Demon Lover (16 page)

“Because I did. I knew I shouldn’t be doing it, and yet I did. I never wavered. Forget it, Gwyneth. I’ll make it right.”

She smiled, taking what was left of his breath away. “You’ve already made it right. You gave me Brea’s life.”

Almost angrily, he burst out, “Can you really not see? I was the one who nearly took it from you! From her! You
must
see—”

“I do see. I see everything now,” she whispered, and stretching up on tip-toe, she kissed his lips, a quick, soft kiss that devastated him.

He closed his eyes. “Gwyneth, you’re killing me. Do you not know how much I love you?”

Her breath touched his lips. “How much?”

“More than my life. More even than my kingdom. So much that it’s unkind to touch me now.”

Tiny kisses peppered his lips, silencing him. When her arms came around his neck, drawing his head down to her, he gasped again in an effort to break free. It was no good. The arms that reached up to push her away seized her close to him instead, clutched her as if he’d never let her go.

She gave a tiny sigh, her tongue slipping between his parted lips, and Ragnorak was lost. He devoured her mouth, and with her every eager response, he took more, sinking into the blissful agony of all the desire and love and loss that Gwyneth now embodied.

“You would do this?” He pulled away and stared into her eyes. “You would give me this third, last night? Before I take you home?”

“I give you it, and gladly.” Her voice trembled. “I want it, my Ragnorak, my demon. I’ve always wanted you…”

He made a last effort to think, to be strong, because he knew emotion and sheer reaction were drowning them both. He knew that the sweet, urgent woman in his arms would probably not love him when she awoke. But her pebbled breasts were rubbing against his chest, her mouth kissed with passion, her tongue teasing and delighting his. She pushed and swayed against his raging erection, arousing him almost to the point of no return.

Groaning, he tore his mouth free. “Brea,” he got out. “We cannot leave Brea.”

“We won’t. Make love to me here. She’s asleep, and I’ll know as soon as she wakes.”

Her parted lips were red and lush from kissing him. Her eyes shone. Her golden hair tumbled in tangles around her face and shoulders. She had never been more beautiful to him.

“You are so lovely,” he whispered. “My golden girl.” He touched her hair, following its tangled progress to her half-naked shoulder. “You’re like the gold we spun all those months ago. Like sunshine. You burn me and draw me at once.”

Her smooth skin was warm, shivering beneath his fingers as he slid his hands under the shoulder of her nightgown and let it fall around her elbows to reveal her wonderful breasts.

He kissed her throat, her clavicle. She threw her head back with such abandon that he couldn’t doubt her arousal or her pleasure. Tenderly, he cupped one heavy breast, loving the feel of her hard, distended nipple under the pad of his thumb. Her tiny moan was like music, driving him to bend his head farther and take the other nipple into his mouth.

Her clutching hands released his hair, dropped from his neck so that her nightgown fell the rest of the way to the floor. He straightened to look at her, completely naked for him. His moisture glistened on the tip of one breast. Her own moisture trickled down her parted inner thigh. He had never seen anything so arousing as this lovely, naked woman, so desperate for his embrace that her pussy wept.

He touched her mound, easing his hand between her thighs, and her breath caught and held. He bathed his hand in her moisture, losing himself in the heady heat of her folds and valleys, discovering the hard, swollen nub of her pleasure and gliding over it until she moaned.

Her hands plucked at his coat, tugging it from his shoulders. Shrugging it off, he could wait no longer, but lifted her in his arms and strode with her to the bed he’d fashioned for her a lifetime ago.

Even as he laid her among the pillows, she was unlacing his shirt, sliding her hot, eager palms under it to find his naked chest. With such encouragement it took only an instant to lose the rest of his clothes, even with the distraction of her busy mouth on his nipples, teasing and biting. As he settled over her, nestling his body and his aching cock between her legs, she writhed under him, her eyes warm and clouded and pleading. Taking her face between his hands, he kissed her long and deeply, savoring her instant, eager response. He made love to her mouth, letting his caressing hands move down her body.

Her fingers ran up and down his back, making his whole body undulate and somehow, before he quite meant it to happen, the head of his cock had entered her pussy. It contracted around him, hot and pulsing. With a moan, she pushed her hips upward, taking him further into her welcoming wetness. He couldn’t help thrusting all the way inside her, right up to his balls. Her gasp of pleasure rang in his ears. She smiled up at him, wicked and joyful, and he paused, savoring for the first time in his life, a moment of pure, unspoiled happiness.

It couldn’t last, of course. The tragedy of parting was too close, but he held on to the memory, because he knew for that instant, she loved him.

