by Celeste Raye
Her face cleared. “This is where they come into your world, right? The humans who come here!”
He smiled. “Yes. This is where they land. It’s not that far from the castle, maybe a mile.”
She looked around the trees. “I can’t even see the castle from here.”
He said, jokingly, “You can’t see the castle for the trees.”
She chuckled. “I guess not.”
She gazed up at the tall doorframe. “How did they get it to stand here?”
He said, “Magic keeps it standing.”
She said, “Maybe somebody will come while we’re standing here.”
He said, “If somebody were coming, the door would be on fire.”
She took a hasty step away from it. “Wait. So, they have to walk through fire?”
He burst into laughter. “No. It’s just that magic makes the door open, and fire makes magic.”
She gave him a skeptical stare. “I think I’ll pass.”
He spotted some familiar bushes and a glinting red fruit. He said, “Since we’re here, let’s pick some of those berries.”
She followed him, and they stood looking at the bushes. She said, “Was all this a ploy to get me to engage in some free labor?”
He turned to her, opening his mouth to deny that but instead of speaking, his lips came down on hers. He had not meant to kiss her. Had not planned on it, but he was kissing her, and it felt so right. Her mouth was warm and soft and firm; she tasted of spices and mint. His heart thundered in his ears, and he couldn’t resist sliding a hand up the nape of her neck and fisting her hair in one hand. A low gasp broke from her throat as he did so, and his excitement mounted as she kissed him back just as fiercely as he kissed her.
Their bodies meshed together, and they landed on the soft grass. His hands were on her flesh, and his mouth was too. She tasted of sweetness and the sun and wind. He let his hands wander over her breasts, felt the hardening of her nipples. He squeezed her breasts with his hands as his tongue moved around those erect peaks, making them grow stiffer still. He grew harder, and blood pounded in his ears as she ran her hands up and down his chest, a low cat-like purr breaking free from her lips as she did so.
His body ached for hers. His hands divested her of the gown that she wore, and his lips pressed against the skin of her lower belly, and then he was between her legs, his hands seeking out the wetness of her core. She groaned and arched upward, her fingers tugging at his hair as he let his tongue slip between her lower lips and taste the sweetness of the oils gathered there. He licked away those creamy drops and then let his tongue wander upward to find the throbbing flesh of her button. He pressed his tongue against it as his fingers dipped inside her body to stroke her inner folds.
“Oh my God, that feels so good,” she groaned out. “Oh yes.”
He kept going, knowing that he was taking her to the edge and then past it. Her cries got longer, and louder, and hot juices splashed from her body and onto his face and fingers. He slid upward, his hand going to his trousers, and hers was there too, helping to free his staff from the layers of fabric and then bring him into her body.
Her legs wrapped around his body and her mouth found his, urgently seeking his kisses. Her body met his thrust for thrust, and his body shook as he felt her inner folds squeeze down on his member, milking it and drawing it back into her body.
Their breaths shuddered in and out of their mouths, and he felt her inner folds squeeze down on him one final time before shivering as an orgasm hit and raced through her body. His quickly followed, and he groaned, his hands tugging at her hair.
She managed a breath. He stared down at her face. It was the most beautiful face he had ever seen in his life, and he wanted her in his life.
He withdrew from her slowly, and she sat up, pulling the gown back down and smoothing it with trembling hands.
Darkness had fallen. The air had begun to cool, and he could sense a growing chill between them as much as he didn’t want to admit it. He stood, arranged his clothes, and asked, “Should we go back to the castle?”
She said, “Yes, I think we should. Heather’s probably going to be worried about me.”
He said, “You two are really good friends?”
She wasn’t quite meeting his eyes, but her words held a ring of truth. “She’s my best friend. She’s the only person in the world I could ever really count on.”
Before he could stop himself, he asked, “Why?”
She gave him a crooked smile. “Because people suck. Most people. Is Max your best friend?”
He nodded. “Yes, and my cousin. We grew up together, and we’ve always been there for each other. Do you want to fly back or do you mind walking?”
He didn’t actually mind flying, but he wanted to spend as much time with her as possible, and he was hoping she’d say she’d rather walk.
She said, “I don’t mind walking.”
They set off. The distance between them stayed though. When her hand accidentally brushed his, she moved it away fast, and that time she kept herself far enough away from him that their bodies did not touch either. He felt that absence even though he didn’t want to.
He asked, “Did you grow up in the city that I found you in?”
She nodded. “Yes, but I didn’t live where I live now. My mom never made a lot of money. The only reason I met Heather at all is because I applied for a scholarship to a school for gifted children when I was still in grade school. Well, actually, the guidance counselor did it for me, and my mom just agreed because she really didn’t care either way.”
Her voice trailed off and then picked up again. “Heather’s parents were very successful people, but it was just my mom and me.”
He said, “That had to be kind of hard.”
She said, “Yes,” in a tone that told him just how hard it had been. He didn’t know what to say to her after that. Fortunately, she spoke. “What do people do for fun here? I mean, the humans. There’s no television or nightclubs. You don’t have phones. What do they do all day?”
