Loving an Ugly Beast (9 page)

From there his mouth traveled down to cover her stomach. He spent long moments absorbed in her belly button, causing her to giggle.

Finally, he parted her legs. Here, she stiffened, caused by apprehension and not anticipation. He started to raise himself up. “Nissa?”

She shook her head, pushing his shoulder to keep him still. “I want this, Benton. I need you.”

“Then look at me.”

His eyes never left her face, but his tongue learned the texture and taste of her. It mapped the curve of her lips and the swell of her thighs. It found the entrance to her body, and as his eyes held hers he entered her with his tongue, pushing in to fill her.

Two spots of color rose high on her cheeks as she watched him. “Yes, yes,” she panted, her hips wriggling against his lips. He withdrew his tongue only to lay it against the small bundle of nerves right above, causing her to break their gaze as her back arched off the bed and a keening cry escaped her lips. “Benton!”

So she hadn’t learned about this from the women’s gossip night? Good. That meant it was all his to teach.

He attacked the nerve center, his entire focus on manipulating the little button of flesh. She flailed and twisted but he would not be dislodged. Since his tongue was otherwise engaged, he pushed two fingers inside her and pressed in.

Shivers wracked her body and her screams became ever louder. She was reaching her peak.

Nissa arched off the bed. She would have dislodged him if he hadn’t placed an arm over her hips, forcing them close to the bed and not allowing them to escape.

“That was so good, so good, I never realized…” She was talking to herself more than him, the words pouring from her lips in unrestrained strings. He lay next to her, bringing her into his arms and holding her close.

“You should have done that to me before. No, you shouldn’t have. If you had done that to me before we never would have left your bedroom. But what about now? No way are we leaving this bedroom. What about—” Her disjointed sentence was cut off by a kiss. She didn’t seem too upset at the interruption, if the way she pressed herself into him was any indication.

After they pulled apart, he said, “Glad you liked it.”

She threw her head back and laughed. “The women never warned me about that.”

“Maybe it isn’t as good for them.”

She pursed her lips in thought. “That’s kind of sad, but you’re right. A lot of times, they used words like ‘duty’ and ‘job’. Why is it always good for the man but a crapshoot for the woman?”

He nuzzled her ear again and she settled against him with a sigh. He was completely hard again and aching to be inside her.

“Benton…” Her voice was a little whisper with an undercurrent he couldn’t place. No overt unhappiness, but with a treble that spoke of thoughts caught in another time.

He kissed her, gentle, willing her to feel his love and devotion to her. “If you say stop, we stop.”

She shook her head and reached up to push his hair away from his face. “No, I want this.”

Her eyes were clear, the nervousness in them the same flavor he himself was experiencing, the nervousness of finally being intimate with the person you’ve been in love with for years.

Benton rolled to his back and pulled her over him. “Ride me.”

Startled, she swallowed hard and gave her head a tiny shake. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You didn’t know about blowjobs either, and you made me come so hard I thought the back of my head blew off.”

Laughter escaped from her and she nodded. She pushed down and took him inside her. Joy shone over her face when she was fully seated. “This feels good.”

“Yes,” he agreed, and his voice was strangled.
Good
didn’t even come close.
Heaven
was the closest he could come up with, but even that seemed not enough.

She bit her lips as she started to move her hips. “You’ll tell me if I do something wrong?”

“Don’t think that’s possible.” Those words relaxed her a little more, and she added a rise of her hips before coming back down on him.

Soon her head fell back in abandon and she was riding him for all she was worth. “Benton, Benton, Benton,” she chanted. “I…I…”

“Yes,” he encouraged her. “Come, Nissa. I have to feel you coming around my cock.”

As she came so did he, and he pushed deep inside her one final time, calling her name and thanking everything magic in this world and the next that she was part of him at last.

Benton held her throughout the night, loath to sleep. After all this time, Nissa was his. Her gorgeous eyes were closed, her pointed face snuggled into his arm. He couldn’t be happier.

