Primal Moon

by Brooksley Borne

  Primal Moon

  An Erotic Romance Novella

  by Brooksley Borne

  Published by Brooksley Borne

  Copyright 2013 by Brooksley Borne

  Other Titles By Brooksley Borne:

  Taken

  The Landlord

  The Rescue

  He Tamed Her

  Not Such a Bad Girl

  Hot Shorts: 10 Erotic Romance Short Stories

  The moon hung low to the ground and bright white against the cloud-splotched sky. Like the great moon goddess Hathor herself was gazing at Aziza through a crown of crow feathers. The night was as black around the glinting orb as the light was silvery on her copper skin. Hard to believe it was the same moon that hung in the sky over Cairo. She wanted to climb up a beam to it and have it spill her back home.

  Fairies menaced her. She flicked them like scarabs. They were trying to tell her something. She shouldn’t be there. She shouldn’t be doing what she was doing.

  That Aziza hated everything about her new land made the unnamed pull from deep within her to this forbidden spot that much less deniable. It was a place where she found her only peace and warmth and soothing. Her only comfort, it was the only place she didn’t feel alone, for reasons she could not name. She was called to it by an inner, ethereal voice but restricted from it expressly by an outer, lowly voice. Forbidden to come to the woods by a beastly laird. Uh.

  The men of her home were sophisticated, smooth-skinned and seemly. This place crawled with blunt, uncouthed, unshaved, gigantic barbarians. And despite an order to the contrary by the legendary giant king of the beasts, Laird MacDunna himself, Aziza came to this forbidden spot every chance she got. Well, an order by proxy. Aziza never actually met the laird, though she belonged to him.

  She kept a running rant in her head, rehearsed daily, of a tirade she was going to unleash onto the laird at first sight, if and when he actually made it home to her. Her speech was like a well-sharpened weapon she was going to pierce him with. She had it down cold. She was often heard muttering it to herself as she went about her dreary business. It was because of the laird that she was there in Scotland instead of Egypt. It was because of him that she was alone.

  So lonely.

  Aziza bowed, flat as she could, praying to the moon in hopes that it would requite her with passage back home. Or to send her a prince to take her away from this. To make it better. On nights like these when the sky was so ripe, the first chance she found to creep into the breach of the great black woods, she took it. The drive was insane lest she answer it. It was what she imagined the draw to a lover to be. Like the beckoning of the great and charismatic and handsome sultan himself, the grand vizier Ayyubid Saladin by whom she had been chosen to marry. Aziza sighed with the very thought of him.

  Then her stomach sharpened with disappointment.

  The sultan gifted her to his respected foe, Richard the Lionhearted who foisted her off to some barnyard animal Scottish knight noted for his breastly brawn but lamb-like loyalty. She had never met the grand vizier, nor the king and never this oafish rudimentary creature who had the callousness to not even show. To keep her waiting for him for over a year while she was left stranded among crude conditions, among creatures farthest from the civilization to which she was accustomed.

  Aziza hated her Scotsman with everything she had. She savored each practice of her little soliloquy that would let him know one day just how much she loathed him and why. She wanted to go home. Back to Egypt.

  She lay in the forest litter, mottled by shadows and moonlight, not finding her ease in celestial supplication. She was being nipped alive by blasted fairies buzzing and their bites were starting to itch. Just as she was about to abandon her endeavor and call it a night, she spied shadowy figures stealing into the trees. She crouched against the springy pine needles and observed in secret.

  In the spotlight cast from the sky, she beheld a line of young clan women dressed in clan finery, heeding the escort of hooded men. In the center of the line wearing a green, gossamer gown that looked like a dream, like it was meant to be worn by a fairy or perhaps a bride was the woman Aziza knew to be betrothed to the laird’s brother.

