The Winter King (20 page)

Mindlessly, instinctively, she obeyed. Her legs hitched up and locked around his waist, heels pressing through the soft fur of his loincloth to the hard, rounded buttocks beneath. Free of her weight, one of his hands splayed against her back, the broad fingers spread wide, holding her pressed against him. The other wandered lower, curving down the deep valley of her bottom to the petals of her hottest flesh opened to him by the position of her legs. His fingers curved up, skimming the slick moisture, stroking.

She gasped and arched her back, the motion thrusting her breasts closer to his mouth. Her legs clenched tight around his waist. Enemy king or no, in this at least, she bowed to his conquest, and at the moment, it felt nothing like defeat.

She rode his hand, instinct making her thighs and buttocks clench and unclench, lifting and lowering her in an undulating rhythm that was as natural as the roll of clouds across the sky. Her heart beat faster. Her breath came in panting gasps. Heat rolled off her in waves. The tightness in her wound tighter and tighter until she thought the fire inside would burst from her skin like flames from wind-fed embers.

There was no arras in her veins, no Summerlea herb to heighten her sensations. This was pure, natural magic. Almost as powerful a force as weather magic. His north wind meeting her southern heat, the storm building in intensity. Against her closed eyelids, she could see the first white flashes, lightning gathering in black clouds.

His thumb was stroking the small, hard bead of flesh nestled in the folds of her sex. Her body wept from the pleasure of it.

“Wynter.” His name was a gasp of air. “Husband!” An acknowledgment of his claim. A cry of both surrender and triumph. Her eyes flew open as the storm consumed her, battering her with shivering streaks of cold and heat. She shuddered and flew apart in his arms.

He held her firm, a rock in the tempest, steady and unwavering. His heavy muscles bunched tight beneath her clenched hands and shaking legs. He wasn’t done. He’d fed the storm, let first the cloudburst pour out its strength against him, but even before she could catch her breath, he’d begun to feed the storm again.

She wasn’t even aware of how or when he’d stripped his loincloth away. She only knew the moment that he pierced her core. He filled her, stretched her body wide, set her flesh afire from the inside out. His legendary strength held her fast, arms as broad and strong as the branches of the mighty oak, his legs the unyielding granite of the mountain crags. His mouth tracked lines of icy fire across her skin.

“Put your arms ’round my neck,
eldi-kona.
” The growl skated across her sensitive flesh like a hand, leaving dancing sparks of lightning in its wake. “Hold tight.”

She obeyed without conscious thought. Her arms wound up, around the powerful column of his neck, fingers clasping behind it.

His hands fell to her hips and held her fast, his grip firm yet surprisingly delicate. He could have easily bruised her, and she would hardly have noticed, but when this storm broke, and passion faded back into stillness, her body would bear nary a mark.

Then his hands gripped her tighter, lifted her up, and plunged her back down on his shaft, filling her utterly. Her eyes rolled back in near-fainting pleasure, and every last rational thought flew from her mind. There was no later, there was no before. There was only now. There was only this: the heat, the ice, the consuming, desperate need for more . . . more . . . his mouth, his hands, his tongue. His strength wrapped around her, holding her fast. His sex plunged so deep, she thought she might die. His teeth closed around one nipple, tugging with unbearable torment as he raised and lowered her on the thick column of his flesh again and again.

All the while her fingers dug deep into his shoulders. Her nails raked him. Her passion had far less care than his, more savagery. She was a child of the elements, a mage of storms. Rarely gentle. And never well behaved.

He endured it without flinching, and only growled deep in his throat when her nails broke the surface of his skin. The sound vibrated against her breast and drove her over the edge. Consciousness shattered. Electric threads of lightning shot from her fingertips and raced across his skin, into his veins. Her inner muscles clenched around his sex in wave after wave of powerful, shuddering ripples.

Wynter’s back arched. His teeth tugged free of her breast as his head flung back on a shout of triumph and ecstasy. Her musky, feminine scent swirled around him in heady waves, infusing his senses, driving him wild. His hips pumped with urgent, near-violent thrusts. Once. Twice. Inside her clenching heat, his flesh expanded. On the third driving thrust, he exploded. “Winter’s Frost!” he cried, and his seed erupted into her dark heat with such force it was as if his own life were pouring from his body into hers.