A little sharp dagger hit him and burst his mood just a little. He needed to talk to Joseph. Only Joseph could tell him where she had come from. Whoever had hurt her was a dead man.

He ghosted his mouth over her forehead. She mumbled and curled closer to him. They were dead.

Finally, sleep claimed him.

Morning sun burned bright behind his closed eyelids. “Time to wake up,” a sultry voice spoke low in his ear.

“One part of me is awake,” he said, grabbing the hand on his chest and urging it down.

She laughed as her fingers curled around him. “If he’s awake, he’d better give me a little more of what he did last night. I have other positions I want to try.”

Benton smiled and turned, prying his eyes open to gaze at his beloved’s face.

Shock froze him.

“Benton?”

It was her voice and her violet eyes, eyes no one else in the world had. But this wasn’t Nissa.

The woman before him was beautiful, the type of beautiful that could start wars. Shiny black hair fell in long waves over porcelain skin, with high cheekbones and almond–shaped eyes in a heart-shaped face. Her lips were pouty and full and perfectly formed, while her nose was straight with the barest hint of a slope.

In his haste to get away he fell out of the bed. She was looking at him, Nissa’s twilight eyes in a perfect face.

“Benton, what is it?”

She rose to follow him. Her body was all long lines and perfect curves. Her breasts were full with pink, pert nipples while her stomach was a flat slope that invited a man’s mouth down to the little black triangle between her legs. And her legs, a man could fall to his knees and worship them.

“Benton, you’re scaring me.”

He
scared
her
? Where was Nissa?

She looked down and her whole body tensed and flinched, the way someone preparing for a blow would. She picked up a hank of black hair lying over her breast. Her face couldn’t be more panicked if she had just picked up a poisonous spider. “Oh no,” she breathed. “No. No no. This is… – no no no.”

She ran across the room to where the reflective metal he used to groom himself lay on the dresser and stared at her reflection, horror etched in her eyes and open mouth. She touched her face, then touched the mirror, as if to verify it was indeed reflecting her.

The metal dropped from slack fingers, her body shaking as she stepped back, as if to escape some horrible fate. “No, no this isn’t right. This can’t be right. She never said I’d turn back.
She never told me I’d turn back
!”

Chapter Nine

Marie stroked the soft skin of her son’s cheek.

He was a miracle, and the great pain it took to bring him into this world was nothing compared to the joy of holding him like this – though she would not tell Joseph that little fact. The boy was at her breast nursing, his sweet-baby smell warm and wonderful.

A quick knock sounded at the door and before she could even answer, the door opened to reveal a woman in a cloak. “It’s me, Marie. It’s Nissa. You have to believe me.”

Nissa
. Thank heavens she was not hurt. Joseph had told her Benton had returned and protected her, but Joseph was tight-lipped over the other details. He’d said he wanted her to rest after the birth, but the way he carried himself screamed uneasy thoughts. She’d been too tired to question him any further.

Marie chuckled. “As tired as I am, I’d take your word that you were the tooth fairy. Are you all right? What’s with the cloak?” When Nissa stood there and said nothing, unease began to tighten Marie’s stomach. “Nissa, did something happen last night? I
told
Joseph he should never have let you out of his sight, Benton or no! I’m so sorry—”

A hand shot out from beneath the cloak, fingers spread in a sign to calm down. A deep breath and a long exhale were audible from the cloaks folds. “Marie, I’m fine. I’m fine. Just remember, I’m your Nissa.” With that, she pulled off the cloak.

What game was this? It had sounded like Nissa, but this woman was as far from her friend in looks as the moon was from the sun. Marie’s grip tightened on her baby, bringing him flush against her body. “I don’t understand. Who are you, and why are you joking like this? Where’s Nissa?”

The woman swallowed. She took another deep breath before she stepped forward to kneel beside the bed. She looked straight into Marie’s eyes, the position and the direct glance showing her violet eyes clearly. “It’s me. I need you now, just like I needed you before. Please don’t abandon me.”

Please don’t abandon me
. The words rung through her head, echoing the first words she had heard from Nissa three years ago, the lost and broken woman she’d somehow managed to put together again. Marie’s breathing went ragged. “How can you be Nissa?”