  As far as filthy Scottish men went, the laird’s brother was remotely mannered and not at all bad to look at. In fact, Aziza thought he was quite stunning and it made her curious as to how much he might look like the laird. The brother had been just a boy when the laird left to fight in the Holy Wars. But the boy was a giant now. A beautiful giant whose passing glance stirred Aziza in the pit of her stomach and drew her up between her legs from deep inside. Though Egyptians kept as little body hair as possible, he, like the rest of Scots, was practically carpeted. Aziza envied the bride or whatever she was. Not only because her dress was that beautiful but in her day-to-day life, the bride seemed to be the center of attention of an exquisite man. Simply witnessing this line of moonlit forest trekkers conjured a strange yearning in Aziza. She wished it were her turn for whatever it was they were doing.

  The procession had all the feel of a human sacrifice. If this scene had been taking place in her land, that is exactly what it would be. Though their faces were shrouded, Aziza suspected the identities of the men by their posture and their gait, with the exception of a slightly larger man, overseeing it all. Perhaps it was because she didn’t know who he was and therefore she was curious that Aziza felt drawn to him most of all. She could almost hear the connection between them snap into place as she laid eyes on him. He turned his hooded profile over his shoulder in her direction. Aziza recoiled, shrinking in the cover of the shrubs.

  Just after the last of them crossed her vista, unearthly moans and wails and shushes echoed up, filling the sky. Wicked, animalistic sounds somewhere between the mournful tones of livestock at slaughter and the grunting noises that regularly drifted from her hosts' bed. She writhed on the ground in a heady spell, fighting not to succumb to whatever it was that sought her wits. She had to touch herself. Play with wetness between her legs which sprang from a delicious ache, and stroke her firm full breasts wantonly. Aziza needed something. She needed someone.

  She needed a man.

  She sat upright without regard to being seen. She pressed her back against a tree, her body suffering with such great need as strange and wonderful spasms washed over her. She wept and gasped until they ebbed from her. It was a visitation of a sweet sultry spirit that Aziza wished to summon again. She smiled with gratitude. She dropped to her chest and spied. Her livened, sensitive breasts and belly squirmed on the damp, musty earth.

  All but the strange man/overseer were in pairs, inspirited. They were mauling, joining each other, stealing glances as the laird’s brother who, crying up to the moon, appeared to ready himself to mate with his bride. She was prepared, tethered to a marble alter. The laird’s brother took pause to gaze upon her.

  Disturbed and enchanted, Aziza had been relieved it was a marriage ceremony after all, uniting the lovers in the fruitful phase of the great moon. She knew these clans people, though mostly Christian, still marked their world by the phases of the sky in their ancient custom. Not unlike her own culture but in a much baser way. In a rare moment, she felt a sort of communion with them.

  The priestess put her hands on the overseer who by this point Aziza had chosen for herself. He requited the priestess with a hot kiss that seared Aziza with jealously. She savored his masterful control over affection, the way his body inclined over the voluptuous priestess, the way his muscles rippled, the way he rendered the priestess so defenseless against him.

  “I wish he was kissing me,” she found herself thinking out loud. She cast her words to the ceremony. “I wish he were my husband.” As she crept just a little closer for a better look, the laird�
��s brother reared back, cried up to the moon, flared great white fangs.

  Algul! Aziza bit her knuckle in horror. In Egypt, Algul were demons who drank the blood of others. But there, bloodsuckers took the form of virgin women. In this barbaric land, they were surely tawdry men. The overseer pulled away from the priestess to hold the bride’s still, whispering in her ear. He lifted her jaw and bared her neck. The laird’s brother drew down on her, burrowing his face to the arched porcelain flesh. He was on her and he was in her, grinding mouth and hips to both ends of her. The bride screamed out.

  Aziza joined her. Shrieking into the universe in absolute terror.

  The overseer pulled back and looked Aziza straight in the eye with an intimacy and knowingness that made it feel as though he were inches from her. The edge gave way beneath her and she was air-born. She flew on a magic carpet of earth, plummeting down the cliff-like incline.

