WYVERN (8 page)

"You have to open your eyes sometime, Beth."

That voice, so loved and so missed, breathed gently in her ear. Elsbeth kept her eyes tightly closed.

"No, I don't," she said. "This is a good dream. I don't want it to end."

The warmth along her side shifted until it pressed down on her from shoulder to ankle. Elsbeth felt the heavy weight of a solid chest against her breasts, long thighs sliding between hers. Fingertips fluttered across her cheekbones and drifted into her hair.

"Does this feel like a dream?"

Elsbeth moaned softly and finally opened her eyes. Alaric, the bard who had given her days of happiness and eight years of loneliness, stared down at her and smiled. He rested on his elbows and forearms, keeping much of his weight off her. He was so close, she could see the fine lines fanning from the corner of his gray eyes, the curve of his eyelids. Black hair, streaked russet by the cave's ambient light, fell across his forehead. It was shorter than she remembered, touching his neck instead of falling below his shoulders. A stubble of beard graced his cheeks, accentuating the line of his jaw.

"Are you truly here, or am I just wishing you to life?"

His bare shoulders, golden and smooth, flexed. He lowered his mouth to hers and brushed her lips in the faintest kiss before pulling away. "Ah, Beth, if such wishing worked, I'd have wished you to my side years ago."

Held spellbound by Alaric's smoky gaze, she could only stare at him for several moments, drinking in the sight of him as if he were cool water on a sweltering summer day. She'd missed him. Dear gods, had she missed him.

Elsbeth touched him then, a tentative caress of fingers and palms tracing the slope of his shoulders and neck. Alaric's eyelids lowered to half mast, and his breathing hitched. He shut his eyes when she ran a fingertip over his cheekbones and across the bridge of his nose. A strong, handsome face with a generous mouth that smiled easily and had brought her to delirium with a simple kiss. A beloved face.

"I was afraid you were dead," she whispered, curving her hand against his cheek.

Alaric opened his eyes and turned his head to kiss her palm. "I was dead," he said, "until a fortnight ago when I heard a fiddler's music on the cliffs." Another breathless kiss danced across her lips. "I didn't think it possible, but you've grown more beautiful with time, Beth."

Beth. Only Alaric had ever called her Beth. Sometimes teasing, sometimes passionate, it belonged strictly to him. Elsbeth blushed.

"Oh, yes," she said and smiled. Her fingers sketched delicate patterns on his arms. "All these new lines on my face become me so well."

Hands, both graceful and rough, slid into her hair, cupping the back of her head. Alaric no longer smiled, and his gray eyes narrowed. "The woman who bewitched me eight years ago had only half the grace and beauty she has now. You will grow lovelier with every passing year. If you live a wyvern's lifespan, you will only enthrall me more."

Blood, heated by desire and elation, ran hot in her veins. She slid her arms around him, embraced him fully. He was naked against her, a perfect study of male beauty that begged her touch. Elsbeth spread her thighs wider, bringing Alaric fully against her so she could feel his erection through her trousers. He moaned, hands tightening against her head, hips thrusting lightly in response to her silent invitation.

His lips teased hers with half kisses. "We've much to discuss, Beth." The sweep of his tongue on the underside of her upper lip sent tingles dancing down her arms and legs. "I came back for you."

Elsbeth dug her fingers into Alaric's back at that confession. She wanted to know, desperately wanted to know what happened to him during those lost years, why he had not found her when he returned for her, and who was this man that wore the guise of a wyvern?

Her hands slid over the ridges and valleys of muscle, moving lower to caress his lean buttocks. "Not yet," she whispered, trying to capture his mouth for a deeper kiss. Her legs wrapped around his; her hands gripped him, pulling him closer into the juncture of her thighs. "Not yet. Give me this. Convince me this is real. That you're real. That I won't wake up alone in the fallow dark, with nothing but the memory of you against me."

Alaric offered no protest. He traced his tongue across her lips, held her head still and opened her mouth to stroke and plunder. New and yet familiar to her, he tasted and felt as good as she remembered. She helped him remove her tunic and trousers, pausing when she lay before him, covered only in the mage-light illuminating the cavern.

"I'll say it again. You're more beautiful now than you were eight years ago."

