Knight in Leather (18 page)

Ethan wished Dasha wasn’t so hesitant. There was something she wanted from him—that was obvious—but either she wasn’t comfortable enough to state what her needs were or she wanted to draw out his torture.

He’d explode soon if she didn’t tell him.

He rocked his hips helplessly, and thrust his painful erection upward, but she pulled her body away so he was only fucking air.

“Be patient,” she whispered. The sting of her teeth against his bottom lip made him buck again, and a whine escaped his chest.

“Trying…
so
hard,” he said.

“I know. And thank you.” She peppered his face with sweet kisses—his chin, jaw, cheeks, and temples—dragging her breasts against his chest with every slight movement.

The bra needed to go. He wanted to see her—every inch of silken skin that belonged to him and may as well have been created for his pleasure. The panties needed to go, too. If he had his way, she’d never be dressed around him. He didn’t think Sully would mind.

At the thought of his fellow fairy, Ethan tuned his hearing toward the living room, badly in need of a temporary distraction from Dasha’s carnal torture.

Gods, her lips…

They were on his neck and inching downward, and he was wound too tight.

The television in the living room was on and, though Ethan couldn’t tell the exact nature of the show, he could hear that it made Sully chuckle. Occasionally, Sully crinkled the fast food bag. Food and television would only distract him for so long. If noises from Ethan’s room got loud, Sully wouldn’t try so hard not to hear. Space had always been a luxury for the crew when they were on the road. One of the men to bringing a partner back to wherever they were hunkered down for a night wouldn’t have been unusual, and there weren’t always doors to close or curtains to pull. Sometimes, they fucked right out in the open, and all the rest of them could do was not to outright leer.

Fortunately, what might have been very uncomfortable for the victim of all that fairy togetherness was generally forgotten the next day. Daryn and Caryl had ways of making people forget things, and often, their fellows called on one of them to use that magic.

Dasha’s hot tongue seared across his nipple and flicked it to a hard peak.

“Gods,” he said low, letting his eyes close and trying to keep his hips still.

So often, his many erogenous zones were ignored for the obvious organ. Her licks and tender touches primed his body and blew his mind a little, and with much more, he was going to come whether he was in her or not.

“I’d rather be in you when I come,” he said.

“Hmm?” Rolling her gaze toward his face, she raised an eyebrow at him.

“Too responsive,” he muttered. “Doesn’t take much to make me come. Keep kissing me like that, and you might find yourself wearing my seed on your chest.”

She laughed and kissed down to his navel, making his belly flutter. “I’m sure you’ll recover quickly.”

“Aye, but that may not be such a good thing, as you’ll come to learn.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” She encircled his cock with her fingers and lifted the shaft from his belly. Kissing around the base, she murmured, “Hmm?”

And he nearly came.

Already, his cock was weeping and balls clenched up tight, waiting for their cue to set off the fireworks.

“I…I recover quickly, but—
fuck
, woman.” She’d locked her lips around his cock head and was staring up at him in a do-something-about-it kind of way.

And he
couldn’t
do anything except to tightly curl his fingers into the covers. His choices were either that or her hair, and he wouldn’t presume she wanted her sex that kind of rough.

“Hmm?” she repeated. The tip of her tongue raked back and forth over his slit as she massaged the length of him, twisting both hands around his shaft.

Sighing, he put his head back, closed his eyes, and resigned himself to the inevitable.

“I’m sorry I can’t do better,” he said, thrusting his cock into her fists and against her tongue. “Blame the way I’m wired—the part of me that’s more animal than man. Duration isn’t important to animals. They need to be able to deposit their seed quickly before they’re interrupted.”

One of her hands pressed downward to his sac, which she fondled while murmuring, “Mm-hmm.”

“I hope I won’t disappoint you.”

“Mm.” She opened her mouth wider and took more of him in—not much, given the limits of the human jaw, but enough for his cock to give up the fight, and so did he.

He rolled his eyes as she took his seed down her throat and vocalized his orgasm in the form of a frustrated growl.

She sat back on her heels and rested her hands atop her lap, and he was afraid to look at her face—to read her disappointment. He kept his gaze locked on her bare fingers.

“You always come that quickly?”

