Chapter 5
He had minutes at the most. Minutes until the venom renewed her desire and he would have to do this all over again. He wouldn’t make it. By the twins, he’d been so close to biting her again, giving her another dose!
Damir closed her knees and sat up even though the urge to hold her and ease her through the aftermath gripped him.
Her taste was as bewitching as her scent, the slight burn of her natural salinity perfectly balanced on the edge of pain.
His cock agreed and was badgering him to break his oath to leave her unbreached.
In this state, she’d let him. He had to get away from her, if only for a moment. “I’ll be back.”
Stumbling out of the chamber and down the long, narrow passageway, he extended his wings behind him to test them. Nearly healed. New scar tissue made them tight, but they’d stretch with a few flights. Her blood had worked its magic.
When he reached the mouth of the cave where the moons-light streamed into the entrance, he stopped and leaned against the wall, trying to catch his breath.
When Aster called his name, she’d taken it from him.
If she said it again, he was done for. His cock agreed, and he gripped it to stop its complaints at being in the cool night air and not submerged in her warmth.
It had nothing to complain about. He would do his duty and marry in two nights.
He had no business dallying with another female so close to his wedding, especially not another human.
Not even a fierce, perceptive, willing one like Aster.
Corek, she was still sprawled out there on the floor of the cave, tied up and waiting. Begging for him.
He couldn’t go back in. Not until his own need was slaked. Hers wouldn’t be for hours more, but his could be. That would make it easier to keep his sanity, at least. Maybe it was the influence of the moons’ conjunction, but he was dangerously close to falling into a rut.
Damir braced his arm against the mouth of the cave, spat on his free palm, and went at it viciously, stroking himself from root to tip, remembering how she’d spread her legs and fingered her folds for him like she was offering him a gift.
Perhaps she had gifted him with the sight.
He’d never observed a human female like that before, and her rosy folds, shimmering with her arousal in the shadows, were the most beautiful sight he’d ever laid eyes on.
He worked his shaft and imagined flipping her over onto her knees and taking her the Nightborn way, thrusting between her cheeks, his deep blue cock slipping in and out of her honey-gold flesh.
So beautiful and so wrong.
“Damir, I need you!” Aster’s plaintive cry rang down the rocky passage and reached his ears as he neared his climax, and hearing his name from her again sent him over the edge.
He grunted, falling against his arm as his hips jerked and his seed spouted into his hand, leaving him shamefully weak. He nearly wiped away the evidence until he realized that the solution to his problem was right there in his grasp.
He cupped it in his palm and carried it back to her. He found her on her belly, her legs splayed out and offering a glimpse of her sex. He forced himself to skim his eyes away and forget her taste. She startled when he touched the small of her back.
“I didn’t hear you coming!”
“That’s because you were scrabbling in the rocks, making them clatter.”
“I was trying to get up,” she confessed. “I thought you might’ve flown off and left me here.”
“I wouldn’t leave you like this.”
“Tied up and naked?” she asked. “How kind of you.”
“Needy,” he murmured, reaching to apply his seed between her legs. She gasped when his fingers brushed her inner thigh and clamped her legs around his hand. He had to clench his fist so he didn’t accidentally get any of his seed inside her. “Careful,” he cautioned her.
“Sorry,” she panted. “I can’t help it. I think it’s getting worse, not better. How much longer?”
“Not too long, if you relax and let me take care of you.” Her vise grip loosened momentarily, and he swiftly coated her folds.
She moaned at his touch, and he almost hated to stop.
He wanted to hear her cry out his name again, hear her beg to have him inside her.
But he could not bring himself to be so selfish.
His people needed peace when the treaty expired.
For two-hundred years, they had paid a blood price.
It was penance because the Nightborn king had stolen a human woman, the daughter of a powerful man.
A war had resulted, and the tenuous peace brokered at the end of it meant that since then, the nightmaids had been held hostage, forced to serve the human colony.
For generations, Nightborn males suffered without their mates.
Infants suffered without their mothers, brothers without their sisters.
There was only one more payment due, the one he would make when he chose a bride from among the eligible humans during the Revel and make her his queen.
A final gesture of goodwill to bind their two peoples together.
He couldn’t jeopardize that, so he sat back while Aster whimpered and whined for him and tried to block it out.
After a few minutes, she quieted. “I—I think maybe it’s getting better,” she finally said. “What did you give me?”
He flexed his wings, embarrassed to admit the truth. But what did it matter? “My…essence.”
She sucked in her breath and gave a soft oh. “You seeded me.”
“No,” he said flatly. “I only put it on the outside. You’ll likely feel some residual effects of the venom, but I hope it will help you feel more in control.” I hope it will help me stay more in control, too, he added fervently to himself.
“Thank you, I do already,” she said, her prim tone a delicious contrast to her posture, spread out on the floor with her hands bound behind her back. “Will you untie me now?”
“I don’t know. Are you going to grab my cock again?”
“I don’t know,” she echoed. “Are you going to strip me naked and rub it against me again?”
