Chapter Eighteen
Do you remember every kiss? Every touch? Every scream?
If you do, then you have not been bedded by the Lover.
Not truly.
Excerpt from Beloved,
a poetry collection dedicated to the Lover
Einar thought he had experienced the full range of emotions it was possible to feel for another person.
Lust had been simple and easily come by over the years.
Love might be more precious, but he had known it in many incarnations—a son’s love for the woman who had raised him, a man’s love for the people who earned his loyalty, even a captain’s love for the crew who trusted him with their lives.
He’d known respect, too—for the Siren, the first time he had knelt before her and felt her power. For the rest of the High Court.
Aleksi and Naia had taught him new shades of all three—love twined with yearning, respect married to lust, all three so tangled together they became something more than their parts. They’d taught him how it felt to be in love.
But no one in his life had ever inspired true awe.
Not even Zanya and Sachi, whose power was so vast and unfathomable only a fool would not bend before it, because even in their strength, they were still so untested.
New to the world, in the way Naia had been when she first walked out of waves with the memories of a thousand sailors and none of her own.
Naia was not untested anymore. When she glanced back at him, her eyes alight with power so ancient it made him feel like a trembling youth, there was no other word for the feeling that flooded him, riding hard alongside love and lust and respect, twisting them up tight in its grip.
Awe. She inspired naked, undiluted awe in him, a feeling so strong he forgot for a moment that lust had made fire of his blood, that all he wanted was to make her sob with pleasure until her body was slick enough to take him.
She was a primordial being, ancient long before the High Court first walked the land, and everything in him screamed at him to yield. If he had been on his feet, he would have fallen to his knees.
Instead he eased closer to her, reveling in the soft press of her back against his chest, shuddering as her ass brushed teasingly against his straining cock.
He sank his face into the unbound masses of her hair and breathed in her scent—salt and sand and the heady scent of flowers stirred by a tropical breeze. “Tell me what to do.”
“The Lover is at our mercy right now.” Even her soft voice seemed to resonate, vibrating through the warm air around the three of them. “Let’s not squander this moment.”
She took Einar’s hand and reached out, guiding his fingers to brush only lightly over the crown of Aleksi’s cock before pulling them away, despite the sudden, eager arch of the man’s hips.
Then she leaned forward, smoothing Aleksi’s hair and running her hands out along his pinned arms. The position left one of her nipples hovering a few inches from his face, though she jerked back when Aleksi tried to capture the taut peak between his lips.
“The insolence,” she murmured. “And this, after he’s teased you so, Einar.”
There was a dark satisfaction in having their positions reversed.
Not that Einar would ever object to watching Naia squirm, but Aleksi did seem to take an almost dangerous glee in ordering Einar to watch.
Smiling slowly, Einar spread his fingers wide on Aleksi’s hip, knowing that the rough texture of his skin in this form would rasp tauntingly. “He does like to make me wait.”
The Lover seemed unbothered by his relative vulnerability. He simply tilted his head with a slow, devastating smile. “Are you planning to torment me?”
His voice was a growl, and a purr. It was everything seductive that had ever existed, somehow rolled into this moment.
It was a lure.
Naia almost fell into it. She leaned in again, and her mouth was a scant inch from Aleksi’s when she caught herself—and chuckled softly. “The answer was no. Now? It’s a definite yes.”
She finally touched her lips to Aleksi’s skin, but not to his mouth. She started at his jaw, where stubble darkened the clean lines. First a tiny kiss, then the glancing brush of tongue. She moved on to his ear, then down to the side of his neck, and beyond.
They were beautiful to watch, but Einar had no patience left for being a mere spectator.
He dragged his fingers slowly up Aleksi’s chest until his fingertips found Naia’s seeking mouth.
A teasing swipe of her tongue left just enough wetness behind to turn his rasping caress of Aleksi’s nipple into a taunting glide.
“I wonder if he likes teeth as much as you do. Should we find out?”
Naia turned her head and closed her teeth on the inside of Einar’s forearm—hard.
Instead of digging in, they slid over his hardened flesh with a rasp.
His skin might be near impenetrable, but the sting of her teeth and the heightened sensitivity twined into sensory madness.
