16 #3
She couldn’t go to him. The door to the stables was blocked at night, and she was busy during the day with Flaihir.
She did not know why she ultimately thought of him as the man she wanted to make desperate for her. Maybe because he used to be desperate for her, and now he was not.
But she could not think of any way to manipulate him. She realized she didn’t know him, didn’t know the sorts of things that gave him pleasure or the things he looked forward to. She knew only his struggles, his hurts, his pains.
But as she lay on the bed, she thought through everything that had happened between them.
If Flaihir was correct, then he would have wanted to be necessary to her, and what was it he’d said when he found out that her family could not send her a train ticket? Perhaps I can be useful to you in some way.
But then he had tried to be useful to her and it had turned out that he had not been that useful.
He had not been able to plan out the trip or guarantee they would have somewhere to go.
He had not protected them from having their things stolen.
He had not been able to stop her from breaking her ankle.
Was that what had beaten him? Not them, but his own feelings for himself?
Flaihir said that a man had to feel as if he earned her, and she realized that Dathor had decided he could not earn her, and perhaps he couldn’t. What would he be able to do in order to…?
And then, she had her answer.
She knew exactly what to do to get him to be desperate for her.
DATHOR WAS SITTING on the ground, gritting his teeth as he tried to remove the broken wheel from the carriage, when she walked by and dropped a little piece of paper in his lap.
He was annoyed with her for doing that, because that was dangerous and they could be discovered and this was all still a game for her.
She didn’t know the risks for him.
Even as he thought that, he knew it wasn’t exactly true. She was Celedin’s betrothed, after all, and if she were found with him, it could be very dire for her as well. Maybe he wasn’t being fair to her.
He looked at the letter, and it said that he should find a way to climb out of his window and meet her that night at midnight in the barn loft, where they used to meet as children.
Climb out of his window? As if it were so easy.
On the other hand, he was thinking about seven different ways he could do it.
There was a rope that he could secure and he could probably use that to shimmy down, though climbing back up would be difficult, but he could also probably leave a ladder up against the stable if he needed to do so, just for one night.
He could not do that regularly, but if he had to do it, he could.
He could also just stretch out fixing the wagon wheel here and claim to be working on it late and he’d never have to climb out the window.
He settled on the last, but he felt better knowing that he had options, ways he could get free if he wanted.
He realized he could have thought of these things all along, but he hadn’t.
He’d been subdued and tired and beaten lately.
Something about her being so assured he could meet her if he wished had woken him up in a certain way. He liked it.
He fixed the wheel as soon as everyone was asleep, and then he stayed out in the barn until midnight, when she appeared in a cloak.
He stood up from where he had been waiting, just a shadow in the darkness, but she saw him and came for him.
She pressed into him, and they hadn’t done that sort of thing in a long time, but he wanted to, so he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her.
She sighed into his mouth. “I missed you,” she whispered.
He touched her face. “I missed you, too, but I don’t know if I realized how much until this moment.”
“I’m sorry to do this,” she said. “But I need your help with something. It has to be you. It can’t be anyone else.”
“Me?” This warmed him, he had to say. “There’s nothing I can do for you.”
“Oh, it has to be you,” she said.
“Look, I know you wanted us to try to run again—”
“That was foolish,” she said. “You were right. We have been on our own before. That’s not what we should do. I do have a plan, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves, I suppose. I need you for something else.”
“What?” he said.
“If I marry Celedin,” she said, “I can’t imagine he’s going to be…” She ducked down her face. “A very giving lover, you know? So, whatever it is with him, that is all I will know, and I need—”
“You’re mad,” he said, cutting her off, but his voice had gotten very deep. “Have you truly told me to meet you in the barn to make this request of me?”
“It has to be you,” she said, pressing in against him, her small elvish body warm and lithe as it seemed to brand itself into him.
“I need to know what it could be like between a man and a woman, and I know I will not get the knowledge from Celedin, so I must get it from somewhere, and who else could I turn to?”
He supposed, from a certain perspective, there was a kind of logic to what she was saying, but it was too dangerous for a number of reasons. He kissed her again, anyway.