Shaking, he dropped to his knees and bore her down to the furs. Her eyes, pure silver only now beginning to shift back to gray, stared up at him in dazed silence. He took her mouth in a brief, conquering kiss, then rolled away onto his back, his lungs heaving like bellows.

Khamsin lay on the furs beside him, shaken and trembling. Not even a whiff of arras had touched her senses, yet this coupling had been even more devastating and passionate than their fierce, herb-enhanced matings.

She drew air into her lungs, forcing herself to breathe deep and even, to gather her shattered wits and calm her racing heart. With effort, she lifted her hands, her arms. Her fingers dragged across the flat surface of her stomach and over her breasts. Still-tingling sparks of sensual energy followed in their wake. The muscles of her thighs and sex continued to tremble, but the earlier, more violent spasms had subsided.

She threw an arm over her eyes. The Rose burned at her wrist, as hot as an ember in her flesh, throbbing in time with her pounding heart. The smell of sex and Wynter washed over her, bringing with it a flood of completeness and a strange, exhausted satisfaction. Her eyes fluttered shut. Just for a moment, she told herself. No more than a minute or two.

How long she slept, she didn’t know, but she woke to shadows and lamplight and the feeling of Wynter’s hands playing across her body. Blue flame flickering in the depths of his eyes and the silvery whiteness of his hair slid across her skin like falls of snow.

If he possessed even a hint of modesty, he did not show it. He knelt before her naked and unashamed, and held her fast when she would have shied away from the lips that sought out the damp flesh between her legs. What he did with his mouth left her fainting, but even as her body folded, he drew her down upon him and set her afire once more. She’d heard her father’s courtiers speculating that the Winter King would be a cold, dispassionate lover at best, but he proved them all wrong. As he had on their wedding night, he demonstrated with breathtaking, mind-shattering mastery that even ice could burn.

Four times more he came to her. Four times more, he drove her beyond reason, beyond thought. Four more times he rode her, his touch like lightning on the wind.

The fifth time, she came to him.

When she did, kneeling naked beside him and reaching out to run a curious finger down the resting length of flesh that now lay limp against his thigh, he gave a wry, weary grunt of laughter. “The mind is willing,
min ros,
but the body, I think, is done.”

She glanced up at him, but his eyes were closed, and the small smile that played at the corners of his mouth made her butterflies take flight in her stomach.
Careful, Khamsin. He is the Winter King, not some summer lover. And not Roland either.
She had to guard herself. It would be all too easy with him to forget why she was here, forget that the pleasure he’d just poured out upon her like water from a fountain was but a means to an end.

Bear an heir within the year or face the deadly judgment of the mountains.

Even knowing that, and even knowing he would have shared this same shattering pleasure with whichever Summerlea princess he had wed, she couldn’t keep away. For now, at least, he was hers. Besides, if this really was to be her last year of life, she might as well live it large. What had she to lose?

For the first time, she was free of the cage of her father’s making, free of his rules and his demands for obedience. She would not willingly step into another. If the Winter King thought to control her, he would find caging the wind an easier task.

Her fingers curved around him, curious, testing. What had earlier been a long, rock-hard column of flesh, was slightly smaller now and soft to the touch. Beneath the flesh ran several long, thick blue veins. He was still damp and sticky from their last coupling, and that stickiness smelled pungent and musky, a mingling of her scent and his. The hair at his groin was thick and short, as silvery white as the hair on his head. Not wiry, and not curly as her own was, but straight and rather soft. Like a wolf’s pelt, but not quite so densely furred. Beneath his penis, the large, twin globes of his testicles hung heavy in a sac of flesh.

She cupped them in her hand, scraped fingernail lightly on the underside. A muscle in his thigh leapt. His sex twitched, growing straighter and fuller, starting to rise.

“Does it hurt when it does that?” She’d heard her father’s courtiers sometimes cursing the ache in their loins.

She knew the instant his eyes opened, felt the tingling energy of his gaze like sunlight on her skin. She glanced up and, sure enough, found him watching her from beneath the thick lashes of his half-shuttered eyes. “Only if you don’t finish what you’ve started.” His voice was a low growl again, and the deep, raspy sound of it sent shivers racing across her body.