She reached up with her mouth and kissed him. He began to move inside her with long, tender strokes. He had never had this before, the freedom to love her without fighting impending orgasm, to explore her with no agenda but to bring her joy. His cock quickly found the place she liked best and from then on he made certain to find it with every thrust and every sweet, circling grind. His reward came not only in her moans and cries of pleasure, but in the increasingly powerful grip of her internal muscles around his cock as she squeezed and caressed him.

Lost in the blissful world that contained only the two of them, he slid constantly up and down her tight, wet pussy, building the rapture. There was no fight for control, only the two of them undulating and writhing together to the same, frantic end. Her nails dug into his buttocks as she pulled him into her, desperate to increase the pace, to find the ultimate pleasure. Ragnorak moved faster, hanging desperately on to the shreds of care and tenderness as he drove into her ever harder and faster.

“Ragnorak,” she whispered. “Oh, Ragnorak, I’m…”

So was he. As she convulsed around him, thrilling him as much by the sound of his name bursting from her ecstatic lips, he let everything go at last. In three wild, desperate strokes he joined her orgasm, releasing his seed into her in an explosion of joy so violent that it shook his whole body. There wasn’t a nerve ending, not so much as a finger tip, that didn’t feel soaked in pleasure. And through it all, her body jerked under him, around him, and her voice cried out in bliss.

There may even have been an instant of unconsciousness. But as he came back to some kind of sense, at least he retained enough care to move his weight off Gwyneth’s body. However, she clung to him, twisting with him so that they lay on their sides face to face with his cock still buried deep inside her.

She smiled at him with such tender mischief that his rapidly beating heart turned over in his breast. “You lost,” she crowed. “At last, you lost!”

And he smiled back and kissed her mouth. “No I didn’t.”

Chapter Sixteen

“The king had to send her away, of course. Just after the child was born. He had to marry, you see, and the disgusting underdweller just wasn’t suitable.”

“Indeed.” Midas nodded to his steward, who pushed the ancient, wizened old woman into a chair, none too gently. The king had thought at first they were really dredging the bottom of the barrel with this old hag. It wasn’t even worth torturing her, and in any case he was fed up listening to lies extracted on the rack from people who’d have said anything just to stop the pain.

But there was something about the old woman. Midas began to wonder if he didn’t recognize her. At any rate, she really did sound like an old palace servant, and when she claimed to remember the demon child and his mother, he felt oddly inclined to believe her.

“Why wasn’t she suitable?” he asked.

The old woman regarded him with scorn. “A whore from the magical realm? She could claim all the royal blood she liked, but we all knew what she was.”

“Hmmm. And did she mind being sent away?”

“She didn’t mind going,” the old woman said with a cackle of laughter. “But you should have heard her trying to persuade the king to go with her. Told him he’d find incredible riches in her realm. Beyond his imagination, she said. Apparently, in her world they trampled underfoot the gold and gems that we so prize. The maids made necklaces out of stones bigger than the crown jewels. Apparently!”

Midas sat up. He even stopped drumming his fingers. “Indeed?”

The old woman shrugged. “If you were naive enough to believe her.”

“You didn’t?”

“Would you?” scoffed the hag.

“Did the king?” Midas countered.

“Don’t know. The whore and her child were both gone by morning.”

“Interesting…” His mind moved beyond the immediate problem of getting Gwyneth back to the prospect of a brand new kingdom full of new wealth for the taking. If he could wrest it from his half-brother. If he could
find
his bloody brother.

“I don’t suppose,” Midas sighed, “that you know the name of this woman’s child?”

The old lady’s eyebrows rose. “Svartan,” she said. “She called him Svartan in my presence. Ungodly, un-human name.”

Midas began to smile. “Never discount the old and ugly,” he said to no one in particular. He stood and raised his voice commandingly. “Oh, Svartan! I summon you! Come to me now!”

Gwyneth, her head propped up on her hand so that she could gaze down upon her strange, wonderful lover, played her fingers around his broad, strong chest.

“You think you’ve won?” she teased. “I know we didn’t use the timer, but that was never two hours.”

“Before, I could only lose,” he said. “You would leave me or you would shun me. Tonight I could only win.”

“Because you changed the rules of the game?”

“Because tonight I wasn’t playing.”

Her heart turned over, constricting her throat. “Neither was I,” she whispered. It had just seemed so right. Brea’s sudden, terrifying illness and even more sudden recovery had brought things into proper perspective. She hadn’t taken him into her bed from gratitude, however much of that she owed him. He was a man, a strange, compelling, tortured man, who’d made a mistake and was sorry. A man she could swear loved her, even before he spoke the words. He’d even given her his real name and all the power over him that he imagined it gave her. He’d said he would take them back. And she knew then, as she should always have known, that she loved him, too.

