The Fortune Teller's Daughter

by Jordan Bell

  And when he nipped the hardened, elongated peach bud, she cried his name and thrust her hips up into his and ground into his erection in the most innocent, wanton way he’d ever seen. It made him feel drugged and irrational. He wanted to teach her passion and debauchery and pleasure. He wanted her to want his control, here, in his bed, where he could adore her.

  And, when he’d reddened her pale skin and tied her to his bed and entered her in every way possible, he wanted to make love to her.

  “Eli,” she begged, arching prettily beneath his body. “Eli, please.”

  He grinned against her breast and licked and bit the soft flesh until he turned it red and left the softest, lightest marks. He’d never hurt her. Never.

  “How do you need me, Sera? I want to hear you say it.”

  “Inside.” She fought for words as if they no longer made sense to her. “I want this.”

  He caught her words with his mouth and kissed her, crushed her silent and she shuddered. He kissed her so that she’d know he didn’t ever want to stop kissing her. He kissed her until her until he’d memorized her taste, until she was mewling and begging into his open mouth and kissing him back and even though he was holding her down, she was holding back.

  And without warning, he broke contact and flipped her over onto her stomach, her cheek pressed into her pillow and all her red, lovely curls fanned out around her.

  Still holding her wrists in one hand, he worked her blue panties down to expose her plump, upturned ass. She bowed her back and offered herself to him. It was such a sweet, giving gesture. He sighed from the pleasure of it.

  With his free hand he stroked her thighs, her waist, her hips. Here the freckles were few and far between except for the galaxy of them over her lower back where she had two delicious dimples above each cheek. He stroked them with his fingers, their smooth divots giving him perfect, kissable targets.

  He let go of her hands though she didn’t uncross them. He moved behind her, cupped her cheeks in both hands and proceeded to kiss her spine and each dimple. She sighed and moaned and closed her eyes while he touched her. He kissed the bottom swell of her ass, the backs of her thighs. He stroked the inside of them up to her soft red curls, damp with her pleasure. The same color as her hair.

  Before he could touch her, he needed to get rid of his pants. He fought out of them and took his place behind her, between her knees and her bare feet. Her toes turned under, gripping the sheets. Everything about her was so deliberate and full of surrender here in his bed. She had no idea how badly that turned him on. For the rest of his life he would never be able to resist her on her knees.

  Eli had to have her. Like this. Bent forward onto her shoulders, her hips meeting his. He had to make his mark and claim her.

  Mine.

  He bent across her, his erection fitting between her legs and surprising her with its hardness, its presence. She jerked and squirmed and lost her position. He growled a warning and she froze.

  “Will you let me have you, my Serafine?” He rumbled his words against her back as he pulled her wrists back into his hands, one in each, pinned to the pillow on either side of her face.

  Her eyes flicked open, hooded and languid, staring at her captured hand.

  “Yes.” She swallowed, her mouth parting, allowing her little pants to escape. “God, yes.”

  He released one of her wrists and reached between them, took his member in his hand and settled it against her wet, puffy lips. She was so ready, so open, he almost slipped in before he was ready. If she moved even a little bit, she’d impale herself on him.

  “I want to hear my name on your lips.” He bent along the shape of her back until his face was even with the back of her neck. He kissed her ear and pushed the head just inside her spread folds. “I want you to want me, Sera.”

  And before she could respond, he thrust into her, eliciting the most delicious scream from her red, swollen mouth.

  She curled her fingers into the sheets, her eyes flying wide open in surprise. He was big enough, not enough to hurt her, but he couldn’t remember the last time any woman had made him so mad with lust either. Inside of her was worse. She pulsed, hot as her heartbeat, squeezing herself around the length of him as if she were trying to pull him in. She was so tight, though wet and slick enough to make his entrance easy.

  They fit together as if she’d been made for him alone.

  While she writhed and swayed and pulled beneath him, stretched and accommodating, he panted for control. For any other woman he would have plowed her until he came, unconcerned with her comfort or her wants. Before this night, he’d been a selfish lover.

  Now…now there was only one pleasure that concerned him. One that centered his whole world, finally, into orbit with the sun.

  He kissed her shoulder, her smooth pale skin. He kissed and licked at her freckles until she relaxed, until she was wiggling pleasantly beneath his hips, and only then did he retreat and return. His body flexed and the pleasure of mounting her made him delirious. Everything about her from her soft, pliant body to her panting, almost giggling moans turned him on and made it damn near impossible to control himself.

  She caught the rhythm easily and soon their hips moved together, matched from where his shoulders laid across hers down to where he bent over her, impaled between her legs.

  “Eli,” she moaned, eyes squeezed closed. “Oh. Ooh.” She bit her bottom lip and tucked her chin to her chest. She stretched beneath him like a cat. He wrapped one arm beneath her waist and locked her to him.

  “Yes, love, yes. So sweet. I’ve never…Sera…”

  He was as lost as she was. They’re words dissolved into sounds of pleasure, gasping, groaning, their names the only thing they got right in the dark.

