At Her Service (Swords of Passion)

by DeLand, Cerise

  She moaned and let her fingers fondle and pet her nether lips. Then she let her knees fall wide onto the bed. “Oh, Simon, this is lovely.”

  He pursed his lips, his brow wet with sweat as he focused on her fingers dancing over her juicy cunt. “I agree. Take yourself now, my lovely. I want you so wet for me you drip onto the sheets.”

  And so she took herself there to that demanding, pounding point where she lifted her hips off the bed in a carnal heat that had her delirious with thoughts of him twisting her nipples and slapping her slit and eating her very needy little cunt all at once.

  She splayed on the bed, limbs askew, gasping for air and smiling at him. “Do I inspire you, my Knight Divine?”

  Simon bent and kissed her knee then rose. He poured wine into his goblet and strode forward to hand her the cup. “Drink, my lovely. You need it for your next lesson.”

  She lifted on an elbow to take the earthen cup and drink. “There is more that is new?” She sipped, luxuriating in the bedclothes. “How much can you do in one afternoon?”

  Simon winked at her and stripped himself of the tunic he must have donned to open the door to the Omar. His naked body stopped her breath. The ridges of his ribs and the valley between his hip bones made her mouth water. But the size of his manhood made her swallow and lick her lips.

  “Want to know now? Or will you eat first?” He inclined his head towards the sideboard and the tray.

  “Which would you prefer?”

  “Ah…” He got a devilish gleam in his eyes. “I want you now.”

  “Well, then.” She drained the cup, dropped it to the floor and wound her legs together in a coy coil. “Come show me.”

  He was over her in the flash of an eye. His hand delved between her heavy lips. “You are not sore?”

  She purred. “Delicious to be sore from loving you, I say. Let us be about our business, my man.”

  He roared in laughter, throwing back his head and enjoying the mirth she could wager he had not had much of these last twelve years. But when he was done, he grew stark and serious. “Let us be about another way to give each other joy.”

  She pouted prettily, letting the fire of her desire sit in her eyes. “I am ready.” She reached for his shaft again.

  He batted her hand away but held her gaze with his hard one. “I have another piece I brought from the East. This is rare here, but used by pashas and emperors alike to ensure their women never hunger for another man.”

  “Well then I must see this,” she invited him, though the very idea that these would excite her beyond what she had already experienced thrilled her—and made her anxious.

  “If we use this, you must promise to tell me if you are hurt or outraged. They are tools of love and lust, but not pain and so—“

  “So you must bring this out,” she overcame her fear to say, while dismissing once more the urge to ask if him if he’d ever used this on another woman. Jealousy had no place in her bed with him. Not now. “Show me. Love me with all your ways.”

  But she could see in his liquid silver gaze that he spoke as if he took a vow, “With this one piece, you shall henceforth belong to me, in a new way that few men ever possess their women.”

  Without question or hesitation, she gave him her trust and so she said, “Come love me then, and let us thus declare that I am yours and you will forever be only mine.” She did not say, if only in our minds, for that truth was a useless point to state.

  Then, he wrapped her in his embrace and clamped her to his warm and musky body.

  He caught her under her ass and spread her legs up on his thighs. He toyed with her little pearl, so sinfully tender and rounded, and pinched it until she shuddered and moaned. Softly, he traced the outline of her nub with his fingertip. “I make you ready for me, for this new way to love. I need you flowing with thick cream, my lovely. I want to ready you—here.” He inserted his finger in her ass, and she groaned. “Here where I wish to come inside as I did the other night.”

  “Ah, Simon, you make me pant with eagerness.”

  He caught her chin and checked her expression. “For this, you must feel wanted but safe.”

  “I do,” she affirmed and reached up to draw his mouth to hers for a long kiss. “I do.”

  “Good. Let me prepare you, my sweet one.” He shifted and against her hungry cunny lips, she felt his sure fingers dip inside her then bathe his penis with her cream. “Beauty, I can smell your desire from here,” he rasped as he reached around to massage her asshole, then coat it inside and out with her juice.