The beautiful woman stroked her right hand over her left forearm, a nervous habit Marie was all-too-familiar with. The woman drew a deep breath and turned the full force of those violet eyes on Marie. “Do you believe in magic?”

Magic
. Yes, she always had. Her mother’s house was steeped in the belief of magic, stories of fairy godmothers and brave knights and happily-ever-afters told to her daily

It was one of the reasons she had been drawn to Nissa in the first place. Nissa three years ago had been a broken doll, so shattered only magic could explain how she still moved in spite of the fractures. It made Marie want to get close, to help heal where maybe the magic couldn’t reach, to be part of a miracle.

“You came from the north, you said,” Marie began, and Nissa’s whole body tensed like someone does when waiting for a blow. “That was the only clue you would ever give to your past. Not long after you arrived, Joseph traveled north on business for Benton. It was a little town he stopped at to rest for the night.”

Nissa turned so her face was in profile. Her visible eye was wide, staring ahead to watch whatever memory raced past.

Marie continued. “They talked in that village, of a beautiful woman, the type of beauty that drives men to become beasts. They said she was the governess to the local lord’s five children. They said one day the lord forced her to be brought to him when his lady wife and their children were not home. But the lord’s brother was there, as well as the brother’s two sons, both of them of age and all of them,
all of them
, evil. The villagers said they never saw her again, that they didn’t expect to, not after what was surely done to her by those men. Her name was Nissa, and she had violet eyes.” Marie’s voice cracked at the end, and the baby wailed. Marie looked down where her son was covered in her tears, crying himself as they dripped over his face. “And I thought, ‘It’s not her, thank the heavens. Look at her, she’s not what anyone would ever call a beauty’.”

Nissa’s eyes closed and her head tilted to the side, falling against her shoulder. Old pain seeped into the air around her in a near visible cloud, its tendrils snaking through space to cover even to the far corners of the room. Her voice was low when she spoke. “They fell asleep, and I walked out the front door. I kept expecting to be stopped. After everything, it felt wrong to be able to leave so easily. I walked. And when I stopped, there was a woman. She held me. She said nothing could change the past, but she would use every bit of magic she possessed to heal me.”

Her trembling arms cradled her torso. “I don’t remember falling asleep, but when I woke I was alone. There was a piece of parchment nearby and a rucksack. The rucksack was filled, and the letter said to travel south, that I would know when to stop and when I stopped, that’s where I would heal. I… There was a river nearby. I went to splash my face and get a drink, and the reflection that stared up at me was a woman I had never seen before, a woman with dirty-blond hair and a pinched little face. That’s when I knew that magic was real, and I picked up the rucksack. I never looked back.”

Nissa lifted her head and looked over at Marie. Her smile was as moving as any painted by a great master, hope apparent under the still-present pain. “I met you and it was time to stop. It was as obvious to me as the sun rising in the morning. I had you, and then I had Joseph, and finally I had Benton.”

As Benton’s name left her lips a new pain enveloped her features, one more recent. Her mouth twisted while her fists clenched against her stomach.

“Benton was with you last night, that’s what Joseph told me.”

“Benton was Byron.”

Of course he was
. Every question about Byron fell into place and was answered. “He made a wish, didn’t he?”

Nissa nodded but didn’t give details.

“What does this mean? Is he going to be Byron again? Will you go back to being the other Nissa?”

She raised her hand to rub the side of her neck. “I think not. I remember vaguely something about how once the wish has run its course and the magic’s gone, it’s over. We are now both as we really are.”

“And what does Benton think?”

Nissa didn’t cry, not over anything, but as soon as the question left Marie’s mouth great sobs escaped from Nissa and she bent over with the force of them.

Marie put her son in his crib and went to Nissa to wrap the now-stunning woman in her arms. “Shh, it will be all right. No matter what it is, we’ll get through it together as we always have.”

In a tear-choked voice, Nissa said, “He doesn’t love me like this.”