He grunted like the animal he was. “Well, it’s been a while, but…”

“How long’s a while?”

“Long enough that I can’t remember. Certainly not within the last year.” Not since he’d met her, and probably not for six months before that. That had been a busy six months. The crew had spent most of the period chasing down some hell-raising trolls who had been dangerously close to getting themselves seen by humans.

“You
really
don’t touch yourself?” she asked.

“I do, but compared to my mate’s touch, jacking off is no better than going without.”

“But you
can
last longer?”

He draped his forearm over his eyes and let out a breath. The conversation wasn’t one he wanted to be having so early in their relationship, but he knew he had to, otherwise she’d keep expecting him to improve and that wasn’t ever going to happen. “A little bit,” he groused. “After I come once, setting me off takes a bit more doing.”

“And you can go back-to-back in the same session?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.” At the inscrutable lilt to her tone, he uncovered his eyes.

She was rubbing her chin and nibbling at her lower lip. He didn’t know what to make of that studious expression because it certainly wasn’t the one he expected.

He squeezed her between his knees to get her attention. “What are you thinking? I’m not certain I want to know, but tell me anyway.”

She shrugged, then crawled between his legs and lay atop him. That certainly wasn’t a response of disgust, at least in Ethan’s opinion.

“I guess with the way
I’m
wired,” she said, “I’m usually ready for a man to get off me long before he’s done.”

“You don’t have to tell me that just to assuage my ego.”

Her eyelashes tickled his chest when she blinked, making his toes curl. Everything she did to him felt good.

“I mean it,” she said. “There’s a pretty short window during intercourse where the touching actually feels stimulating. Whether I come or not, I’ve got maybe ten minutes at the most before all that grinding starts to feel like a chore. Everything gets numb, the lubrication is gone, and the friction is uncomfortable. What can I do but just lay there and wait, huh?”

“So, you’d…
prefer
that I not take long? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that.”

“I’m glad you told me.”

“The way I see things,” she said softly, “you’re still ahead of the curve. At least you can get it up and be raring to go again in short order. I need a while to be ready.”

He pulled the covers up over her back and held her tight. “I wouldn’t worry about that. The only good of my so-called gift would be if I were trying to knock you up when you were fertile.”

She picked up her head and furrowed her brow. “Your sperm count doesn’t drop between the first session and the last one?”

He grimaced.

He was ashamed to admit that he actually knew the answer to that. Sídhe men as a general rule didn’t tend to make donations to sperm banks even if their compulsion was to broadly disseminate their genetic material. Healthy children by a number of mothers wasn’t necessarily a bad thing with their gene pool being so shallow. But, there were a few mixed human-fairy men who donated anyway in spite of their generally lower sperm counts. Only a few of those children had ever come onto Heath’s radar. Curiously, though, Ethan had once visited a clinic where he’d found a previously undetected quarter-Sídhe working behind the scenes. He hadn’t wanted to donate so much as to answer that exact question Dasha had asked him. There was always a reason for every gift and flaw a person of Sídhe heritage had, and he was convinced his sensitive trigger had a purpose.

He’d produced five samples in twenty-five minutes. The tech tested each and quickly destroyed the evidence.

There was no significant difference in count between samples one and five. That meant that while he might have been unable to perform for as long as some of his peers, the chance of a child being produced from the coupling was higher, depending on his partner’s tolerance.

“So I’d need to come more than once before you did,” he mused.

“Pardon?” She picked up her head.

He gently nudged it back down. “Ignore me.”

“As if that were so easy.” She wriggled her hips and worked her pussy against his half-mast cock.

“You want to…” He clamped his lips. He wouldn’t say no if she wanted to have a go. Already, the blood was leaving his bigger head for the party in the smaller one.

“No. I don’t really want to move. I’m comfortable right now.”

“Are you sure? If you like, I could—”

“Nah. My sexual appetites are weird. They come and go like the breeze. If I don’t act on them, generally, they recede.”

“So…no?”

She pushed up onto her palms and stared down at him. “Let’s put it this way. If you put your cock into me right now, I’d probably give you a pretty good ride, but I’m just as likely to lie very still and let you do all the work. Maybe I’d come. Maybe I wouldn’t.”

“I’d want you to come.”

