33
IF IT WAS to be the last time, Gathren wanted to come when he was inside her, and she set this as her goal.
She told him that she thought she needed more time, and less of his movement, and she asked if she could simply tuck him into her while she straddled him and he put his mouth to her breasts—their typical foreplay and the way that she usually could come—and he had no objections. Obviously.
She was sort of stunned when it happened right away.
Her orgasm was one of those quick builds and quick releases, the kind that doesn’t feel as good as one that’s been building for a time.
But it had happened, and she had him in her, hard and eager, and his mouth was on her sensitive nipples, and she kissed his forehead and rode him like that for some time until he gasped that she needed to move off or he would spill in her, and she did not want that, so she moved.
They lay there, next to each other, sweat cooling on their skin.
“Look, I’m not saying…” He cleared his throat. “But I think we’ll simply have to meet again at some point, because we can do better.”
She snickered up at the ceiling. “Oh, truly?”
He looked at her. “Do you disagree? Was it really lovely for you?”
“We can do better,” she agreed.
“But I have to get back,” he said. “Kinsahad is going to be wondering what became of me, and he’s going to think I tried to run off and then changed my mind.”
“And you do have to go back,” she said. “For your mother.”
“I…” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“You do,” she said. “I have a mother as well, you know. I have to go back to her at some point, make sure that dragon hasn’t eaten her.”
“I tell you, they don’t eat humans.”
“Hasn’t burned her to death.”
“Yes, fair enough.”
Another long pause.
“A ship,” she said eventually, breaking the silence.
“Hmm?”
“What if we didn’t get off of it?” she said.
He sat up and looked down at her. “Didn’t get off the ship?”
“What if we, erm, lived on a ship?” She peered up at him. “My lord, you are the heir to Cirlahir—”
“Well, I’m told Ciralhir is going to be reassigned, actually.”
“Reassigned?” She was sort of horrified. “They can do that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, thinking about it.
“It will depend on whether my father and my brother recognize Gilrihl’s government, I suppose.
They could simply refuse to leave. I don’t think there’s much in the way of an army to force them.
Whatever there is would be dealing with the orcs, I suppose.
Anyway, there was some talk of it being reassigned to me.
But if we’re going to live on a ship, I will not be taking over as the Envivtain of Cirlahir, I don’t suppose. ”
She shook her head. “No, never mind it. This is mad.”
“It’s only talk,” he said. “Finish your thought. Why did you bring up my being the heir? Anyway, I suppose my brother is, really.”
“Only because you could get your hands on enough coin to buy a ship, could you not?”
His mouth curved into a smile. “Buy a ship? What would we be, then, warrioress? Pirates?”
She smiled back. “I was thinking respectable merchants. We could go all over, really. We could sail the seas.”
His eyebrows shot up. “We could go east, see the eastern dragons.”
“We could indeed, my lord.”
He bent down and kissed her. “You’d have to stop calling me that. I would not be a lord anymore.”
“And I wouldn’t be a warrioress,” she said, curving a hand around the back of his neck.
“I do like it,” he said. “I like the idea.”
“We could come back, you know,” she said. “We could come back, briefly, look in on our mothers and then—”
“Leave again,” he said. “And it would be you and me, and we could be together, and we would be on the ocean, and no one could stop it.”
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose it might be a dangerous life.”
“Well, I’d have you around to save my life, would I not?”
“Just so, my lord. My… Iahir.”
He kissed her again. “A ship is quite a lot of coin, Gathren.”
“Too much?”
“I guess I’d best go back, then, and make up with Kinsahad, speak to my father, and find some way to finagle it all.
Since I have been disgraced with killing the High King, maybe it will not be difficult to convince my father that a little time on a ship, away from the country, would be warranted, however. ”
“This is something you think you could do?”
“Oh, yes, I’m very good at getting money,” he said. He got up off the bed. “I can’t entirely say how long it will take, however. It might be weeks. Can you stay here, in this house, so I know where to find you?”
“I do not see why not,” she said. “No one has bothered me thus far, and I have been here for nearly a week.”
He ran a hand through his hair, gazing down on her with a besotted expression on his face. “You’re very brilliant, and very beautiful, and you have perfect breasts, and I don’t know how I got so lucky.”
“You’re very beautiful, too,” she said.
“I’m your golden plaything,” he said, waggling his eyebrows at her. “And I need to provide the gold, don’t I?”
“You have your uses,” she said.
He kissed her again, hard.
Then he was gone, and she rolled over in the bed and hugged a pillow and dared—for the first time in a very long time—to hope for the future.