Elijah

by Jacquelyn Frank

  And that was the moment he finally understood what it meant to be an Imprinted male on Samhain.

  CHAPTER 12

  Elijah’s attention was riveted as the women around the Queen helped her into bed. Siena was gently laid back in the center of the enormous expanse of plush pillows and white and gold velvet bedding. She smiled at him as he clearly became increasingly tense. She was nearer to his mind now, so knew quite well what he was thinking and feeling in the moment. And all of it was quite primal. More so, she realized, as the ladies-in-wait sprinkled her body with the petals of late-season sunflowers.

  Syreena and Anya had a sense of the tension in the room and, as soon as they were done anointing the Queen, guided the giggling young women from the room. Elijah completely ignored their curiosity and speculation. Clearly, they did not realize that the fast whispers they spoke in were easily heard by him and would continue to be so, unless they waited until they were much farther away. He also noted that someone, the sister Syreena with the strange hair and eyes, had taken the marriage dagger from his hand.

  And that moment was all the time he spent giving thought to it.

  The next moment, the click of the closing doors being latched galvanized him into action.

  Siena watched with quick breath and anticipation as he moved to the foot of the bed. He reached out swiftly, grabbing her by both ankles and sliding her completely off the mattress with one very firm pull. She laughed as he scooped her up against his body with one arm around her waist, saffron-colored petals crushing between them.

  “You are mine,” he said softly through clenched teeth.

  He leaned in with an aggressive male sound rumbling from his throat. Siena closed her eyes as he searched for her scent at the curve of her neck, drawing it deeply into his lungs until he sighed with satisfaction.

  “I have been parted from you too long,” he announced, moving her back just enough so he could devour her body with his eyes even as his bold hand slid over her belly and ribs and cradled her breast with firm intensity. “I am half mad from wanting you, kitten, and I am afraid I will not be very gentle.”

  She did not speak aloud but instead wound her fingers deep into his hair and drew his head, and his mouth, closer to hers. Her lips parted, rubbing soft and warm over his, teasing him with her spiced taste.

  “You are mine,” she said, feeling the chilled flash of stimulation her voice and words sent rushing over his skin. “And I never”—she licked his lips teasingly, making him groan—“never once”—her body curled erotically up to his, every inch of her skin a caress that reached deeply into him—“asked you to be gentle,” she finished at last.

  Elijah captured that wicked, teasing mouth with a fervor that bruised her hungry lips. She had fooled herself into believing all of this had come about by her choices and machinations, a product of her reluctant will, but in that second she understood there had never been a choice. She had always wanted him with this intensity, even when he had already been buried deep in her body. Her flesh flushed with the first true life she had felt since they had parted last, and even that encounter in the innards of the castle had been too brief, too bittersweet.

  His hands on her skin were a balm for her paled soul. He had such large, calloused palms, the roughness of them suiting the roughness of his sweeping touch. His fingers pressed into her soft flesh, and she welcomed the idea of him leaving his prints behind this time.

  Siena felt the sudden release of her collar of office, the jeweled weight of it dropping carelessly to the floor as he broke from her lips in order to devour the sweet, pulsing skin of her bared neck. She went so limp so suddenly that she was supported solely by his powerful hands and the balanced lean of his body as he bore her weight with careless ease. She was a woman of remarkable stature, and yet he managed to make her feel fairy light, a delicately feminine insignificance she hadn’t thought could be born in the heart of an Amazonian huntress such as herself. But it seemed practical it would take a mighty warrior like Elijah to make it so.

  “Elijah…” she whispered in his ear, needing to speak his name, needing to feel the emotions that came with the knowledge that she was permitted to do so without worry, without guilt. Their journey was far from over, and would be far from easy, but she had made the choice and would now revel in it as much as she might come to suffer for it. She was suddenly allowed to be that someone she had never allowed herself access to, that someone she had glimpsed those other times in his arms.

  Elijah’s mouth was like magic, casting spells wherever it went, his hunger for her taste coming through in his actions as well as his thoughts. To be in the mind of a man in such a moment was like nothing she could have ever conceived of. To be in the mind of this man, in this moment, was incomprehensible pleasure. His need for her was unfailingly overwhelming, as consistent as it was voracious. She felt the way he drank in her heat through his fingertips and mouth, like passionate straws that thirsted for her unlike anything else in the world.

  Then the warrior began to fade beneath her grasping hands, the wind that was his power buoying her as he rushed past and through her, materializing at her back, one hand around her waist, the other on her throat and chin, guiding her head back onto his shoulder.

  Siena laughed, a cross between joy and relieved sobbing. The warmth of his suddenly bare flesh was like heaven itself, and she realized her limp fingers were still clinging to the shirt he had abandoned with his maneuver. She let it fall to the ground on top of the other discarded clothing and reached past her hips, behind herself, until she was touching the powerful thighs bracing both of their weight so easily.

  Elijah wrapped her up in the embrace of his hungry hands, her supple, soft skin a searing, tactile perfection to him. He would never get enough of touching her. He went from thigh to breast and back again until she was making those soft sounds of lost wit that so enthralled him.