“Ah. I’ll be sure to finish, then.” She turned her attention back to the intriguing mysteries of his sex. She stroked him, traced one long blue vein running the length of his shaft with the rounded edge of a nail, and smiled to herself when, despite his claims of exhaustion, his flesh strained upwards, as if rising to meet her hand. His body was a marvel. So different from her own, yet fascinating and beautiful in its own right.

She curled her fingers around him. The flesh that had only moments ago been soft and malleable was now a thick, rapidly hardening shaft. Her fingers spanned little more than halfway around the base.

She jumped a little when his hand stroked her bare bottom and slid between her heels to caress her inner thighs. One broad finger curved up, found her damp heat, and thrust up while a second finger slid up between her folds and began stroking the tiny nub of flesh that sent flares of electric heat shooting throughout her body. Her inner muscles clenched tight around him.

“Does it hurt when it does that?” he asked with a slow smile.

Her eyes fluttered down, and she swallowed thickly. “Only if you don’t finish what you’ve started.” His finger moved up and down inside her, a pale mimicry of what was to come but dizzying in its own right.

He shook his head slightly. “Nay, Summerlass,” he denied. “This time
you
finish it.”

“How?” She was willing. The ache was there and building. She wanted more than his finger inside her. Her hand clenched tighter around his shaft, moving up and down in a rhythm that instinctively matched his own strokes.

“Mount me. As you would a horse.”

“I don’t know how. I’ve never ridden a horse.” Oh. She caught her lower lip between her teeth and shuddered on a delicious wave of pleasure. She felt her inner muscles ripple and clench around his finger. It was only the beginning. He’d already taught her to expect much more.

“Then today is a good day to start.”

She gasped and nodded. Her eyes fluttered closed. “How?”

She bit back a cry of protest as his hands ceased their erotic magic and slid towards her waist. Damp fingers stroked her thigh. “Put this leg across me and kneel over my body.”

She shifted her weight and rose on her knees. He helped her, lifting her by the waist as she flung a leg across his hips and straddled him. Cool air mixed with warm swirled across the hot, damp skin between her legs. The dark, earthy scent of sex wafted around her like a dizzying cloud of incense. She saw Wynter’s nostrils flare as the wolf tasted the scent on the breeze. The hands at her waist slid down to her hips and squeezed briefly before sliding between their bodies.

“Now, fill yourself with me and ride.” He guided his shaft to the entrance of her body and held it there while she impaled herself slowly on him. Inch by devastating inch, she took him, feeling the burning pull as her body stretched to accommodate him. He watched her with eyes of blue flame and his hands slid up her waist to cup the weight of her breasts in his palms and roll her nipples between his thumb and index finger.

Her body clenched. Her hips bucked.

“Gently,
eldi-kona.
Find your rhythm.” His hips rose and fell, showing her the tempo.

She rode. Slowly at first, rocking against him, feeling the tug and burn where her flesh had stretched to accommodate him, then slowly increasing as she grew in confidence, and the heat coiled within her. He rose on his elbows to capture the tips of her bobbing breasts with his mouth. Teeth closed gently around one nipple and held fast, so that every time she rocked, she felt the tug at her breast like a spear of lightning shooting from chest to womb.

“Wynter.” She speared her fingers into his hair and gripped his head. He would not let her end the torment. His tongue flicked out in teasing touches, flickering across the tight bead of her nipple in concert with each thrust of her hips.

Her hips rose and fell. The hard, wide shaft worked in and out of her body, in a slow, incinerating slide. “Wynter!” Heat coiled inside her, winding tight.

He grabbed her hips, broad fingers sank into soft flesh and gripped her tight. He lifted her hips and brought her down hard, forcing his body deeper inside her. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Slow, burning strokes, each one robbing her lungs of breath, each pulse making her heart race. Down. His own hips bucked up to greet her.

“
Wynter!
” Sensation exploded inside her, radiating out from her womb in jolting electric spikes. Sparks burst in a million dizzying flashes behind her closed eyes. Dimly, she felt the last, pounding thrusts of his hips. Her body exploded again, and she rode the waves of shattering senses into darkness.