  After minutes, hours, days, the intensity between them grew until he was humping her backside, holding her still as he rode her. She couldn’t keep up, shaking and spreading herself, begging for more without knowing what that meant. Her core squeezed him, slippery and sensitive, forcing gasping groans from him. Harder, harder, harder, until he was banging against her, bruising her thighs with his need, this beautiful, giving girl that he’d caught and captured and took and took and took…

  Eli slammed his fist into the pillow above her head, jerked her hips into his, buried himself to the root one last time with such force he saw stars. He buried his face into the cove of her neck and cried her name into her skin as he burst inside her.

  Light and sound, the cold and the feel of his sheets beneath them fell away. There was no language, no carnival, no anything beyond this woman’s body. Shaking, he held himself to her, no longer her captor but her worshiper, bent in supplication at her alter. He rasped her name, begged for her to love him, such things he’d never said to another woman in his life spilled from him in irrational words that may or may not have even been English.

  And beyond all possible belief, she answered him. She said yes, yes, yes. I love you. I love you. I love you. I’m so in love with you. Don’t stop touching me. I beg you. I beg you. I beg you.

  He didn’t. Couldn’t. He’d have died first than stop touching her. Still buried inside her he moved from holding her to him to touching her. He slipped his hand between her legs and searched for the heart of her pleasure, swollen and slick with her cream and his. He touched her, touched her so that she danced in his arms. She lifted her shoulders off the bed, dropped her head between her elbows, and arched her body into him.

  Sera’s explosion was only a moment behind his, and then she was rolling in waves of her own ecstasy. She threw her head back and he caught her so he could hold her against his chest, eyes closed and lost in her own world. Her head fell back to his shoulder and he kissed her cheek, the corner of her mouth. She begged his name and kissed him, kissed him messily without an ounce of self-consciousness. She kissed him as she came, as she shook and clawed at his hands and held him tight to her.

  When she stilled, panting, her eyes shining like stars as she stared into
him, through him, mesmerized him, they collapsed back to the bed. He rolled off her, but didn’t let her go. He held her against him, buried himself in her sweaty hair. She clutched him, breathing hard, searching his face for…he couldn’t know. He’d never had a woman look at him the way his Serafine looked at him now.

  She loved him. She’d said it, even though she shouldn’t love him. Even though he was so far beyond being loved. She’d said it anyway. Even now she didn’t look like she regretted it.

  Mine, he thought

  Then, no.

  Hers.

  23

  __________________

  Eli caught me in my escape from his bed and hauled me back into his body, growling playfully into my neck as I squealed and wiggled to free myself, not that I tried very hard. He nuzzled and kissed at my throat, despite the mess of hair haloing my head or my pale, naked body. He still felt warm from being buried beneath blankets with me all night.

  “Sera.” He said it like a promise. “Meet me at my stage today.”

  “As if there were anywhere else I could be.” I laughed and managed to twist around to face him. He knelt on the edge of the bed in front of where I stood. He kissed my nose and the little spot between my eyebrows. He felt lighter, more unhurried, and I wondered if this was the real Eli. The one who’d existed before the accident that forced the carnival to close. The one he wouldn’t talk about. His was not the face of a broken, damaged man. He seemed young again. Ageless as always, but new.

  He kissed me, much softer than those we shared last night in the dark, but just as delicious.

  “Good. And detach from your shadow today. As much as I like Micah, it’s only you I want.”

  I grinned at the image of Micah as my shadow when it was more likely the other way around. Micah would have loved the image of us being so inseparable.

  “I have to help Lily go through her closet. We’re reorganizing, apparently, which actually means I’ll pull things out and she’ll offer advice from her fainting couch.”

  “Lily,” he grumbled and glanced around as if she might have materialized in his wagon suddenly. “I bet she’s got plenty of advice for you.”

  “About you, you mean.”

  “Suffice it to say, she does not approve of my obsession with you.”

  “I bet.” I hesitated, but it seemed too late for shyness now. “Were you two…lovers?”

  “Us?” His eyes widened a fraction. “No. Never. I know what she is. I am not interested.”

  “You don’t like her because she’s a courtesan? That seems a little judgy, Mr. I’ve had plenty of women. Many. Often. All of them.” I affected a terrible British accent and he tugged me impatiently against him with a playful nip at my mouth.

  “She is more than just a courtesan, Sera. I thought you would have figured that out by now. No one here is only just anything.”

  I didn’t understand what he meant. Or at least, I didn’t know how to understand what he meant. I thought of Micah dodging questions about her age, the carousel, everything about the Magician. “You mean, everyone here is like you?”

  Now it was his turn to hesitate. “Not like me. No one is like anyone else. They all have secrets about where they come from, what they can do. They are not likely to tell you, so don’t bother asking. Knowledge, here, is power. If anyone knew what they were, beneath their skin, it would make them targets.”

  “But everyone knows what you are.”

  “Yes, well, I can’t hide who I am.”

  “I am not anything.”

  “You’re Cora’s.”