  As promised, he was not gentle. He did not want to mark her but could not seem to help himself. And also as promised, she only seemed to respond all the more for it. He found himself resisting the urge he had to lay his teeth on her, marking her for his own. It was part of the animalistic mating ritual the night was visiting on him. Then he remembered she was mostly animal herself and he finally released his restraint, his mouth closing over the soft curve of the back of her neck possessively. Siena writhed sensually in his hands, a bold, rumbling purr vibrating out of her until he was completely inundated with the arousing sensation of it.

  He leaned forward slightly in his enthusiasm, and Siena’s foot finally touched the floor. She reacted instantly, using the purchase to shove her weight back against him. Caught off guard, he was forced to step back to recover. She used the opportunity to spin around in his hold, leaping back into his embrace in a way that propelled him back a few steps more.

  He recovered quickly, however, in spite of what her subsequent attack on his mouth did to his already shattered equilibrium. Still, as one arm wrapped around her wild body, the other reached out blindly for support. He touched the smoothness of cool stone and leaned back into it as he reached to meet her onslaught.

  Siena dodged his mouth, seeking the strong column of his throat with eager lips and tongue, doing to him what he so easily did to her. She wriggled so she slid down his dampening body with her own, her mouth following suit. Her tongue licked silkily over his collarbone, her fingers splaying over his sides and belly, the precursor to her oral exploration as she continued to slide down the length of him. Elijah was drawing for breath, his head falling back against stone as his eyes slid closed. She had left him with nothing to occupy his thoughts outside of the feel of her traveling mouth and his hand clinging deeply into her hair.

  Her industrious tongue slid over a dark nipple, her lips skimming through fine golden hairs as she sought to give equal attention to the other. Then her voracious mouth licked down the ridges of his abdomen. Her hands encircled his hips, her strong fingers massaging the clenching muscles of his backside and t
highs as she continued to torture him, her progress becoming slower and slower until he was gritting his teeth with the sweet agony of anticipation.

  She touched him first, the ever-so-light brush of teasing fingertips, curiously experiencing the hard heat of his aroused body. She slid those soft, searching fingers over the length of him, experiencing the tactile sensation of smooth skin stretched over hot, steely engorged flesh. But it was when he felt the brush of warm lips and breath that he gripped her hair with renewed intensity and swore with vehemence, both curses and prayers, for strength, control, or even the smallest flash of civility.

  Then the moist heat of her lips diligently surrounded him, the flick of her tongue so sure, so heated, and far too eager for his sanity. He tried to push, to pull away…to escape her before he completely lost his mind. She was too bold, too curious, and she was going to destroy what little control he might have had by then. His urges and emotions were too primal as it was—the night, the deprivation, and the approaching fullness of the moon.

  But she would not give him quarter. She had tasted him as he had tasted her, and it was as much a drug to her senses as she had been to his. He knew it, felt it, and heard it in the eager focus of her thoughts. She taunted him with the fit of her mouth, taking delight in the groan the movement elicited, feeling the clench and the tremor of straining muscles with that feline satisfaction that always rushed over her when she experienced an exceptional victory.

  “Siena.”

  He was begging her hoarsely, trying to warn her with his thoughts, but she courted his volatile reactions with the heaven of her heated exploration. It left him victimized, helpless, and lost with the pure ecstasy of it.

  Finally, she released him from her talented trap, retracing her path up his body. But she had barely begun her journey when his hands clamped around her shoulders and jerked her up to his mouth. He launched himself off the wall as he ravaged those sinful lips of hers with brutal passion. As soon as the backs of her legs touched the mattress, he turned her back to his chest once more and shoved her onto the bed. She burst into laughter as she bounced hard on her face, knowing every thought in his mind with delightful clarity, hearing every wicked name he hurled at her for her wanton disregard of his sanity.

  She barely had her palms under her before he enclosed her hips in his hands and jerked her back toward him, pulling her up onto her knees as he settled her back into the cradle of his pelvis. One hand came up to clamp the back of her neck as he thrust forward into her with absolutely no warning, not even an anticipatory thought to prepare her for the divine invasion. Siena gasped on her laughter, overwhelmed by the way he seemed to fill her beyond her capacity. She shuddered top to bottom, involuntarily clenching around him so that they were chorusing sounds of lost bliss an instant later.

  “Siena,” he groaned.

  He moved forward within and above her, his hand reaching to cover hers, his fingers lacing tightly through hers as his forehead briefly touched her spine between her shoulder blades. He kissed her gently in that spot, the tenderness out of place with the ferocity of his passions. So much so that she felt it all the more for the loving gesture that it was.

  That was when she realized the truth of his feelings. He hid it under animal passion and the barely leashed savagery of a dominant male, but she was seeing deeper into his heart even as she saw deeper into his mind.

  Siena closed her eyes as her body accepted his surging invasion, feeling acutely alive and aware, even as she felt numb with what she was beginning to understand.

  Elijah suddenly vacated her body, making her gasp with bereft shock between that moment and the moment his hands flipped her over as if she were light as air.