He said, “Live. If they want to talk to each other, they just go to each other’s houses or stop in the street or in the stores.”
She said, in an abrupt shift of subject, “Did you spend much time in my world when you were younger? I know you said you went, but did you spend a lot of time there?”
He said, “Yes. By the time my parents took me over there, though, your world was much different from the world they had known.”
She said, “Tell me what it was like, my world I mean, when you were young.”
He said, “Well, we didn’t go to your city. We went to the city in Europe. That’s actually where my family is from. Back then, the portal opened there and nowhere else. It was beautiful. There were so many people, even then. There was a man and he had a court. My parents managed to use a lot of the things we have here, the jewels and so on, to buy things to make us look like we were very rich. Then we snuck into the court.”
She stopped walking and faced him. Her mouth hung open. “Why on earth would you do that?”
He burst into laughter. My father protected a king. My aunt, Max’s mother, was a princess.”
Her eyes went wide and round. “A real princess?”
What was it with women and princesses anyway? “Yes, a real princess. Her father was a king. And she was to be queen. That’s probably why the wizard fell in love with her. He was really in love with power.”
She asked, “Was your mother a princess?”
They started walking again, and that time her body was closer to his. He wanted to slide his arm around her neck and bring her closer still, but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure how she felt about what happened between them or if she wanted him to touch her, so he kept his hands to his side. “No, she was a witch.”
“Okay, now you’re kidding me, right?”
He said, “No, not at all. She was going to be burned at the stake and would have been if my father had not fought his way through a
crowd and freed her from it.”
She sighed. “Oh! How romantic!”
Blake knew there had been nothing at all romantic about that. There had been a lot of priests who had wanted to see his mother dead, a whole crowd of villagers determined to enjoy her death is entertainment, and only his father and a sword standing between her and death. Times had been different then, stark and often brutal.
He said, “He loved her very much.” That was true. His father had loved his mother enough to ride into that village knowing that he might never ride out again, that he might join the woman that he had fallen in love with on that pyre. To his amusement, he realized that she was correct. It was in fact, quite romantic.
She said, “Guys just don’t do that anymore. Now you’re lucky if you get them to pay for their own damn coffee. Oh, but then again, we also have indoor plumbing now. Speaking of which, the castle has it. How did you know to put that in? I mean it’s not like it existed back when your parents were in my world.” How she could go from something as romantic as a story as his parents, to something as practical as plumbing boggled his mind.
“It was the dwarves. They live in caves you know.”
Her shoulder brushed against his, sending little thrills down his side. “Wait a minute. What do dwarves have to do with toilets that flush?”
He said, “The dwarves have always had them. It seemed like a quite practical thing to have so we put them in.”
She muttered, “To think, my world’s plumbing could’ve been modernized much faster if we just believed in dwarves.”
For some reason that struck him as funny and he burst into laughter. She looked at him for a second and then she burst into laughter too. She said, “I want to think that you’re just pulling my leg. That there’s no way in the world that a dwarf gave you guys indoor plumbing, but I’m terribly afraid that you’re serious.”
Between guffaws, he said, “I assure you, I’m quite serious.”
She asked, “Are there still dwarves?”
He said, “Yes, they are still here. They don’t like us much. They really don’t like humans. They’re not evil though; they just prefer to keep to themselves. You’ll mostly know that you stumbled into a dwarf’s layer by the fact that you take a step down on something that appears to be solid earth, but which is in fact not. Before you can even blink, you’ll be tumbling down into a mine shaft. They’re constantly mining. It’s a wonder they haven’t riddled this entire world with sinkholes.”
She said, “Is that were all the diamonds and things that are all in the furniture come from, the dwarves?”
He said, “Yes. They show up every now and then with a problem they can’t solve for themselves. They’ve gotten into a battle with the Orcs or some other creature and they need assistance. The pay is in the things they mine.”
“So, you’re mercenaries.”
“What’s a mercenary?”
“You kill for money.”
He gave her a huffy look. “We are knights. We fight for the greater good. Even if we told them no, they’d still leave the stuff. They pile it up in front of the castle doors or lobby using catapults. One time they shot a diamond that was as big as my head. God damn near took off my head too. Not to mention it broke a perfectly good window.”
She said, “You know what amazes me the most? You’re complaining that that diamond almost hit you in the head and broke a window instead of gloating about how much it was worth.”
He said, “It’s pretty; things aren’t worth much just because they’re pretty.”
He had said something wrong. He knew it immediately. Her entire body drew inward. Her hands came up and crossed over her chest, and her fingers grabbed her elbows. Her face went pale. “You’re right. You have to be more than pretty.”
He lifted a hand and placed it on her shoulder. She flinched away. He said, “I don’t know what I said, but I think I hurt your feelings. I’m sorry.”
