now, little mouse. You’re mine again.”

“I was always yours.”

“Ah.” He grinned crookedly, and if it hadn’t been Severin
she would have said his expression was sheepish—with perhaps a touch of heat.
“Yes. I remember.”

“Oh, before Rounay even.”

“Oh?” He arched a brow.

“Do you know what they say, here on Venn? That if you save
someone from the sea, they are bound to you forever. That their blood will turn
to salt water if they ever cast you aside. So I am yours, Severin de Meynard.”

“As I am yours,” said he, his fingers twining in her hair.

It was her turn to look questioning. “But I didn’t save
you.”

“I think you did.”

Eloise didn’t know how to answer that. She put her fingers
on his lips, tracing the soft curve of his smile as if to reassure herself of
his reality. “Was it wicked of me to love you? I couldn’t help it.”

“Ella…”

“You know that I wanted you even before I knew you well
enough to honor you? That was wicked, wasn’t it?”

His hand deserted hers and slid back to her hip, his grip
insistent. “Well, then we are both equally guilty.”

“That night in Rounay. If I hadn’t…”

“I give my soul in thanks that you did, Ella. Don’t hint at
remorse.”

“It’s not remorse. What if we
had not?
How would I
have lived my life without you?”

Severin used her hair to bring her to his lips once more.
His kiss was bruising in its admonishment. “The world has brought us here,” he
whispered fiercely. “Here. Now. There is nothing else. No one else but you and
me. Don’t let anything come between us and joy.”

She traced her fingers down from his temple, over his jaw,
down his throat, onto his chest. The world blurred as the hunger for him filled
her. “Yet there is something you haven’t finished.”

His voice had thickened. “Yes. I was thinking of that.”

He rose, lifting her and laying her back upon the bed so
that he could move over her. That simple shift of position brought the heat
bubbling to Eloise’s sex and a surge in her blood as her body prepared to
welcome him. But he delayed, prolonging the exquisite frustration. First his
lips found hers, and then they found her bare breasts, kissing those soft
mounds as if they were holy, nursing upon her nipples until they were flushed
pink and swollen and slippery and she moaned out loud with the sweetness of his
suckling. In response, he bit her tenderly before making a sudden move down between
her legs, spreading her thighs so that he could lick their soft inner surfaces,
lapping at her clit until she moaned and bucked.
Oh, his mouth
—his
kisses—the touch and the smell and the weight of him, the hardness and the
tender gentleness. He was everything in her world. He was the rock beneath her
and the sea washing around her, he was the hammering wind and the sky full of
stars.

She was soaring.

The tormenting pleasure of his tongue was so overwhelming
that she covered her face with her hands and arched her back, her hips
writhing. But he didn’t let her fall. He raised himself again, looming over her
so that he could look into her face.

“Severin,” she whispered, stroking him pleadingly.

“Oh God. I’m not a good man, Ella. You don’t need me to tell
you that.”

“Aren’t you?” Her voice was husky with desire. Her hand
sought his cock and found it sleek and rigid and eager, just as she
remembered—and just as wonderful. Severin made a noise of deep appreciation but
managed to stay focused.

“Not by the way the world reckons such things. But I swear I
will try to make it up to you, Ella—all you have been through, all the hurt you
have borne for my sake. I will make it up.”

Eloise circled her arms about his back. “You’re good enough
for me,” she said, drawing him down upon her as she opened her body to him.

He didn’t answer except with a long-drawn groan. But he
started making good on his promise. Bluntly searching all the slippery open
parts he had readied, his cock head sent frissons of delight through her nerves
as it sought out the wet hollow of her sex. It stung upon her abraded tissues
as he pressed deeper, but as he found his mark and entered her, that ceased to
matter at all. Stretching her wide, he filled her completely, all his weight
and his girth and his strength nesting in the cup of her sex. She looked at him
in glazed wonder, at the braced pillars of his arms and the hard muscles of his
shoulders and the taut incline of his stomach. Already his skin was glistening
with effort and she realized with an intuitive rush that it was the strain of
holding himself back, of taking it slowly instead of ramming her so hard that
she screamed.

“This is all I dreamed of,” Severin whispered, moving his
hips in such a way as to thrust deeper into her and at the same time grind down
on her licked and swollen clit. Eloise let out an involuntary gasp as arousal
kicked through her. “I will not fall first,” he warned.

And he is nothing if not a man who keeps his word.
She understood then that there was nothing for it but to surrender—to him, to
his impaling cock, to the heat pulsing inside her with every push of his hips.
Rocking her beneath him on that great dark bed, he pushed the rest of the world
away, thrust by thrust and inch by inch. Very soon there was nothing but his
cock delving inside her and his arms about her and his face over hers. There
was nothing but their hunger for each other, flesh and heart, and the more he
filled her the more she hungered. Far sooner than she could have anticipated,
in fact, her need built to a roaring storm front. She began to gasp and mew,
and was grateful when he shifted his weight and put one hand over her mouth—it
gave her the freedom to cry out.

With that he unleashed the full force of his desire.
Groaning, he began to pound his cock harder and harder inside her. Skin slapped
and slithered and wept salt. His thrusts were ferocious, but by then she could
take it, she welcomed it, and in the end they fell together, more or less, in a
hot tangle of limbs into the deep, dark ocean below.

Afterward they stretched out on the rumpled coverlet and
Severin rolled Eloise to lie on top of him, her head upon his chest. She could
feel the warm melt of their sweat binding them together and hear the strong,
hard beat of his heart. Under her cheek the tight skin of one of those new
scars cut a smooth track through the hair. Eloise didn’t want to imagine how
he’d received it. She reached out and took his right hand, the one with the
missing fingers, and she drew it to her lips to kiss it with awestruck
gratitude.

Severin murmured softly, without words, using his free hand
to caress between her shoulder blades.

“It’s gone,” she whispered.

“What has?”

“The great, empty hurt inside me. You fill me up.”

She heard his soft laugh.

“Oh that was rude, wasn’t it? I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I know what you meant, my love.” He traced a spiral on the
skin below the nape of her neck. “But I don’t mind you being rude either. In
fact, I like it a lot. And I’m going to do my best to fill you up, in every
way, as often as I can.”

Eloise giggled. “Are you happy?” she wondered.

He considered, filling the lazy silence with caresses. “Yes.
Completely. For the first time in years. Maybe the first time ever, really.”

“Now that’s funny.”

“Why?”

“You said happiness wasn’t that easy.”

“Oh it isn’t easy, little mouse. I doubt it will ever be
easy. Love will always hurt.”

She let the words sink into her heart and saw what lay
behind them. “How long can you stay?” With her head against his chest, she felt
his breath catch and hold before he exhaled again.

“I have leave to be absent from Court for a month.”

She grimaced. “Just long enough to get me with child, then.”

“That’s the general idea, I imagine. I need to be back there
before the Bull Festival.”

“Ah.” She was too filled with bliss, just for the moment, to
feel more than a pang of dread. “I can’t come to Court with you, can I?”

“No. That would be extremely foolish. You mustn’t show your
face there unless the King summons you.”

“Oh.” Involuntarily, her fingers tightened on his ribs.

“So you have two choices, Ella.”

She moved to look at his face up the warm curve of his
chest. “Yes?”