  Aziza hit the ground. She passed out

  ****

  The forest whispered her name, called to her and Aziza came to. She had fallen out of her under garments and her clothes were in a tangle around her body. She lifted her head but soon rested it. She tried and tried to progress past that point but fairies spun around her head in a virtual Druid crown. Finally, amid whispers and pests, she sat up, crossed her arms in front of her chest to hide until she could get home. It was broad daylight. This was how she imagined it to be after spending the night with a lover.

  To be in love. Dizzy and sated.

  The whispered beckoning was sensual and Aziza felt embraced by it. She relished the night’s fingers still stroking her, bringing her to that honey place that had her body clenching as she spied so wickedly, until the stark recollection of the last images before she passed out.

  He bit her neck. He held her down. He looked at her.

  Aziza quaked. Her disobedience to the errant Jamie MacDunna had been luscious and ecstatic. Wet and hedonistic. And absolutely the most horrifying moments she experienced yet. Just as she was about to give thanks the laird was absent, for he would surely take her as his brother took his bride; just as she was avow to never come back to this forbidden place, she felt a firm, very large hand grip her shoulder.

  She had been caught.

  “Are you all right, Aziza? Have you been somewhere?”

  He stood up straight.

  Aziza almost shot out of her skin. She blinked and blinked to focus. She could have wept for what she saw. There standing in the clear sunlight, as giant as the trees surrounding them was a Scotsman, one not familiar to her but who knew her by name. He was magnificent. He was unnaturally so.

  His reddish blonde strands were exactly like gold tufting in the tamed breeze that lifted all around him. He folded his mighty arms across his chest as though he was imitating her, and looked down at her sternly. Perspiration made its untimely appearance above her lip. Though she was nervous, both starved and sickened, his great deep voice stirred the evening’s sweeter sensations. Like the whispers. To look at him made her ache with an emptiness worse than the one created by the night’s escapades, and she needed to be filled. Flooded with time-old instinct and she wanted him.

  Aziza burned. Her prince.

  The giant apparently found something funny as he plucked white petals of mountain flowers from her ebony hair. He brushed them from her shoulders and off the front and back of her shift with an almost intimate caress. She did her best to contain the heavy breaths that rose from her at his very touch. Aziza could not speak. She could only gawk.

  “Lass?” He smiled affectionately as he tilted his head.

  “Who are you?” She struggled to affect the most regal of voices but his stunning beauty made her warble. “And how do you know my name?”

  He cocked his head again. “Am I mistaken then? Is there another Egyptian lass here and I’ve gotten you two confused?”

  Aziza woke up. “I am not an ‘Egyptian lass.’ I was betrothed to the grand vizier Ayyubid Saladin. I was a member of the royal –“

  “You are haraam. And I am your laird and master. Jamie MacDunna,” he corrected with a bow.

  Aziza sputtered. She seized as her heart commenced to beat its way from her chest. Her speech. Her litany of how much she hated him and why. Between the fright and anger and yet the strange sensual attraction, she could not remember a single word. Every day for a year or more. She said it out loud so often that probably even some of the clans people could recite it. How did it go?

  She didn’t know what she found more offensive, to be called haraam, that he said it perfectly or the fact that it was true. Though she had never been with a man and she had not yet been schooled, as the second or third or 43rd wife of a sultan wasn’t royalty, she was a concubine. A harem girl.

  As Aziza lazily contemplated Laird MacDunna and his sudden irksome appearance, something in the way he moved struck her and she realized who he was. He had been the stranger overseeing the ritual. He held his brother’s bride still so his brother could take her. Her eyes flew open as wide they possibly could. This man was wicked.

  “I’ll ask you again. Have you been somewhere?” He asked her more like he was trying to get an answer he already had.

  “I’m somewhere now,” she replied, checking her temper in light of her realization.