She kicked a small rock and then lengthened her stride. He caught up to her easily, confused by the sudden shift in her personality. She blew out a long, audible breath. “It’s not really anything you said. It’s just that when I was younger, everybody told me how pretty I was. Nobody thought I would ever amount to much, not really. They always just thought that because I was pretty, I would either end up as a model or somebody’s trophy wife. Literally, those were the expectations people had for me.”
He said, “Why would anyone display their wife?”
She roared laughter. “You need a lesson in current slang and language.”
He said, “Probably. I learned how to swear from several of the humans that came here, but we haven’t had any come in a long time. Years and years now. But why would anyone think that you were just pretty? You’re way more than that.”
His words, sincere as they were, did not loosen her shoulders or the tension on her face. “Oh, I know that. But I had to teach myself that. I don’t know. I guess because my world is obsessed with that, with beauty and youth and money and... I guess because it’s easy to use one to get the other, but if you’re born with none of them, you are pretty much out of luck.”
Just one more reason why he wasn’t too fond of her world. They reached the trail, and he looked upward. It wound steeply up the side of the mountain to the castle gates. He said, “I’ll give you a ride the rest of the way.”
She said, “I’m not even going to resist that suggestion. I don’t think my calves can take that.”
He changed and let her climb up. When her legs slid around him, he felt again the urgent press of her body against his as she had wriggled and moaned below him while he made love to her. As he lifted them back toward the castle, he had one thought rolling through his mind: he had found someone who would be the perfect mate, and he was determined to find a way to make her stay.
Chapter Eight
Christy was completely conflicted over what had just happened. Part of her could not believe what she had done. Blake might appear human, but there was still that part of her that could not see him as such. He was a monster; well, not exactly, but he was a dragon.
She found Heather curled up on a divan in the room, reading what looked to be a very old book. Heather set the book down as soon as she came in and said, “Oh. Something happened, spill.”
Christy gave her a shamefaced grin. “Maybe you don’t really want to know.”
Heather said, “You slept with him! Oh my God! Have you lost your mind?”
Christy said, “I’m fairly sure I have.”
Heather said, “I thought you hated him.”
Christy said, “I’m pretty sure that’s never really been a deterrent for me when it comes to having sex.”
She flopped down next to Heather and said, “You know the hell of it is, he’s not really that bad of a guy.”
Heather’s arm went around her and hugged her hard. “Oh?”
Christy laced her fingers together and stared at them. “This morning, in the kitchen, even after I threw flour in his face, he never lost his temper with me. I know I push people’s buttons. I’m a smart ass for one thing. I’m hard to deal with for another.”
“You forgot to mention that your prickly, defensive, and always ready to cover the fact that you’re angry or upset with a joke.”
Christy’s eyes rolled in their sockets. Then a small laugh came from her throat. “Can’t lie to my best friend, can I? You know everything about me.”
Heather said, “I do. That’s why I know you’re either seriously regretting this or you’re not at all. I just don’t know which one it is.”
“Maybe both. All he wants is someone to have a baby for him. I am so not that person. The last thing on earth I want is a kid. I mean, I’m not ready for that. Not that I doubt that he’d be happy to take it and raise it without me, but I don’t want that either.”
Heather leaned forward to set the book on the table. She asked, “Have you ever even thought about it? I mean, not just in a no way am I ever doing that way,
but in a maybe someday way?”
“No. I never did. I never thought about marriage or kids or any of that.”
“Are you thinking about it now?”
Christy’s mouth dropped open. She sputtered out, “No! Hell no! Are you kidding me? I’m not ready to give up my freedom. I have everything I need! Have a great apartment, a great job, and these boobs—which probably would not be the same after childbirth.”
Heather said, “You’re doing it again. Your boobs aside, would you really not be willing to give up everything you have if you found somebody that truly loved you?”
Christy considered that. “I don’t know. I do know that this isn’t love. What we just did was straight up sex. It was great sex, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not looking for love any more than I am. And I’m not looking to rent out my uterus to him either.”
Heather leaned back into the seat. “Do you know that the Orcs have pretty much declared open warfare? Max is really worried about it.”
Christy nodded. Her eyes went back to the massive rubies and sapphires encrusted into the arm of the chair. “I know. I’m a little nervous about it. I think we need to get the hell out of here as fast as we can and before the Orcs decide to kill us.”
Also, she needed to get the hell out of there as fast as she could before her heart decided to betray her. “We need to find out if maybe we can use the doorway instead of the portal.”
Heather asked, “What doorway?”
Christy quickly filled her in on the doorway in the forest. Heather stood and began to pace around the floor. “Oh. Max never mentioned it.”
“Of course not. He’s trying to talk you into staying here.”
The look of hope on Heather’s face made Christy’s heart contract. It had always been the two of them against the world. Even when Heather had been engaged to Alan, that lousy ex-fiancé of hers, they had been each other’s confidants and support system. But something was happening here; it was changing things, and Christy didn’t like it.
She said, “Are you considering staying here?”
Heather went to the windows, facing away from her. Worry made Christy sit up straight and then leave the place where she sat to go to her friend. She laid a gentle hand on Heather’s back and said, “Seriously, talk to me. You know you can.”