Chapter 13 Thaleo
THALEO
Iwondered then if I’d never woken up this morning at all. The pale, fluttering light of the spinners gave everything the quality of a dream.
A dream. That would explain why Nazreen was willingly pressing herself against me, as if initiating an embrace.
Dream or not, my body responded at once. My cock thickened.
“What are you doing?” I rasped.
“Just…Holding you,” she said.
It skewered me a little. The way she’d phrased it. Just like the story I’d told her, about asking my uncle to hold me like a parent might.
But hers was not like a parent’s touch upon me.
It sent little fires burning all through me, until my entire being burned, like I’d been tossed onto a funeral pyre.
Like I was going to die, or dead already, simply because she’d laid her little cheek against my chest. Simply because I could smell her sweetly strange human scent, intermingled with the familiar fragrances of the water and the cleansing moss of my mountains. She smelled like here and not here.
She smelled like home.
“Tell me to stop, and I will,” she said. Her breath was torturous against me. “If you don’t like it-”
“Don’t.” The hissing vehemence of the word surprised me.
Maybe surprised her, too. She moved to pull away. “Don’t touch you?”
“Don’t stop.” My hands shot up to clasp at her back, to keep her there just a little longer. She stiffened, and the reaction nearly slayed me. That by returning her embrace, she tightened up with discomfort.
“Look at me.” My words were a command but my hand was a plea, sliding up over her hair to cup her jaw.
Gently, I touched her chin, tilting her head back.
Her eyes glittered under the blue light.
There was moisture on her cheeks, seeping from her eyes.
I let my thumb trace the silk of her damp skin, marvelling at this wondrous ability of hers.
So much water in her. It felt to me a sign that she was meant to be here, among my mountains and lakes, and not in the desert.
A sign that she was meant to be with me.
But…
If she were meant to be so, the Vrika would have come.
My arms tightened around her. As if I could summon the Vrika myself, simply by how closely I held her.
Please.
The word echoed in my head as I stared down at Nazreen’s achingly beautiful face. For a moment, I thought she had said it, before I realized it came from within myself.
I was asking for something. Begging. For something I wanted. That I wanted for me and only me.
I wanted Nazreen. There was no way to hide it, no way to bury it, no way to cut this down. Even my uncle’s knife could not have amputated this desire from me. Vrika or not, my mate or not, a terrible part of me had already decided she was mine. Even though no part of her was mine to claim.
If Gahn Seerak could only see me now.
He would likely be ashamed. Just as I was of myself.
But not ashamed enough to let her go.
Her breath was upon my mouth. A swallowed groan made my ribs ache. I leaned towards the sensation – I could not help it. Could not stop myself. An entire life of discipline crushed beneath her sweetness.
And, curse the Deep Sky, it was sweetness.
Our lips touched, inadvertently at first, but she opened her mouth to me at once.
The luscious, heady taste of her had me groaning again, and this time, I could not hold it back.
She made a little sound in response, a breathy sort of whimper that went straight to my groin, my cock leaping painfully against her.
She removed her hands from my back, but I did not have time to worry about what that might mean, because she soon wrapped her arms around my neck instead.
Dazedly, my thoughts sluggish as if I’d been struck in the temple, I wondered if she wanted to be even closer to me.
It seemed absurd. Impossible. Reserved, guarded, elegant Nazreen, that agonisingly perfect creature with her always perfect distance.
But there was no distance now. And this was far too vivid to be a dream. Her back arched, her breasts pressing into me as I claimed her waist with my claws. By the skies, I could nearly span the entire circumference of this precious spot with just my fingers and thumbs.
“Thaleo,” she breathed against my mouth.
I gripped her hard. I liked when she called me that. No one had called me anything but “Gahn” or “Gahn Thaleo” in ages heaped upon ages.
“Yes,” I said, my voice a fevered fracture of its former self. In that moment, I was certain that I would grant her anything.
But she seemed not to want anything from me at all. At least, she did not ask me for anything with words. With a hot sigh, she simply met my mouth once more, letting the tip of her single, sweet tongue prod experimentally against the writhing segments of my own.
I had never done such a thing before. I did not know what she expected. I did not even know what this meant, especially to one such as her. A human from another world entirely.
All I knew was that this could not stop.
I had to keep her here. My body demanded it; my heart spasmed at the thought of letting her go now.
A pleasurable torment built in my cock, throbbing as if with a second pulse of its own.
There was no way she did not feel it bucking possessively against her.
She had to feel my need for her. Human women could mate with men from our world.
Their men must have had anatomy at least somewhat similar to mine.
So she must have known. Understood the ardent agony of my arousal as she arched against me, her tongue meeting mine. And she did not recoil.
Why? Why did she not run from me now? This female who’d never sought me out. This female I offended. Instead, she allowed me into her mouth. She shivered and sighed beneath my hands, as if she craved my touch.
Immediately, and with an urgency I found hard to back down from, I could imagine doing with Nazreen what I’d never done with anyone.
I could imagine being inside her, the hot, slow slide of my aching shaft into the wet clasp of her lovely body.
I could imagine doing it here, now. Backing her up against the wall of this very cave, in the glistening light of the spinners, and letting her feel me, feel all of me, in her silken core.
And it would be silken. By the skies, I knew it from the feel of her tongue, the slippery walls of her mouth. She would feel like this against my cock.
My body moved instinctively then. I dragged my hands down, clutching possessively at her hips, my fingers splaying along the curves of her backside. I bent my knees and pulled her upwards, then, onto the toes of her little flat feet, lining up my groin with hers and giving a slow, savage thrust.
She shuddered, her head thrashing back and away from mine. She moaned something in her native tongue, “Oh, God,” and buried her fingers in my hair.
At that very moment, a spinner found its way into the space between our faces. It landed on the tip of Nazreen’s nose.
She gave a violent start, and the spinner fled.
I wished to put my mouth on hers again, but she now stared at me with wide and startled eyes, pulling her arms away from my neck. With a quivering hand, she touched her own lips with her fingertips.
“Did I hurt you?” I croaked, panic racing down my spine. I had fangs. Perhaps, I had not been careful with them. Perhaps-
“No,” she said. She swallowed then, and my sight stars tracked the movement of her slender throat. “No.”
She said it twice, and yet it did nothing to assuage the unease building in the back of my neck. I still clutched her hips, clasping her pelvis to my own. My swollen cock throbbed between us, a damning sign of my desperation.
Because I was desperate. I recognized the irrational, flailing feeling of it as she extricated herself from me. Please. The word came to me, unbidden, once again.
I did not utter it. I simply let her go.
“Thank you for, er, bringing me here,” she said. She was out of breath, her chest heaving. I ground my fangs at the memory of her breasts against me. “We should probably be getting back.”
Back. Back to her cave, and me to mine. Back to the roles we recognized. The people we were before this delirious collision.
“Yes,” I said. “We should.”
I brought her back through the dark, touching her as little as possible.
And then, once again under the guidance of the lanterns, we did not touch – or speak – again.