He stood and helped her rise. Elsbeth blushed as he did a slow turn around her. She knew he viewed her with partiality. Eight years had brought the inevitable changes. She was not so firm in some places, a little wider in others. But she chose not to point them out, content to let him see her through complimentary eyes.

Alaric, on the other hand, was as flawless as she remembered. The gift of wyvern magic, she supposed. Lean and muscled, he moved with a feline grace, unaware of his extraordinary effect on her senses. Or so she thought. He met her gaze with an amused one of his own. Not only was he aware of her perusal, he reveled in it.

"Like what you see?"

"I'd be blind not to," she said, gaze drawn to his cock, stiff and jutting from a nest of black curls. "If my memory serves, I liked the feel and the taste, too."

He brought her into his arms, against his beautiful body. Elsbeth sighed in sheer pleasure at the feel of his skin on hers. "Eight years," she said. "Yet this still feels the same."

"No," he said, and bent to kiss the sensitive spot where her neck and shoulder met. "This is better."

Alaric made slow love to her then. Unlike the first time they coupled, this wasn't frenzied, desperate. He took his time, and Elsbeth savored his touch. He kissed and licked her everywhere, leaving no part of her untouched by his mouth. When he spread her thighs and lowered his face to her curls, she'd sucked in a breath, eager for his tongue on her clit and inside her cunus.

His tongue played havoc with her body and her senses. He stroked and sucked gently on her clit, rolling it with the tip of his tongue, pausing here and there to dip into her wetness, lick her thighs made slippery by his pleasuring her. When he brought her to orgasm, her cries carried to all parts of the cliffs' interior.

She returned the favor, pleasured herself by taking his cock in her mouth. He stood before her, hands buried in her hair as she knelt, sucking him leisurely. It was a slow torture she performed. Her tongue ran the length of his shaft, the sensitive vein along its underside. His bollocks were cool in her hands, his taste salty in her mouth. It wasn't Elsbeth on her knees who was the supplicant, but Alaric whose thighs shivered beneath her palms and whose hands clenched her hair in an effort not to fuck her mouth in hard, mindless thrusts.

His climax was as intense as hers, his knees buckling. He filled her mouth. Cum trickled from the corners of her lips as she swallowed and licked him clean.

They loved through the long hours of the afternoon. Alaric reasserted his claim from eight years earlier, taking her cunus, her mouth and her ass. During a short nap, exhausted by their excesses, she'd awakened to the feel of oiled fingers sliding between the cleft of her buttocks. Half-asleep but eager for more of his touch, Elsbeth bent a knee, bringing her leg higher to give Alaric better access.

She moaned at the slide of one finger into her ass. Another joined it, stretching her anus to accommodate its intrusion.

"That's it, Beth, open for me," Alaric whispered in her ear as she pressed against his hand. He fucked her slowly with his fingers for several moments, allowing her time to adjust to his invasion. When he released her, Elsbeth gasped in protest, wanting more.

She didn't have to wait long. Alaric turned her from her side to her stomach and raised her to her knees. His cock, as slippery and oiled as his fingers, followed their path. He spread her buttocks. Elsbeth felt the tip of his penis press against her anus and pushed back.

His cock slid in her ass smoothly, an inch at a time. Elsbeth groaned at the feel of it, the stretching, the pressure bearing down on her cunus from behind as he breached her bottom and slowly impaled her on his shaft.

"Tell me if it hurts, Beth. I'll stop."

It didn't hurt, but it was agonizing. Agonizing in the way that intense pleasure could be painful. Elsbeth arched her back, wanting more. Wanting to be fully breached, wanting to be possessed in the most primal way.

"No," she said on a groan. "Don't stop. I want it all."

Alaric's hands tightened at her waist. "A claiming, Beth," he gasped out and thrust hard, burying his cock in her ass to the hilt.

It was a loving debauchery. Elsbeth's fingers dug into the pallet, her body rocked by Alaric's thrusts, her senses overloaded by his possession. That pressure grew, swelling to encompass her entire body. She reached down, slid her fingers between the lips of her cunus and stimulated herself. In seconds, she orgasmed.

Alaric immediately followed her, his bollocks caressing her thighs as he thrust twice more into her before filling her. The sounds he made were guttural, incoherent.

