“Daarik,” she murmured.
“There will be little time for this if it all comes to war,” Daarik said. With the hand that wasn’t twined in her hair, he gently traced his fingers down the front of her throat, down her breastbone, his enormous hand resting heavily between her breasts. Shannen could barely breathe.
“There is time now,” she whispered. His gaze darkened, and he turned their bodies so that he was on top of her, his bulk settling onto her heavily, maddeningly, pressing her body into the mattress. She could feel his erection, the hardness pressing into her lower belly, and she was ready to tear the clothes from his body.
“There will never be enough time with you, wife,” he said, leaning down and kissing, then gently biting the side of her neck. She gasped and bucked beneath him. “But we’ll do our best.”
Chapter Thirteen
Daarik made short work of her clothing, and before she knew how it happened, she was there, naked before him as he knelt over her. He still wore the black leather armor he always wore, and that, in combination with her own undressed state, made it all feel somehow more dangerous, more exciting. Shannen could feel her breath coming in quick huffs, her heart racing as his dark eyes took her in, lingering for an almost indecent amount of time on her full breasts, the tuft of hair at the apex of her thighs.
“Daarik?” she finally whispered.
“I’m just wondering what to do with you first,” he murmured, still taking her in. “I’ve spent so much time imagining all the things I want to do to you, it’s like a dream to have you like this.”
Shannen tried to squeeze her thighs together, any kind of friction to stop the maddening ache there, but she couldn’t because of the way he was kneeling between her knees. He ran a large, calloused hand from her throat, down to her chest, grazing the side of one breast. She let out a helpless moan, and he responded with a low laugh that had her stomach fluttering. He continued running his hand down her body, over the curve of her waist, the flare of her hips. He rested his palm heavily on her stomach, and it was ridiculous how much that touch, which should have been nothing at all, was more erotic than it had any right to be.
“Daarik,” she breathed.
He was utterly focused on her, staring at her. Her nipples tightened more under his hungry appraisal, the ache and wetness between her legs growing more maddening. And still, all he did was watch her, one hand resting on the curve of her waist, that other hand resting on her stomach, a weight that was driving her slowly but surely insane.
And when his fingers gently traced a searing line down her abdomen, over her mound, and to where she’d been aching for him to touch her, she nearly cried in gratitude. Just as he had on their wedding night, their consummation, he handled her body expertly, his fingers quickly bringing her to the brink of release. And when he lowered his head and captured one aching nipple between his teeth, she fell apart with a strangled cry, thrusting her hips toward his hand, needing more even as she drowned in release. He bit down on her nipple, not exactly gently, and she moaned.
“Harder,” she begged.
He flicked his tongue over her breast, then gave the same attention to the other one. “Harder? Where? Here?” he asked, biting her nipple, making her arch her back, pushing her breasts toward his mouth greedily. “Or here?” He pushed one thick, calloused finger inside her, pumping it in and out of her a few times, and she cried out.
“Where, Shannen?” Daarik repeated as he continued to drive her mad.
“Everywhere,” she begged. “I need you.”
He rewarded her by adding a second thick finger, scissoring them inside her until everything tightened and she lost control, screaming as he continued torturing her. She felt his fangs biting at the side of her breast, and the bite of pain was everything she never knew she wanted. She pushed her hips toward him, helping him as he worked her.
“This. This is what I’ve been dreaming of with you,” he growled. “Out of control and needy. Where is your cool disposition now, Shannen? Where is that haughty, uncaring act you pull off so well?” He pumped his fingers into her hard a few more times while she ground her hips into his hand. She was chasing another release, nearly there, when he sat back and removed his fingers from her.
“Daarik,” she begged, opening her eyes. He stood up and motioned her to him.
“Undress me,” he demanded, and she obeyed, crawling across the rumpled, twisted bedding, kneeling at the edge of the mattress as she started unbuckling his armor with shaking hands. Every sensation — his warm breath at the side of her neck, the heat emanating from his body, her hair brushing against her aching, tender breasts every time she moved — was enough to drive her mad.
She worked frantically, dying now to see her husband’s body for the first time, completely unclothed. After a few frenzied moments, she had everything off of his muscled body, and he kicked his boots off, then stood before her.
He was glorious. Stone gray skin over hard muscle, giving him the look of one of the statues near her uncle’s palace. A dusting of black hair covered his chest, trailing off into a dark line down his stomach, leading to the one part of his body she’d seen before now, and it was just as impressive as it had been on their wedding night. She remembered well the feeling of him filling her, thrusting into her, so full she felt she’d nearly burst. He watched her as she looked him over. He wore the scars of battle as well, long scars down his arms, a jagged one marring the flesh of his right shoulder. She glanced up at his face. His eyes were dark as he watched her study him, his breathing short, shallow.
She reached out and gently ran her fingertips over his erect length, and he let out a low growl. When she grasped him in her hand, she could barely get her fingers all the way around him. He bucked his hips forward at her touch.
He buried his hands in her hair, pulling, not exactly gently, as he pulled her head back and lowered his face to hers. “Don’t stop touching me,” he demanded.
She nodded, and worked her hand along the length of him as he captured her lips in a hungry, almost violent kiss. Everything — his mouth on hers, his hands buried, pulling her hair, even the way he pushed into her hand as she worked him, spoke of ownership, and she wanted it.
Very soon, he pulled away and laid her back on the bed.
“This time, I’ll be able to see the look in your eyes when I take you,” he said in a low voice. He pushed her legs open and settled between them. “Keep your eyes on mine. There are no secrets between us here, no hiding. Yes?”
