Chapter 13 Divine Intimacy
Divine Intimacy
Idan studied the gold light of the dying embers playing across Sheba’s skin as they lay in bed, after waking from their post coital nap.
He trailed his lips over her, lost in the landscape of her soft curves.
‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she whispered, blushing.
‘Like what?’
‘Like you’re about to rewrite the laws of physics just to get me closer.’
Idan leaned in, his breath warm against her temple. ‘Physics has nothing to do with it, Sheba. You’re the strongest gravitational pull in my universe.’
She rolled her eyes, though she couldn’t hide her smile. ‘Starbane’s void, you’re cheesy.’
‘Actually,’ he muttered, his hands sliding to her waist, ‘I’m divine.’
He moved his touch to her face, his thumb tracing the line of her jaw.
‘Sun sakin subuta suhin suhina. You’ve rewritten the constellations of my spirit,’ he murmured. ‘You’ve seized my sacred spark and bound it to your mortal heart.’
Sheba glanced up at him, her dark eyes dancing as they reflected the amber pulse of his sigils. ‘Who are you? How do you speak with such sacred poetic mastery?’
‘I can’t help it, salkia. You’re the only soul I’d burn the heavens to keep as mine.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been consumed by the need to lose myself in you until the world falls away.
I want to take you beyond the stars, to that place of pure, blinding bliss within the Gardens of Aethelgard. ’
‘Is that right?’ she murmured, still a little skeptical. ‘I’ll have you know I’m wary of sweet-talking men.’
‘Then thank fokk I’m no mere mortal,’ he grinned.
‘On a somber note, you’re the first woman I’ve ever spoken to this way.
My people only quote poetry when they are in the presence of their destined twin essence.
In this case, you, my queen, with whom my heart longs to plant seeds and have babies with. ’
When her eyes dilated in shock, he chuckled, burying his face in her nape.
‘Am I rushing you?’
She shrugged.
He rumbled into her neck. ‘Please, salkia, know this, I won’t rush you, there is no race. Let’s take our time and become what each other needs, through thick and thin.’
She twisted in his arms and stared into his eyes. ‘Who are you? Where are you even from? How are you in my life?’
‘What do you mean?’ he rasped.
She cast her eyes from him, gazing beyond the walls. ‘You need to know that I never thought I’d ever find eternal love, and even right now I doubt it’ll happen.’
She glanced away for a second. ‘The last time I tried for a relationship, my heart broke; it hurt so bad that I decided to lock it away and only care for me, myself, and I.’
Sheba eyed Idan, her brow furrowed.
‘Now here you are,’ she whispered. ‘Yet my soul struggles to understand how you’re in my life?’
Idan huffed. ‘It’s because we are meant to be. At least here and now. I also sense it will be a long-term connection because you’re the most entrancing woman I have ever met in all my immortal days.’
Sheba stiffened against his chest. ‘Immortal?’
Idan drew in a breath, and his lips quirked as he knifed up and fixed her with a somber gaze. ‘Ah, I gave myself away. I am the humble son of an otherworldly power, one with an eternal existence.’
‘Like Mo,’ she stated, her voice quiet.
‘Mo?’ Idan’s brow furrowed.
‘Molan. My best friend’s partner. He’s a Sacran, who got cast to Iccythria, and only found out who he was not so long ago.’
Interest ignited in Idan’s eyes, a gleam of curiosity. ‘Did he now?’
‘Are you the same? Sacran?’ Sheba asked, searching his face.
He shrugged. ‘Beautiful, I am something. That much I know.’
‘You’re deflecting,’ she accused. ‘You are Sacran.
‘Am I?’ Idan rasped, choosing to remain enigmatic. ‘You’ve rumbled me.’
The thing is, what kind are you? A minor god, a demi-god, a fallen soldier running from celestial conscription?’
‘A little bit of this and that.’
‘So I’m sleeping with a deity?’
‘Isn’t it divine?’ he grinned wickedly.
As he shot her a rakish smile, his soul surged with emotion.
He was falling for her, plummeting into an abyss of devotion.
However, the words of his traitorous father echoed in the corners of his mind.
The older man had foreseen Sheba. He’d mentioned a shared destiny, a path that led through the very tether binding their souls.
The name Molan too teased the edges of his consciousness as he tried to remember where he had heard it, raking his memories.
He soon recalled that Molan was indeed a Sacran who, as a child, fell from Sivania with his shamed mother.
Was it a mere coincidence that this appellation surfaced now?
Even more suspicion coiled in his gut.
Was Sheba’s presence in his life a genuine chance at love, or was she yet another manipulation by the fallen god to entice him into a scheme of celestial proportions?