Her eager sweet mouth opened to him, her tongue dancing with his.
He groaned. “You know,” he gasped against her lips, “that I have told you we would never do that.”
“But you showed me your cock anyway,” she whispered back.
“Yes, but that was such a long time ago, and I didn’t do anything with you—”
“I want it to be you,” she said. “I don’t want it to be anyone else.”
“But it can’t be me,” he said. “Your maidenhead. If you don’t come intact to your wedding night—”
“But I don’t understand how that works!” she protested.
“Well, I certainly don’t understand,” he said.
“But who else am I going to go to?” she said, her voice soft and insistent.
“Obviously, no one,” he said firmly. Because the thought of her in someone else’s arms was torture. Impossible to bear.
“So, I’m just to wait for Celedin, then? Subject myself to that and never know anything else?”
He groaned again. He kissed her. His hands roamed up and down her spine.
She slid her hands over his chest. “I feel like I have the right to know what it could be like. I feel like he will not give me anything but pain. I feel like he will only see to his own desires and never pay any attention to mine.”
His hand went to the curve of her backside, and he urged her pelvis against his. He had been half hard at the sight of her, truly, but this conversation had urged his arousal on. The more aroused he became, the less he could really think.
She gasped as she felt the press of him against her. Her hand went lower, all the way to his crotch, to cup him.
He groaned again. “We could… pleasure each other, maybe. But not that. Just touching.”
She started at the laces to his breeches, and he didn’t stop her.
His hand migrated north on her body. He reached down into her bodice and scooped one of her breasts right out.
She let out a surprised giggle, her fingers stilling for a moment and then going right back to work on his breeches.
He gazed at her creamy breast, its rounded perfection, the tiny rose-colored nipple in the center. “You’re so beautiful, Aerhril,” he breathed, and he bent his head down to kiss her there, to kiss that puckered pink nub of her.
She had her hand inside his breeches. She mewled when his lips made contact with her there, so he did it again. Her hand was on him, around him, squeezing him, exploring him. He groaned again.
His kisses against her nipple grew wetter until he had sucked the tip of her into his mouth, and she was panting prettily into his neck as she continued to toy with his cock.
He could have shown her to stroke him, up and down, but that would have only meant he finished quickly—too quickly—and he wanted more time to explore her, so he just let her continue what she was doing, which felt nice, anyway.
He scooped out her other breast. He went back and forth between her taut nipples, using his mouth, using his fingers.
He liked cupping the whole round breast and giving it gentle squeezes.
He liked rubbing the nipples back and forth.
He liked gently tweaking them. He liked his mouth on them.
She seemed to like all of these things too, if the noises that came out of her were any indication.
“I knew it had to be you,” she breathed. “Can you… I want to lift my skirts and show you everything?”
“Yes,” he said. He kissed her. “Please.”
So she did, and he extricated his cock from her grasp and knelt down to be eye level with her as she pulled her skirts out of the way to reveal her long elfin legs and the place her thighs met, which was covered in dark blond curls.
When he put his fingers to her, she was leaking from the slit of her.
It parted easily to let his fingers slide against her.
She gasped and he explored, not knowing what he was doing at all. There were all sorts of little folds and crannies to it, all of them very slick, and then—
His finger slipped into her.
She let out a little noise.
He pushed in further, looking up at her.
She held his gaze, looking down at him.
Was this…? It had to be. He was inside her. He imagined pressing his cock into this space. It was small and slippery and it gripped his finger and he could hardly imagine how good this would feel.
He removed his finger. “Not there,” he whispered.
“Here,” she agreed. “Here.” She moved his fingers to the front of her, showing him a little slippery nub that she wanted him to toy with. It seemed incredibly sensitive. She kept stopping him, breathing, “Not so hard. Just glide over it. Let me show you.”
It took him a long time to do it the way she liked, but eventually, she was sighing against him, gently canting her hips against his fingers, and then she made a little tiny noise and he felt her burst against him. It was so similar to the way his own finish felt that he knew it was the same.