  “I need to see you,” he ground out roughly. “I want your eyes on me while you are thinking your thoughts, kitten.”

  Siena felt her chest swelling with indescribable emotion and more than a little fear as he covered her with his warm strength and bored into her gaze with unrelenting sight that speared into her soul. He moved into her more slowly this time, purposeful. Watching the pleasure that blanketed her entire expression as she accepted him so readily with her body, and so reluctantly with her endangered heart.

  “You know. I see it,” he said heavily, whispering against her lips. “I feel it, Siena.”

  Siena mutely shook her head, closing her eyes so she could hide from him. But there was no hiding from someone so connected to her. Bodily, mentally, and whatever it was spiritually that had refused to let them remain apart.

  “Elijah, just…just be with me,” she begged him. “Just for now.”

  And because of the day, because of how desperately he needed her, he had no choice but to comply. This once he would allow her to retreat behind the last walls she was using to separate them.

  He knew she had read his soul a moment ago, that she now understood that he was in love with her, and that this was what she could not face. Elijah’s pain went deeply through him in that moment of understanding, but he pushed it aside severely. He would wait for her. If it took every moment of every day for the rest of his life, he would wait for her heart. And that was the only thing that kept him from shattering emotionally in front of her.

  He shook back the feelings robbing him of breath and voice, and refocused on her sweet body. If this was the only way she would allow herself to accept him, then so be it. He was going to take every advantage of the intimacy. Not that he could have chosen otherwise.

  The warrior allowed himself to be lost in the physicality of their rhythmic embrace within and around each other. He altered his thoughts to pure sexual need, eliminating her access to his yearning heart, allowing her to burrow her head beneath the sand for just a little while longer.

  Her distracting fear evaporated quickly as he manipulated her body as skillfully as he manipulated his hidden thoughts. Soon he was lost in the sheer sensation of her as she embraced him more and more powerfully, the tension of her rising need strangling him blissfully. The fulfillment that came was bittersweet. She ignited with a sound of utter gratification, the clutch of her convulsing body dragging him under her bewitching spell moments later.

  Elijah’s eyes roamed over the etched stone on the ceiling above him, the pattern peeking through the streamers of sheer white silk woven in a loose X shape across the canopy.

  Beside him, trapping his arm beneath the weight of her body, Siena lay deeply, peacefully asleep. He had used her to the utmost, exorcising his emotions with a physical passion that had exhausted her. But he was not even close to such a restful repose. While she lay in the only state where his thoughts would be safely guarded from her, he took them out to examine them.

  He freed himself from her easily, at least in the physical sense, and sat up on the edge of the bed, letting the cold of the floor seep into his bare feet as he ran his fingers through his tousled hair and the rough growth of his seven-hours-old beard.

  Seven hours. And in that time his entire world had been tumbled head over heels.

  Elijah stood up carefully, moving slowly so the removal of his weight did not catch her subconscious attention. He scooped up his clothes and dressed quickly. He should not leave her. He should not allow her to wake without him beside her. But he needed this time to himself. He would possibly be back at her side before she even noticed, but he could not remain still a moment longer, watching her look so damned beautiful and content when he was in such turmoil.

  He needed a wise ear because he knew he did not have the wisdom to hash this out on his own. He was too engaged, too close. And he was in far too much pain to see straight.

  And for once, it was a pain he realized would not be as easy to survive as a physical wound might be.

  No.

  Dying was far less painful than a hurting heart.

  CHAPTER 13

  Gideon opened his eyes barely twenty minutes after he had drifted to sleep. The stained glass windows of the bedroom blocked a great deal of the dawn light, making it a shower of warm col
ors rather than intrusive white, and he adjusted to it in seconds.

  He and Legna had decided to spend the day in his former residence. As opposed to their dwelling at Siena’s court where people came and went constantly during times of holiday, here they were assured absolutely uninterrupted privacy during their Samhain night. They had not stayed long at the usual castle festivities with Noah and their other friends, the urgency of the night chasing them quickly to bed just as it had Jacob, Bella, and the others who were Imprinted and even those who were not.

  Gideon had planned on sleeping as lengthily and as thoroughly as he had just made love to his wife, who lay in a deep sleep herself. Legna was sprawled over him, exactly as she always was, exactly in the way that made his heart pound with his deep-seated emotions for her.

  But something had stirred him awake, and as he absently stroked her soft hair, he searched for some clarity about the disturbance that had done so.

  The moment he realized who it was that approached his house, Gideon rolled Legna off his body quickly and un-gently. He ignored her sleepy protest, jerking the coverlet up over her as he grabbed for his robe.

  The Ancient medic paused for a moment of uncharacteristic indecision. Then he reached down to Legna and closed his hand over her forehead. He sank into her body mentally, expending quick energy into her as he manipulated her in a way that no other could match. Once she was completely submerged from the world, her spirit, thoughts, and bio-signs repressed into nonexistence perceptually, he scooped her up into his arms and hauled her over to a swing-away bookshelf that concealed the room that had served as his meditation place for centuries. Placing her gently on the floor within the secret room, he didn’t even spend time kissing her before parting from her, although he wanted to more than anything in that moment.