In the aftermath, they lay spooned together. Elsbeth, tired to the point of exhaustion, was almost asleep once more. Alaric's fared no better. His voice was faintly slurred when he spoke. "Do you want a bath?"

It was an effort to respond. "Later," she mumbled sleepily. "I like your scent on me."

He hugged her close and chuckled. The sound soon changed to a gentle snore. Elsbeth fell asleep to its steady lullaby.

"Why didn't you tell me in Ney that you were more than a man?" Elsbeth crouched in front of the wash bowl Alaric had given her and sponged herself clean. She tossed him the wash cloth.

"Because you might have thought me less of a man if I did." He caught the sponge and dipped it into the water. "Think on it, Beth. I had a difficult enough time convincing you to even speak to me, being that you thought me nothing more than a drifter with a glib tongue and evil designs on innocent village maids." His mouth turned up in a faint smile. "You were wrong about that you know."

Her eyebrows rose. "What? The part about your glib tongue, or the evil designs on village maids?"

Alaric laughed and danced tickling fingers down her ribs, making her wiggle and laugh as well. "The last. I had designs only on one woman, and she did not fall easily to my charms."

"That's because you used the wrong charms at first. I fell quickly enough after you ate my cooking without complaint. Had I known then you could just as easily enjoy an uncooked haunch of ox, I might not have been so complimented." She toweled off with a dry cloth and returned to their pallet, keen to have him against her once more.

"And you've still the sharp tongue to go with that fiery hair." He joined her, reaching out to curl a lock of her hair around his finger. "The wyvern is who I am, Beth. The man merely an enchantment. One that took me nearly three hundred years to master and another fifty to grow comfortable with."

She captured his hand and kissed the back. "But the heart's the same. Do you know there were times when I'd watch your face and see something beyond the scales and those horrendous teeth--an expression, especially when you made some joke, that reminded me of Alaric the bard. I thought it just the wishful yearnings of a lonely woman. I wanted to see similarities simply because you shared the same name."

"I considered taking you from Ney, despite your wish to stay. You almost saw the wyvern then, ready to swoop away with you."

"I shame myself and my grandfather's devotion by admitting I was tempted to say yes when you asked me to go with you."

Alaric kissed her palm. "But you stayed anyway. There's no shame there. You honor Angus. You stayed for your family. I left for mine."

He'd led to the question she'd wanted to ask for almost a decade. "What happened? Where did you go? You never fully explained it to me, only that your kinsmen needed you."

"That was only a half-truth. This enchantment I wear, it's taxing and requires great strength to hold it for long periods. When I met you, I'd already worn the guise of a man, uninterrupted, for four months. I knew I'd have to change back to my true form while I could still control it. Transforming from man to wyvern in the middle of a human village unexpectedly wouldn't bode well for me."

That last made her shudder. Had such a thing happened, he'd have sent the villagers screaming and running into the woods in terror. But not all. Ney boasted, and rightfully so, of brave men. Good hunters and seasoned fighters who wouldn't flee, but find the nearest crossbow or javelin with which to kill the beast.

"The stuff of nightmares," she said and hugged him more tightly to her. He kissed her forehead. "But that isn't what kept you away so long. Tell me of those who needed you."

"My brethren rarely fly these skies. Our lands are in a far country, one very different from here. With those strange beasts I told you about and others like them. We were struck by a plague. Wyverns dying in mid-flight from some unknown sickness, eggs never hatching, their shells consumed by a black rot. It took our young first, and then the old guardians."

Plague. The hairs at her nape rose. Every person's worst fear. Death came on silent feet and without warning. It held no code of honor, taking the young, the weak, and the old first. The greatest warriors couldn't vanquish a foe that made no stand but passed nameless and unseen in the streets.

"What was it?"

He shrugged. "We never found out. A council was called to discuss what to do." That same horror making her skin crawl softened his voice. "So few of us left. The pestilence had killed a good half our number."

"I'm so sorry, Alaric."

His handsome features were drawn; his eyes darkened to the color rain clouds. "The plague burned itself out eventually, but not before taking a few more of us with it."

"Such suffering. Humans have dealt with plagues as well. Families destroyed, children buried. I assumed you'd forgotten me when you left. After dealing with such horror, I can see why you might."