“Well, there are never any guarantees. Not like with guys.” She settled down again and pressed her face against the crook of her neck. “If you want to play with my ass, that’s okay. I appreciate a good grope when I’m sleepy.”

“As you wish.” He slipped his hands down the backs of her panties and curled his fingers over her very fine posterior. He appreciated a good grope when he was sleepy, too. Unfortunately, all that petting was going to make him hard. She’d be uncomfortable and would roll off of him.

He figured he should savor the experience while it lasted.

Dasha had no way of knowing what time it was without reaching for her phone, but the strong light through the window hinted that they were well into morning and that no one had missed them, apparently.

The practical voice in the back of her mind told her that she should get out of Ethan’s bed and go find her wits, but the part of her that was hot-blooded woman said, “Nah.”

She was on her belly with his thigh wedged between her legs and every little shift incited little tremors in her clit. She wriggled experimentally against him and her eyes rolled back into her head. “
Shit
.”

Ethan flexed his leg beneath her. “You don’t have to stop if that feels good, though I have to tell you my leg is growing numb.”

She cringed, and then turned to look at him.

He was fiddling with his phone and wearing a smirk.

She sighed. “What time is it?”

“Only around nine. Are you hungry?”

“Not especially, but I bet you are.”

“I am,” Sully called out from the living room or his bedroom.

Right.
Sully was playing chaperone, probably without knowing he was.
Unless Ethan told him?

She let her breath out in a sputter and rolled onto her back. “Thanks for the good night’s sleep.”

Ethan sat up quickly and set his phone on the nightstand. “Where are you going?”

“Back to Siobhan’s, I guess. To shower and—”

“If you think you need to hurry off, I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I was going to go so you could eat.”

“I’m not in such a hurry.”

“Says the man with the bottomless appetite.”

He shrugged. “I’ve got to be up in an hour, anyway, to run down a lead for Prince Heath. An hour isn’t going to break me.”

Might break me, though
.

She let her gaze track down his naked chest to the swirl of covers that didn’t completely conceal his morning erection. The previous night, if she hadn’t dug deep and found her last iota of self-control, she would have been riding him and milking him for all he was worth. She wasn’t the kind of woman who’d throw caution to the wind like that, but being around him made her feel so brazen and wanton. When he was near, he made every cell in her body light up in that pay-attention way, and her inclination was to seduce, not repel.

She’d forced herself to ease off so she’d have time to unpack what she was feeling and make sure lust wasn’t clouding her common sense.

After a good night’s sleep, she was still feeling pretty lustful, but her mind was clear. She appreciated the considerable restraint he’d shown and his honesty about his performance.

She still wanted to fuck him.
Big surprise there.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked. “I think I’m starting to figure out the things your face does, and right now, you’re thinking.”

“Nothing in particular.”

“Yeah?” He looped his arm over her hip and pulled her a little closer. She had to put her hands onto his chest so she didn’t topple over. “Well, I’ll give you some things to think about, then. You really thought leaving me last night was a good idea?”

“Huh?” She didn’t recall having left him.

“In the parking lot. You took off for dinner without me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Come on, Ethan. I wasn’t going to wait around watching some woman fawn all over you.”

“That really bothered you?”

“That would have bothered most women, I think. No woman wants to feel like she has to try so hard to grab a man’s attention and then have constant impediments to her keeping it.”

“You’re really worried about that? That’s silly.”

She growled, and that only made him laugh.

“I’m serious.” He pulled her down on top of him, and with the tight band his arm made across her shoulders, she couldn’t move—even when he started playing with her hair.

“
Noooo
,” she whimpered.

“Get used to it. Fairies touch things they think are pretty.”

Her cheeks heated. “My hair is a mess. I don’t do anything with it, hence the constant head covering.”

“Looks fine the way it is.”

“Some women might disagree. Lots of women with hair like mine spend tons of money doing cool stuff. Me? I don’t have the patience.”

“It’s springy.”

“And super thick, like carpet. Takes forever to do anything with it, and I’d rather use my time on other things.”

“Like what?”

Like climbing aboard a fairy choo-choo for a ride.

She cleared her throat and pushed against his chest ineffectually. “Uh, you know. Devising schemes to increase Simone’s profits and that sort of thing.”