A sudden rumble from Sheba’s stomach interrupted his thoughts.
‘Hungry, ay?’ Idan teased as he glanced down at her.
‘I am always hungry,’ Sheba declared with a defiant tilt of her chin. ‘It must be the mountain air.’
‘Nada, ‘tis my loving that got you ravenous as fokk,’ he rasped.
He leaned in and pressed a deep, possessive kiss to her lips, leaving her panting and flushed.
Tucking his dark thoughts away for a later hour, Idan rose from the bed of pelts, his naked, sinewed form glowing in the firelight, as he proceeded to prepare a meal to feed his woman.
The storm enveloped the mountain for days, but inside the timber walls of Idan’s hut, time dissolved into a blur of sensual passion and explosion.
The snow-locked seclusion intensified the raw wantonness of their connection.
They made love with unceasing fever, their desire for each other never waning.
Sheba surrendered to the incandescence of Idan’s ability to drive her wild, lost in wonder as the golden tether to his soul tightened with every moan, gasp, and kiss they shared.
In between their sensual fokking, they took long baths in Idan’s mini pool tub hewn out of the rock of the mountain.
He’d start by filling it with heated water from the geothermal depths of the mountain below.
Sheba stepped into the steam, and he followed, his sizable hands gentle as they worked a lather of the fragrant flower soap into the tangled silk of her hair.
She paid it back, shampooing his tresses, loving the thick fall of his locks.
Growling in pleasure, he lay across her chest, sneaking in kisses they shared in between playing with suds.
The intimacy of their shared baths was more profound than the passion of the bed, feeling less like a physical act and more like a total emotional surrender.
The shared, private sensory experience invited a raw level of relaxing, distraction-free conversation and skin-to-skin trust that was unmatched.
‘Why do you even have these sigils?’ she asked, one evening, washing his hair with one hand while tracing the obsidian and gold lines of the sigils on his arms.
‘Because they hold the power of the sun. We could get you some matching ones.’
‘That’s a terrible idea. I’d be a human flashlight.’
‘But you’d be my light source.’
Minutes afterward, they gasped into each other as he turned her around and she sank onto his onyx-tipped cock as he pistoned into her.
Sheba’s bliss ratcheted as Idan came so hard inside her, thrusting with such force that waves of water splashed on the floor.
Still, it didn’t escape her notice that yet again he’d deflected her questions about his exact heritage and background.
Later, dried and dressed, they sat in front of the hearth, as he repaired the stitching on a set of chaps.
Sheba’s gaze traced the firelight dance across his focused features, a sense of domestic bliss settling in her chest.
What else keeps you busy during winter?
I like soapstone carving, he smiled, his eyes drifting to a series of milky rocks on his workspace, some half-carved, others still rough and raw.
I find the stones in the mountains and make figurines, but not that often, as I have no one to make the trinkets for.
‘Now you do.’
He arched a brow.
‘Shall I make you something?’ he rasped out loud.
She thought for a moment. ‘Make me a chess set,’ she requested.
His forehead wrinkled. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a board game of strategy to pass the hours until the skies clear. I’ll show you how to make one. I can put together a rough drawing.’
He handed her a piece of leather and a silver pencil.
She drew out a basic design as Idan reached for a block of raw stone and his awls.
His blade moved in a blur of motion, guided by a golden luminescence that bled from his fingertips.
The soapstone, softer than most, shifted, yielding to his will as if it were soft wax.
Within an hour, thirty-two figures stood on the hearthstone.
Sheba ran her fingers over the smooth, sculpted surfaces, her eyes expansive with wonder at his artistry, then laughed as she recognized their faces in the king and queen.
Cleared a space on his dinner table, she began to arrange the pieces, the familiar geometry of the game pulling memories from the depths of her mind.
‘My father taught me this on Dunia,’ she explained. ‘He was the Prime of the planet and liked to use it to relax. He said the board was the only place where a person could control their destiny.’
She moved a pawn, her fingers lingering on the smooth, exquisite figures.
Idan leaned in, his eyes glistening with the softness he denied himself for centuries.
‘Show me, salkia, how to play this chess game of yours.’
She instructed him on the maneuvers, the gambits, the sacrifices, and the patience of the endgame.
The practice seemed to shake loose her old memories. So, while explaining how the rules worked, she spoke of her childhood in the forest city of New Malindi, the markets, and her family.
She shared about Selene and how close they were.
Idan listened with a stillness that suggested he was memorizing each word.
‘You love your sister dearly, just as I loved my mother.’
‘Do you miss her?’ Sheba asked Idan.