  She had never felt such ministrations, and she tipped up her hips to offer him better access. “Oh, Simon, this is glorious.”

  “And more to come, my precious one.” He pulled away and stood. “Don’t move.” He was gone to the sideboard to open his travelling pouch and back in three heartbeats to cover her lonely body with his own.

  “Here.” He kissed her mouth. “I return to you.”

  “I missed you.” She wound her arms around his shoulders.

  “Feel how I missed you,” he whispered and found the entrance to her core to fill her up in one long drive to pleasure.

  “Ah, I do.” She welcomed him as she rose with the power of his thrust.

  “And here.” He pulled out to make her groan. “Let me bathe this in your ripe juice.” He inserted it between her heated swollen nether lips, something large, smooth and cool, bluntly rounded at one end. In languid strokes, he ran it up and down each of her delicate folds. “Simon, what is this that warms with body heat?”

  With one hand, he removed the object from her swollen flesh, but with the other, he inserted one finger, then two in her ass. “Take this token of my pleasure in your body. And revel in the joy.“ He replaced his fingers with the warm and liquid object. “Here will be your pleasure and mine.”

  She bucked at the size of it. The stretch of it. The exquisite smooth hot feel of it. “Oh, Simon,” she ground out. “What is this that makes me need your rod inside me, too?”

  He fingered her wet, swollen lips aside to bury his manhood deep inside her. “An emerald.”

  She could barely breathe with the fullness of his magnificent possession. The size of the emerald that filled her nether hole filled her loins with mad delight and she thrashed upon the bed.

  He pinned her hands to the sheets. “I will take you now, pretty woman of mine. And in this claim, you will see that a man may claim more than a woman’s sweet cunt.”

  If she had the breath, if he’d given her a moment, she would have told him she knew that. Knew that now more fully than she ever had with Alphonse. Ever could with any other man. For this man was her love. Her lover.

  And as he plumbed her and gave her the sensations of his shaft and his other jewel of love, she knew not which to name the more enthralling. For she adored both. And as he pumped his seed into her greedy little body yet one more time, she milked him in her own ecstasy that must have shook the walls of the keep. Afterward, she lay back, his heavy flesh collapsed upon her, and asked if there could be more she did not know about the art he taught.

  “Aye, my treasure,” he murmured, “but first, we must rest. For I have more to show you, and you will never forget these next moments in my arms.”

  She claimed there could be no higher glory. Then she wound herself around him and would have fallen to sleep when Omar once more knocked upon the door.

  Simon struggled to his feet and trudged to the door. This time as they stood talking in that odd language, she peeped around the hangings to note the tall dark man’s sharp face lined with worry. His gestures were brusque as he pointed towards the guard house. As Simon closed the door upon him, he gave his man an order that had Omar smiling with evil delight.

  “What is the matter?” Elise asked, when Simon returned to her and began to dress. “What has happened?”

  “Omar tells me you have a visitor.”

  Simon secured his tunic and tied his belt then extended his hand. “Come, my dear one.
You must have a bath and dress in your finest. You do not want this guest to smell upon you the joy we’ve shared.”

  She cupped her mound. “No matter who this is, I do not want to wash away our child.”

  “My sweet,” Simon bent over her and brushed her wisps of hair from her cheek over her ear, “we have loved so often here that I wager you now could be carrying our babe.” He grinned broadly, though Elise could see it was an expression that did not light his eyes. “If not, we have many more days and nights to plant a child within your ripe womb. Come now, up.”

  She rose naked, enjoying the pinch of her nipples in the gaudy clamps, the smooth bulk of the emerald in her ass, the fragrance of their musky juices coating her thighs and the dreamy suppleness of her well-loved body. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “Kiss me,” she murmured to his lips, empowered by his loving to face all odds, “and tell me who is here.”

  He stared into her eyes for one long moment and finally relented. “Crosby.”