“You ungrateful—” he began, but broke off when she turned her head and he caught the wry twist of her mouth over the curve of her shoulder. She was only teasing. His anger cooled to something warm and undefined that he refused to examine more closely.
“Thank you. For saving me.” She cleared her throat. “For…helping.”
“Thank you for your lifeblood,” he returned solemnly, more thankful that her senses seemed to have returned so he could master his own.
With a practiced pull on the knot, he released her wrists, and Aster pushed herself up to sit, clutching her ribbons to her chest when he pressed their coil into her hands.
Gray dawn seeped down the passageway from the mouth of the cave and tugged at him. He would sleep soon.
“As soon as the sun rises enough to light your way, follow the edge of the Bite to the sand bridge and wait for ebb tide,” he directed her.
“Manna and Corek will expose a path to the colony gates. You may have to wade part of the way since the conjunction isn’t complete, but it won’t pass your knees. ”
“What will I tell them when I get there?” she whispered.
“Whatever you like. Retie your ribbons, and they won’t know the difference.”
“I can’t pretend none of this happened.” Her voice broke at the end, and her forlorn expression nearly drove him to comfort her.
“You must. For both our sakes,” he muttered. He wrapped his wings around his head and sank into daysleep.
When he woke again, he scented her before he even opened his eyes. She hadn’t left. When he dropped his wings he saw her immediately, swathed in her velvet and armored by a stiff bodice as she sat on the opposite side of the cavern, staring at him. How long had she been watching him sleep?
“Aster,” he hissed, shifting to crouch on his haunches. “You disobeyed me.”
“I’m not bound to obey you. There’s no law that says I must.” She’d rebraided her hair during the day, he noticed, and she didn’t smell of salt, so she’d found fresh water to wash and to drink. The thought relieved a worry he hadn’t even acknowledged.
Why on Salaan did he care?
In two strides, he found himself face-to-face with her. He leaned close, showing his fangs as he spoke so she would not mistake his words. “No human law binds our behavior, only natural law. The one that says that I am predator, and you are prey.”
With cool slowness, she tilted her head to the side, allowing him better access to her throat.
Was she tempting him or defying him? Either way it made him heat, desire and anger fanning him in tandem like the two wings on his back.
He stepped back before he did something irreversible, and she straightened, triumph playing on her features.
Did she think she was safe from him?
“Starcursed female,” he snarled. “Walk back into the sea if you are so eager to die. Don’t make me go to the trouble of dropping you in it.”
“You’ve already proven you won’t hurt me.”
“No, but now you’ve forced me to deliver you to those who you say will,” he said grimly.
He took her elbow and steered her down the passageway, conscious of the thick velvet that separated her tender skin from his touch.
His fingers tightened reflexively, seeking the shape of her beneath the fabric, but she wrenched her arm away.
“I won’t go!” she said hotly. She paused and, smoothing the front of her bodice, inhaled deeply. When she resumed speaking, her voice was unnaturally level. “You don’t have to deliver me anywhere. Carry on with your life, Damir. I’m no longer your responsibility.”
If only that were true.
If only he were not the king. If only he did not have to marry a stranger in two nights to protect his people. Then he could—
He wouldn’t even let himself think it.
He banded his arms around her and, half-flying for the last stretch of passageway, launched them both out of the cavern’s mouth and into the night air.
One, two, three beats of his wings, and they cleared the treeline.
Another two and they were high enough to see the colony’s pinprick lights where it rested like a stain in the dark waters of the Bite.
Aster twisted in his grip, shouting into the wind.
It took everything in him to keep from dropping her.
And he nearly did when she jammed a knee up into his balls.
The pain made his left wing cramp and sent them careening toward the shoreline. He righted before they clipped the spiky top of an elannot grove that bordered the crescent beach, just in time to land gracelessly in the sand.
“Cease or you’ll endanger us both!” he raged.
She marched away from him in the direction of the cave, moons-light shining on the twine of her plait as it swung in the center of her back.
“If you think I will not force you to return, you are being wishful. And if you think you can survive a night alone in the forests, even more so.”
She whirled back on him. “I am being wishful? You are, if you think I will do your bidding simply because you ask it of me. If I were such a woman, I would have stayed in the colony and married my hateful cousin. I am thankful to you for saving my life, sir, but I do not owe you my safety, and I do not need your permission. The risk is mine to bear, like Herold’s thumbprints were. ”
Once again, she confused her own interests with his. And this foolhardy female could listen—he knew she could. If only she would stop long enough to hear him speak! She was already almost to the scrubby strip of brush that lined the edge of the forest.
He was on her in an instant, catching her wrists in one hand before felling them both into the soft sand, careful not to crush her.
Her skirts fanned out beneath him as they landed, their lips nearly touching as a swift wingbeat slowed their fall.
Still, the landing knocked the air out of both of them.
When he’d recovered his breath, he said, “You risk more than a few bruises at a cruel man’s hands.
You risk both our people. You risk voiding our careful peace.
It is not some selfish desire to return you.
It is a necessity for my kin. Nothing must jeopardize the Revel this year or even put a question on it. ”
“Too late for that,” she said defiantly.