  “And what was she?” He gave me a look like he was about to deny me again, but I interrupted. “She’s dead, Eli. She can’t be made a target anymore.”

  “I think what she was made her a target in the first place. She had power over the past, present, and future. Among other things.”

  A vision of her standing with her hands hovering over her cards, plucking them out seemingly at random to tell someone their future in a fake, exotic voice rushed into my thoughts. “So she was a real fortune teller.”

  “More. Surely you saw her do things that you couldn’t explain.”

  I shook my head. “I always found a way to explain them. I thought she was lying to me.”

  “She was a...” he searched the air for the right words. “Once upon a time they would have called her a hedge witch.”

  “Like, are we talking house made of candy, fattening up little children?”

  “More like, love potions, healing salves, curses, divination.”

  “Huh.”

  His corner of his mouth kicked up. “You believe me?”

  I ran my hands over his bare chest and admired the shape of him in the morning sunlight. “You wouldn’t lie to me if you ever want me to get naked for you again.”

  He laughed then, a full bodied, shaking laugh that sounded foreign and wonderful. I grinned and stole a quick kiss from his smiling mouth.

  “Cross my heart.” He twisted a curl of my hair around his fingers and leaned back, pulling me with him. “It’s more like, imagine if all the stories you’d ever been told as a child held a little bit of truth to them. Imagine that they happened a very long time ago. But like most things, people couldn’t just allow there to be wonderful, impossible things to exist without wanting to possess them. Without hunting them out of fear or greed. Imagine that they passed their heritage on to their children, with humans, a little bit less but maybe easier to hide. And enough time passes that there are only children of children of children left in the world, that the originals are all gone, but there’s still a little something out there that is impossible. That’s what the carnival is. The last generation before these bloodlines go out of the world forever. Rook finds them. The carnival protects them.”

  My knee jerk reaction was to deny, to block any consideration of such an outlandish, wild claim.

  Instead I leaned back and swallowed this story. I thought of all the impossible things I had seen. The magic I knew was here, no matter how much I wanted to deny it.

  “Women so beautiful they break your heart. The acrobats who move faster than people ought to move.”

  “Yes.”

  “The strongman who can lift four girls onto his shoulders.”

  “The fortune teller who knows the future.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not anything though.”

  “You’re mine.”

  “But why I am I not like her?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know. She might have been the end. She might have been a random accident. I don’t know much about her past.”

  “You and me both.” I rested my forehead against his chest and listened to him breathe. He folded his arms over my bare back and stroked my spine with his thumb. “It’s a lot to ask me to believe.”

  “I know. I’ll answer any questions that I can. This is your world now.”

  “My father.” The words came tumbling out faster than I could stop them. “Do you know who he is?”

  He frowned. “No. I asked Rook if he knew, but he didn’t. There is something you should know though. Your last name, Moreau, it’s not Cora’s. It’s Alistair’s. Rook is his stage name.”

  “Wait, no, wait, what? Say that one more time. Slower. And in English.”

  Eli hesitated, then shook his head. “We don’t either. You’re not his, but he thinks perhaps she wanted you to have a name that meant something to her. She could have chosen any name in the world, but she chose the director of the carnival that she loved. I don’t think there was any name she’d have trusted more.”

  For some reason, I looked at my hands. They were the same as hers, except for their coloring. We both had the same narrow fingers, the same short nails. Once, after a particularly bad day at my new school, she placed my hand against hers, matched them almost perfect. She’d said, see, we’re not that different.

  She’d given me a last name as a gift.

  And it was better than the truth.

  �
��Thank you. For telling me.”

  “I wish I could tell you who he was. But to be honest, Alistair will never admit it, but I think he kind of likes the idea of you carrying his name.”

  I wanted to ask about Castel, but did not want to ruin this. Another night and I’d ask and he would tell me. But today I wanted to return to last night, play it over and over in my thoughts. Remember why I was sore in all the best places. Why I woke up with a bite mark on my shoulder and aching breasts. Why I felt such deep satisfaction in his arms.

  Rewind to the moment I told him I loved him. This stranger who I’d known in my heart for my whole life.

  * * *

  Katya held up a black and white striped dress to her body, elongated her neck, and stared at herself in one of Lily’s elaborate mirrors.

  “This would look awesome on me.”

  Lily didn’t glance up from her pile of hats. “You don’t have the chest.”

  “I have the chest,” she protested, lifting what little she had into her hands. “Look, I have a chest.”

  “You’ve got the chest of a pre-pubescent boy. Sorry K.” Micah gave her a look of pity before diving back into the back of Lily’s closet.

  Katya pouted and I couldn’t help but grin. I handed another garment back to Micah. “This goes in the back.”

  “Now, Sera’s got a chest. She’d fill out my dresses nicely.” Lily tapped her chin as she chose one hat, but disposed of another into the ‘donate’ pile. Not for the first time this morning I wondered about what Eli had said about knowing what she was. She was beautiful of course, gorgeous beyond words. She was the kind of beauty men wrote sonnets for. What strange, wonderful blood ran through her veins?

  “Let’s leave my chest out of this, shall we?”