  Chapter Six

  Rumour had it that Phillip Crosby had been a nasty youth. As a man he remained rude to his widowed mother and crude and cruel to his female serfs. “To belong to him as a wife or even have him as a neighbour,” Elise confided in Simon as the man in question strode towards them, “was never my ambition.”

  Simon squeezed her forearm as they watched the blond-haired man approach them towards the dais of the great hall. “He has the pinched and greedy look of a man too well coddled.”

  “My lady.” Phillip bent a knee in French style to Elise. “I am pleased you receive me and my men.”

  “I have little choice when you present yourself and your five men at my castle gates.”

  His tiny brown eyes bored into hers as he cast off her tartness with more pap. “I thank you for your hospitality.” His gaze drifted to Simon’s. “Since our hostess does neither of us the honour of introductions, I will offer you my greetings, sir.”

  “Offer me nothing, Crosby. Well you know who I am, else you would not be here.”

  “I am offended,” Phillip declared with hauteur.

  “I care not what you are, man,” Simon growled. “State your business, then you may retire to the guard house.”

  “My business is with the Countess and her husband.”

  Elise could not contain the smile that curled her lip. “Pray tell, what is that business, Phillip? My husband cannot hear it, but I will.”

  “The earl is too ill?” Phillip asked.

  As if he did not know. As if he had no spies in this house. Elise snorted. “He has been ill for some time, and well you know it. Again I ask, what is your business that you have the presumption to come to me here when my lord husband is abed and as added affront bring your retainers with you?”

  “Bah! You know wild boar are about. Why, I hear someone recently took another here,” Phillip flared his nostrils at Simon, “and did so with a dagger, no less.”

  Simon scoffed at him. “You brought five men in full mail over fifteen miles in a snow storm to tell us what we already know?”

  “You are most unkind.”

  “And you,” Simon seethed, “are most unwelcome.”

  Phillip inhaled and set his jaw. “I must speak with your husband.”

  “No.”

  “You then, Elise. Alone.”

  “That is not possible,” she told him. “State your case now.”

  “I have come to propose an alliance.”

  Elise bit her lip to keep from laughing in his face. “That is unnecessary.”

  “You and I,” he replied between clenched teeth, “know you need protection.”

  “Aye, that I do.” From you. From John. From the winds of misfortune once my husband is gone and Simon, too.

  “This man cannot provide it.” Phillip tipped his head towards Simon. “He is here only to insult your honour.”

  “Ah,” Elise crooned, “and you would save me from that blemish.”

  “You know I can. I have the power, the men. Joined to me, you will have a greater buffer from the Scots.”

  “Hmm. I would.” She nodded. “But then who would buffer me from you?”

  “You—you would need none from me!” he sputtered. “I would be your loyal friend.”

  “Phillip,” she spoke softly and leant towards him, “I have known you since I first wed my lord and came here as his wife. You were then a young man of little calibre and have not yet grown in character or kindness. You have not the knowledge of what it is to be a loyal friend, and I have no desire to watch you promise what you cannot give.”

  “The Scots come closer, Elise. They assemble, I am told, a hundred miles from me. And they will care not for your need of loyalty or character.”

  “If they come,” she told him praying she had the means to somehow keep the fiends contained in their homeland, “they will overrun you first, Phillip. And I will seek my sovereign’s help before I seek yours.”

  “You will regret this,” Phillip warned.

  She smiled, serene in her own conviction. “I may regret that I could not thwart them, Phillip, but I will never regret the refusal of any offer of help from you.”

  “The least you can do is give us better quarters. In fact, I demand a better room than the guardhouse. ‘Tis cold there with only one fire in a vast common room. I am your equal, and I deserve a room here in your keep.”

  “There are none available,” she shot back with hot satisfaction. “Either sleep where we put you, or return home in the storm.”

  “I resent the insult.”

  “I resent you came to bully me.” She waved him off. “Leave us.”