“That’s what you do for a living, right?”

“Sort of. I don’t generally work with accounts this small, but I miss being able to. There’s more flexibility with businesses that don’t have a billion layers of decision makers. If something’s not working in a small business, you can change direction much easier than if you’re a huge corporation with a long ladder of executives you have to get things passed through.”

“You like your job?”

She shrugged. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had asked her that, so she didn’t have a ready answer. Lately, she wasn’t so sure that she did. “I guess I like the
idea
of my job. The gig was fun when I started, but now the tasks all seem so routine. I’m good at what I do, I guess, but I can’t really say the work is fulfilling.” And the bad memories of her ex didn’t help.

“You could quit, you know.”

She let out a sputtering breath and closed her eyes. His soothing heartbeat against her ear was the perfect lullaby. She thought she’d been well rested before, but if she stayed in the spot much longer, she’d nod off again and could only hope Ethan didn’t take the slumber personally. “I’ve got to go back to work on Monday. I’m due there for a big meeting.”

“This…long-distance thing is a problem for me.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve made a life in San Francisco.”

“And I go where the crew goes. There’s safety in numbers. You should be with me.”

“I’m not in your crew, Ethan.”

“Aren’t you?” He hoisted her up a little, forcing her to look down at him. And she did. There was so much eagerness and sincerity in his gaze that she knew she would be eaten up inside if she let him down in any way. She didn’t want to make him sad or to make him think that she was cold.

She wasn’t. Just…
scared
.

“Stop thinking,” he said. “Just tell me.”

“Am I? I don’t know. This isn’t my world.”

Sighing, he let her back down and tucked her against his side. His fingertips teased down the inside of her arm, tickling and titillating, but she couldn’t say for sure that either was his goal. The gesture seemed to be an idle one. “This is your world, Dasha. If you weren’t meant to be in it, you wouldn’t belong to me. You probably would have never met the princess.”

“She wasn’t a princess when I met her.”

“She was, in her own right, through her father’s tribe. Just because Rhiannon and Brandan sit on the high thrones in the segregated realm doesn’t mean there aren’t other groups who don’t agree that their authority is legitimate. Their marriage simply joined the two largest remaining bands of Sídhe. There are many others.”

“Why don’t the others fight back against her?”

“Too hard to organize, being so spread out. Many of her opponents, like Princess Simone’s father’s people, are outside the realm. They were never pulled inside. They escaped the punishment it was meant to be.”

“So
that’s
why their home is such a good place for Katie to hide.”

Ethan grunted. “I don’t know that she knew that when she set out in search of a place. Fortunately, I guess, she happened upon her mate that way.”

“Where are the other groups? Simone’s father’s is rooted in the Serengeti, right?”

“Aye. There are many disparate ones, some Rhiannon knows of—like the ones she often tries to intimidate in what’s now Australia. There are some in South America who are very secretive. Prince Heath has yet to encounter them face-to-face, but they often correspond. Those are simply the larger organized groups. But, I imagine that wherever there are humans, there are Sídhe. We evolved not to be better than mankind, but to serve it.”

“And that’s why the gods punished you—because you stopped?”

“Not
me
, as I wasn’t alive then, but in general, yes. That’s a fair assessment.”

Dasha scoffed. “Typical. Rhiannon seems to have forgotten her history. Maybe someone should remind her.” She dragged a fingertip around his nipple, watching entranced as it stiffened and his breaths went ragged.

Oops
.

She pulled her hand away. Just that quickly, she’d forgotten that every inch of him was a trigger to orgasm, and she wanted to play with those triggers very much.

“Perhaps someone
should
remind her of her history.” He kissed the back of her hand and turned it over to brush his lips across her sensitive wrist.

She rolled reflexively toward him and slung her leg over his. “Maybe someone should, but who? Obviously, she doesn’t take much heed to anything her children tell her.”

“Perhaps the people should remind her…as they leave the realm.” His voice deepened at the end and came out sounding like a bear’s growl rather than spoken thoughts.

She pushed up onto her hands and knees and looked down at his face—his furrowed brow and narrowed eyes.

“What are you up to, Ethan?”