His blood turned to lightning as he thrust his fingers into her hair, tangling the silky strands around his fingers.
The wicked mischief in her gaze was almost as irresistible as the taste of her as he claimed her lips in a desperate, wild kiss—spiced wine and tealberry and something so familiar his bones ached with it.
With the heat of Aleksi’s bare chest so close, it was impossible not to turn his head enough to taste him, too—and if he didn’t know better, he would swear that the Lover’s skin was an aphrodisiac all on its own.
Especially when Naia joined him, trading teasing kisses back and forth as they worked their way back up Aleksi’s body.
Then it was his lips beneath theirs, open and coaxing, stealing control of their tangled three-way kiss with deft skill that dragged a rumbling growl from the monster deep within.
Einar nipped at Aleksi’s lower lip, but though the Lover’s chest heaved beneath their joined hands, only the slightest, smallest gasp escaped him.
That wouldn’t do. Einar twined his fingers together with Naia’s as they took turns kissing Aleksi, and it was as if they had done this so many times they needed no words.
Their joined hands smoothed down—over Aleksi’s strong chest, across his trembling abdomen.
They found his cock together, hard and hot and still slick from Naia’s shuddering orgasm, and wrapped their fingers around it as one.
That earned them a groan, low and harsh and fracturing as they stroked their fingers up his length. Aleksi lifted his hips, chasing their grip, and Naia broke the kiss with a harsh moan. “Do you remember the word, my lord?”
“I remember.” Aleksi ground out the words between clenched teeth.
“Good,” she praised, then began to ease toward the foot of the giant bed. Einar had no choice but to go with her, backing up until they would be out of easy reach even if Aleksi’s hands weren’t still bound by ropes of invisible power.
There was nothing obstructing his view, however—Naia, naked on her hands and knees, her hair wild around her body as she moved with the grace of a hunting cat. “Now, Aleksi,” she whispered as she grasped Einar’s hand and pulled it around her body. “It’s your turn to watch.”
Aleksi’s eyes blazed, their deep brown shot through with the first hints of violet—the color of the Lover.
The color of his power, which pulsed in the room.
He watched them with a predator’s patience, and something feral rose within Einar in answer.
He ghosted his rough fingertips up Naia’s body to find her nipple, and shuddered when her pleasure echoed back at him.
That shared pleasure spiked higher when he tightened his fingers and tugged gently.
Naia straightened in his grasp, arching lazily into his touch, and that mirrored sensation wound tighter as the purple glow of Aleksi’s eyes increased. His power was its own caress, wrapping around them in seductive warning.
A warning that Naia ignored. “Einar?”
“Yes, goddess?”
“What were you going to do to me?” Her voice was the soft wash of water over sun-warmed sand. “On the balcony, during the ball?”
The memory came so easily. Her gasping breaths. His hands on her hips. The warmth of her body, beckoning. He nuzzled his face against the side of her neck. “I was going to fuck you until your knees gave out.”
Another laugh rose and fell, cresting like a gentle wave. “That’s right. What was it you said before?” She slipped her hand into his hair and pulled. “That you want to fuck me so deep that I’m all you can feel?”
Aleksi shuddered, and Einar felt it, too—not just their shared physical sensations, but the giddy joy and lazy confidence emanating from the woman in his arms as she tightened her grip on his hair. There was no hesitation as she whispered her command. “I want it. Now.”
Oh, Einar did, too. He ran his hand down the front of her body until he found slick warmth, her body so eager that his groan sounded barely human.
He stroked her with the rough tip of one finger and buried his face in her hair as he felt all of it—her pleasure at his touch twined with his pleasure at touching her, braided together with Aleksi’s hunger to see more.
Einar could show him more. He curled his free arm across her chest, his massive hand cupping her breast as he drove her legs wider with one knee.
There was nothing to block Aleksi’s view as Einar worked two broad fingers into the tightness of her body.
“I was wearing my mortal form that night on the balcony. Tonight there is so much more of me to take.”
Amusement curled through the room, like ink in water. “Are you worried, or merely pointing this out for Aleksi’s benefit?”
Perhaps he should be worried, but she was liquid beneath his fingers, her body primed. And Aleksi had gone still—the stillness of a predator on his chosen stalking ground, waiting for his moment.