  Haraam. To hear him say the lascivious word in her tongue was intoxicating. It compounded his allure enough to almost make her abandon her resentment towards him entirely. This was the man she was waiting for? She had to remind herself he was an unnatural demon. That he held a woman down while another man brutalized her. But while he was standing before her, it was hard to remember anything. She forgot that it burned her that so much time had passed. That she had to endure all the terrible circumstances of being given shelter by the vicious hosts he appointed.

  No, all she could think of was he was magnificent and he was hers. The likeness of a fierce Viking warrior with his grand height, mighty arms and legs and long golden hair burnished with just a hint of red twining down his muscled back. A beard of contrasting brownish red that framed his powerful jaw. This was her man. His eyes were clear green orbs that didn’t seem to miss a single trick. He made her nervous. In a most delicious way. After the pleasured elixir of the passionate night before and the prospect of what stood before her, Aziza was almost elated.

  But slowly anger over the suffering, the waiting for him, revived. Haraam indeed. He was obviously taking his time coming home because he was playing with other women. He ruined her life and she had been completely unimportant to him. She hated him all over again. If she could only remember that blasted speech.

  “You’re somewhere now? An obvious answer I wouldn’t need to look for, now would I? You have a strange look on your face. Have you been practicing your art while I’ve been away?”

  “Pardon me?” He could have slapped her. Aziza was livid. He asked her if she was sleeping around while she had been waiting. No. And it would be a cold day as she heard the Scotsmen say, before she would sleep with him.

  “Well I know that haraam are like confections offered to the kin of those they belong to.”

  “So you know how the arrangement works,” Aziza said bitingly.

  “I do,” Jamie responded with an almost drunken grin.

  “That’s probably why you say the word so well. Was it a requirement to say it perfectly before they let you have any?”

  “What?” he dared her.

  “Confection?”

  Jamie’s eyes narrowed, obviously conscious of the insult. But then he cooled. His face relaxed and he smiled. “I ate with very little preliminaries. Extremely open, sharing, accommodating. But may I remind you, the word means secret.”

  “It means forbidden meaning you really aren’t supposed to have it,” she corrected, “and I’m hardly a secret.” Aziza looked at her skin. “It’s not as though I am not the most obvious person here.”

  “And here I thought that would be me.”

&n
bsp; “Most conspicuous by your absence maybe. The only time I am hidden is among the trees.”

  His face took on a strange scold as he hovered closer. “So is that why you’re here, lass? Playing in the forest? Do you feel it’s where you should be?”

  Aziza shivered. His face was close enough to kiss and their conversation was taking a more intimate character. Like they were familiar with each other already. It sounded as though he knew about her escapade of the night before. Her disobedience of his order to not go near the woods had to be obvious. He just found her face down on the forest floor. The order Aziza knew had nothing to do with avoiding bandit or vicious creatures. “I find peace here,” she said evasively.

  “So long as you’re not finding something else here,” he winked.

  “I found you here, haven’t I?” Aziza’s voice was lead.

  “As you should,” he bowed. “Certainly it was explained that you were intended for me and no one else. The consequences of infidelity and disloyalty are dire. I hope that is clear.”

  “Very, as are many things, laird,” Aziza said dubiously. Her heightening rage thickened the Arab on her tongue.

  Jamie smiled. “That is quite the brogue you have.”

  “I say the same to you,” Aziza threw her jaw out proudly.

  “I meant that your native tongue mixed with mine. It’s becoming.” He gently took hold her hands and uncrossed her arms, taking stock of her. She lit with fierce embarrassment.

  Disheveled by the night’s mayhem, her breasts were not properly contained by her dress and she was practically naked in front of him. He didn’t seem to react to it. He traced the remnants of a beating she had taken in her face. She was punished all the time by the horrible people he had entrusted her to.

  Aziza had been delivered to the clan like a satchel and Andrew Gregor and his wife had been assigned to house her until Jamie made his way home. Seems that it was not made clear to Andrew Gregor Aziza was not to be shared. He never got much more than a taste but not for lack of trying. Both Gregors backhanded her for what they took as insolence or any other reason they could come up with.