“Nothing. I suspect my father may be, though. He wouldn’t have sent his sword ahead without having more than one reason to. I think he knows something’s coming and is trying to cover his bases, so to speak.”

“He said the sword was yours.”

“The sword is his, sweeting. Although his love for me may know no bounds, he wouldn’t gift me with his sword unless he believed his demise was imminent. He sent it ahead so that it would be here for him.”

“How do you know he’s covering bases?”

“I didn’t put the pieces together until you said that perhaps Rhiannon had forgotten her history. Sometimes, the rest of us do, too. We forget what our magic can do. We forget about the lesser gifts because we tend to only nurture the major ones. Which is why I only now remembered that there is a way to pull Sídhe from the realm without Rhiannon knowing.”

“How?”

“They have to leave a part of themselves behind.”

She cringed. “That sounds ominous.”

“To some Sídhe, it may be. Many wouldn’t choose to willingly give up any of the parts of them that makes them godly, but some would. Those are the ones we need to concern ourselves with right now.”

“We, huh?”

“The idea was yours, Dasha. You’re not a fairy, so you make me answer questions I don’t think to ask myself. You help me see the holes in the cage rather than focusing on the bigger prison.”

“Glad to help.”

“Mmm.” He pushed her hips down to make her sit on his erection. “I believe you’ll be helping me a great deal before the day is over.”

“Is that so?” She ground her panty-covered sex against his shaft and leaning forward, balanced against his chest.

“I know so.” He nudged the crotch of her panties aside and sucked in a breath through clenched teeth when her wet slit caught his cock head.

“I can’t do very much of this,” she reminded him.

She hadn’t been kidding. She wasn’t an enduring partner, and that was probably why she’d never gotten into kink. After a while, all that touching and teasing was unwelcome and tedious.

“So let’s do this quickly,” he said. “Forgive me.”

“For what?”

His response was the ripping of her panties, and then the dull probing against her sex with his fat dick that he was struggling to get inside.

Well, jeez. I should help.

Balancing on one hand, she wrapped her fist around his shaft and helped him find her entrance.

She sucked in a bolstering breath as he slowly sheathed himself, and she could hardly move. Her muscles seemed to have become paralyzed from the overload of sensation, and some needed to stop before she could move again—she couldn’t move until he was all the way inside her.

“Breathe,” he said teasingly.

“What’s breath?” she whimpered.

He grabbed her hips and raised her off of him before working her slowly back down. The going was a little easier, less tight, but there was still a
lot
of him inside her. She wouldn’t just be having an orgasm, but giving birth to one.

“Been waiting so long for this.” He brought her head down to his and took her mouth the same way he was taking her down below. Slow, masterful thrusts inside her that she could only submit to and encourage.

His tongue darted forcefully into her mouth, flicking and teasing, and just…
fucking
, and she didn’t know what she could do to contribute except to lock her knees against his sides and encourage his thrusts.

“Harder,” she said against his lips. “Don’t…don’t draw this out.”

“Dasha…”

“
Please
.”

His cock spasmed inside her and she felt the hot surge before, with a snarl, he rolled her over and looked down at her with an apology.

“Get inside me again. If you can,” she said. “Make me come. I don’t need much.”

He thrust back into her, and if he’d gone soft at all after ejaculating, she certainly couldn’t tell.

The extra lubrication deadened the friction somewhat, which helped her push back the tide of her encroaching orgasm, but she was getting close, anyway, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Just looking at him made her want to come—the intensity in his handsome features, the strength in his arms as he held himself up, the way his ripped belly contracted with each thrust.

She wrapped her legs around his back and pulled him down more. Thirty seconds of his weight wasn’t going to kill her. “Fuck me,” she whispered. “Come on.”

“Don’t want to hurt you.”

“I want you to tap the end of me. Give it to me, Ethan. Fuck me the way you wanted to in all that time I was away.”

“You wouldn’t survive.”

“Then give me the next best thing.”

He made that snarling sound again, then increased the speed of his thrusts and the length of them. There was no way in hell he was going to get his whole cock inside her, but she was filled to the brink and squeezing him so tight. With each tap of her cervix she cried out, and every time he tried to back off, she dug her nails deeper into his flesh and kept him moving.