It had always been there, that feeling, incipient but powerful, even in those early nights, spinning straw into gold, when he’d kissed her and aroused her and pleasured her. Wanting him, she’d married the king, but had never stopped wanting him, even through the worst of her anger.

And now she had him. He’d made love to her like an angel, giving her an ecstasy she’d never known and never imagined. And she’d made him come at last. She could still feel his seed inside her, trickling around his semi-hard cock which still nestled in her pussy.

Lowering her head, she kissed his mouth, almost with wonder. Then, feeling his cock twitch and grow once more inside her, she pushed him onto his back and climbed astride him.

“So if we’re not playing, what now?” she said breathlessly.

In an instant, he’d rolled her over and taken his own weight on his elbows. “Now we have more than that paltry two hours,” he said, and slid out of her, tracing a line of kisses down her breasts and stomach. Pausing only to part her thighs, he continued on his way, teasing her by kissing everywhere but her pussy.

He said, “The very first time I made you come was like this.” And he latched his mouth to her lower lips in a strong, sensual kiss that made her cry out. “But it seems I’m losing my touch.”

“No,” she gasped. “I’ve just learned more. From you.”

“So now I have to work for your climaxes?”

“Yes, please…”

Laughing softly, he licked her clitoris, and she clutched his head in abandon. She let her hips move as they wanted to, drinking in the rhythm of his kisses as he pleasured her. When he slid one finger inside her, the tension grew. When another joined it and he began to suck her clitoris, lashing it with his tongue as he slid those fingers up and down her slick pussy, she began to come. And kept coming in one long, searing stream that she thought would never end.

Only when it finally calmed did he rear up on his knees, smiling wolfishly as he wiped her juices off his face with the back of his hand and pushed his hot, rigid cock inside her. She welcomed him with an exhausted purr.

“Again,” he said, and rode her hard. She didn’t think she could. She concentrated on his pleasure, thrusting upward to meet his every stroke, squeezing and teasing his cock with her still trembling internal muscles. And she could feel his galloping pleasure, the tightening of his heavy balls as she avidly stroked them. And her own climax rose up swiftly with his. Some instinct propelled her upward into a sitting position so that she could grab around his neck and kiss him, open mouthed and gasping as they came, grinding and convulsing together.

Eventually, dragging her mouth free, she buried it in his shoulder instead, smiling.

“I love you, Ragnorak.”

He grew very still, as if she’d shocked him. Did he really not know? But when she would have raised her head to gaze at him, he held her face into his shoulder. His body jerked and she wondered if he was weeping again.

He said something muffled. It might have been, “I’ve never known such happiness.” She hoped it was. Fiercely, she wanted to give him every happiness of which he was capable.

At last he raised her head to kiss her, a long, sweet kiss. “Gwyneth…”

Brea gave a snuffle and as one, both their heads turned toward the cot. Gwyneth didn’t need to ask him to move. He withdrew at once and, even through her anxiety, she welcomed the spasm of pleasure induced by his cock sliding out of her. Naked, she leapt off the bed and covered the few paces to the cot.

Brea grinned at her and kicked off the cover.

Gwyneth laughed and picked her up. At once, she began snouting in Gwyneth’s shoulder, looking for milk.

“Is she all right?” Ragnorak asked.

“Fine. She’s just hungry. The fever’s completely gone.” Gwyneth flung a little gown over the baby’s head and brought her back to the bed. There she paused. “Do you mind if I feed her here?”

Ragnorak shook his head slowly. A small, curiously sad smile played around his mouth. “No. I’d like you to.”

She climbed back into bed and settled Brea on to her breast while Ragnorak watched. After a moment, his arm came ’round her shoulder, gentle and cherishing, encompassing both of them, and Gwyneth’s happiness was complete.

“Idiot,” snarled Midas, shooing the old woman from his presence. “That can’t be his name.”

Or had he really gone mad to be imagining he could summon this semi-mythical brother from some magical underworld by the speaking of his name? Whether the name was wrong, or his memory of what to do with it, “Svartan” had certainly not worked. Any more than “Rumpelstiltskin” had worked for stupid Gwyneth.

But as the door closed behind the shuffling old hag, he was again sure he was right. The memory, stirred by the old woman’s genuine ramblings, reformed. He saw again his sick, old father clutching him, gibbering nonsensical words that had meant nothing then and everything now. “Just say his name. Say his name and he’s got to come. His name is…”

Not Svartan, no! But he almost had it! Almost…

“Say his name and he’s got to come. His name is…
Ragnorak
!”

“Yes! Got you!” Midas whispered.

Leaping to his feet, he walked to the middle of the room. “Ragnorak, my brother, I summon you! Come to me now!”