  Phillip surveyed her top to bottom as if she were a whore then narrowed his gaze at Simon. “Aye. I leave you to your rutting.”

  Elise felt Simon’s body stiffen. “What we do is none of your business,“ she told him. “You may dine with us here in the hall tonight, but tomorrow I will send you homeward. At daybreak, you and your men be ready.”

  “Or?” he taunted.

  Simon took a step forward to tower over the man by many inches. “Or we turn you out with what you have on your backs.”

  * * * *

  Dinner was a sad affair with Phillip sullen on one side of her and Simon, silently furious, on the other. Never known for his brilliant conversation, Phillip harped in her ear about the Scots barbarism, their numbers and their arms.

  “Elise, I tell you that you make a mistake to think too lightly of their threat. They have harassed my lands since my grandfather was a boy. Your husband knows this. He and my father led a foray years ago to ward them off. They pushed them back because they were quick and well armed. You and I can do the same. Permit me to come speak with you privately.”

  “I told you nay,” she countered.

  “I am far better than you have heard of me, Elise. I am not the boy I was.”

  She considered him, his pouting mouth, his lax jaw and his dishevelled hair he had not even combed to come before her tonight and dine. “Nay, you are not.”

  He leaned closer. “I am a worthy match for you. Once your husband dies—”

  Elise stiffened at his effrontery. “Say no more, Phillip.”

  “You will consider me, then?” he whispered, his eyes eager with joy.

  “Never.”

  He shot to his feet. “I must see your husband.”

  “He is incapable of seeing anyone.” In fact, she had looked in on him earlier, and he was fitful, muttering of his first wife and thinking Elise was his mother.

  “It is an insult for me to come here and not see him,” Phillip seethed. “I demand to pay my respects.”

  “Very well. A few minutes.” Elise rose and summoned her servant at the front table. “Cleve, take Lord Crosby to the earl and let him greet our master and no more.”

  Cleve walked to the dais and nodded at Phillip to show him the way. “Sir, I beg you the stairs here quickly.”

  Elise pursed her lips as she watched him leave for the b
ack of the hall and the way to Alphonse’s bed chamber. “He is a pestilence upon this clime,” she murmured to Simon. “I wish he’d find a bride to keep him in bed awhile.”

  Simon snorted. “No right-minded lord would hand over his girl to that cur.”

  “As long as John does not hand over any more land or power to him,” Elise told him with distaste, “I shall be safe. But John may fear the Scots more than he fears Phillip’s inadequacies.”

  “Come now, my dear.” Simon took her hand. “You and I have much to do to ensure John’s future.”

  She grinned up at him, regardless of what her serfs would see or say about her loving look days or years from now. “Aye. You promised me another treat. And I am your most ardent student, my Knight Divine.”

  His silver eyes lit with the fires of heaven. “Come quickly, then. The night grows cold, and I am hot to show you new adventures.”

  * * * *

  Simon asked first however for a bath for himself. Heaven knew, he needed the release the hot water brought his body. Dealing with Crosby had churned his insides, and loving Elise required more serenity than dinner in that man’s presence had brought. Besides, Simon liked the way Elise eyed him leisurely from the chair.

  “‘Tis delightful to see you wet, sir.”

  He roared with laughter at her words. “Saucy woman,” he teased and relaxed backward in the copper bath. “Come wash my hair.”

  “Mmm…” She shook her head. “What if I prefer to wash other parts of your body?”

  He narrowed his gaze on her and pointed to his side. “Come here.”

  She licked her lips, rose from her chair and stood, gazing down into the copper tub. Her examination had his manhood thickening, and his balls tensing. “You are quite beautiful,” she told him on a wisp of air.

  “If you come here now,” he rasped with hard need, “I will show you how your beauty strikes me.”

  She grinned and tossed her head. “Ah, what can you show me that I have not already seen?”

  “How your loveliness strikes me at this moment,” he whispered and grasped his rod beneath the water.