She nodded, unable to form words, the sensation of his hardness resting at her entrance enough to drive her completely mad. He twined his fingers with hers, pressing her hands back into the mattress at either side of her head as he pressed lightly into her.
“Don’t go slowly,” she begged.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t. Please. Hard. Fast. Please,” she begged. He swore, and then obliged her, thrusting all the way into her, hard, and she cried out as a potent mix of pain and pleasure washed over her.
“Okay?”
“Again,” she begged. He did, drawing another strangled cry from her, and after that, he needed no more prompting, pumping his hips hard, fast as she wrapped her legs around his hips.
“Look at me,” he ordered when she closed her eyes, and she did. The focused, determined look his face took her breath away. Soon, she was thrashing beneath him, meeting each hard, deep thrust with an answering rise of her hips, wanting, needing more of him even as her body ached under the onslaught.
“Please,” she begged, out of her mind, and he seemed to know what she wanted. He hooked his arms under her knees, opening her wider, gaining deeper access, and he ground himself, hard, into her aching center. She screamed as her building orgasm finally broke, and his thrusts became harder, faster, less controlled. Her orgasm seemed to last forever, and, finally, he followed her, shouting her name as she felt his hot seed spill inside of her.
And still he kept thrusting, wringing every last
possible bit of pleasure from her before flipping her exhausted body over and taking her from behind while she held onto the edge of the mattress for dear life.
“I can’t. I can’t,” she begged, and then she let out a strangled cry as she went over the edge again. He gave her one last hard, deep thrust, and then settled onto the bed, pulling her next to him, his front to her back, still deep inside her aching body. He tweaked and pinched her nipples as they tried to catch their breath.
“I am not going to be able to walk right for a week, at least,” Shannen said once she was able to. He pinched her nipple roughly, and she drew in a harsh breath.
“I see no problem with that. It means you’ll be spending more time in bed, maybe,” Daarik said in a low voice.
“I’d forgotten that you carry a veritable tree trunk in your pants, husband,” Shannen said with a grimace, and Daarik laughed, wrapping his arms around her waist and drawing her closer.
“Shannen,” he murmured a while later.
“Yes?” she asked sleepily.
“We’re going to do that often.”
She smiled. “I was hoping you would say that,” she answered, and he nuzzled his face into the side of her neck. “It will be a good stress reducer,” she added.
“There will be plenty of that, I’m sure,” he said. He rubbed his hand over the curve of her hip, raising gooseflesh with each stroke.
“I am with you in whatever comes next. You know that, yes?” she asked.
She felt him nod. “I know. And I thank you. If I can find any way to avoid war, I’ll do it. We really don’t need to be fighting among ourselves. We still need to create actual peace with your people, not these half-measures we have now.”
“I agree.” She turned so she could look at him. “I am assuming that when the Maarlai find a way to leave this world, you will bring the humans with you.”
“Of course. Assuming any of them want to come with us. We need to build trust. We have bonds now, we have treaties. Your uncle continues to encourage hatred and violence toward us—”
“Which you are doing an admirable job of trying to thwart. I wanted you to know that I appreciate that,” Shannen said.
“Whether any of us like it or not, we will have to work together if we’re to save ourselves. We can’t be fighting a war with the humans, or even dealing with these constant insurrections and raids, and also try to concentrate on training our people to port elsewhere.”
“Let alone a war among your own people,” Shannen murmured.
Daarik nodded.
“I will try to find a way to bring my uncle and his court to their senses,” she said slowly, thinking. “I know he can’t be blamed for every stupid act our people undertake against yours, but the rhetoric from the palace certainly doesn’t dissuade them from them, either.”
“I know there’s not much you can do there. Your uncle and my father. Too stubborn for their own good. Or the good of the people who depend upon them, for that matter.”
Shannen nodded, then ran her fingers through his hair, which had come out of the low tail he usually wore it in during their lovemaking.
“Life would be a bit simpler if our two people could interbreed. Nothing ties people together like children,” she murmured.
Daarik shook his head. “No such luck there. One of my ancestors fell for a human, at least as far as family lore is concerned, and she fell for him. They were together, secretly, for years. No children. The rare times a Maarlai has taken a human lover, the result has been the same.”
“I had no idea that had happened at all,” she said.
“As I said, it has been rare. Only a few cases that we know of. And not a single birth. For all our bodies seem to fit together well, nothing else seems to work as it should.”
“So we will have to bind the Maarlai and my people together in the one thing they both have,” Shannen said.
“What is that?”
“Desperation,” she answered. “We work together, or we all die here. And every second we spend at odds brings us an instant closer to annihilation.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I was angry with you for not being more open with me, and I was keeping my own set of issues from you. I was publicly supporting my father. He believes we can fix Earth once your people eventually die out. And even though you are reproducing much slower than you once did, he forgets that, as I mentioned, we aren’t reproducing at all, not anymore. Your people will outlast mine, just by pure numbers. But the Maarlai are the only chance of all of us getting out of here alive.”
Shannen nodded.
“We have much work to do,” she said.
“I know you were irritated that I decided not to go after Jarvik,” he said. “It was a good idea.”
“I would just like to remind you of your own words. We do not have time for delays. We need to remove sources of strife, not coddle them,” Shannen said.
“If he becomes too much of an issue, we’ll reconsider the option. I want to believe he and my father will come to their senses.”
“How likely do you really think that is, Daarik?”
He sighed. “I know. But we have to try.”
Shannen didn’t answer for quite a while. “Well, he is old. He may not be long for this world anyway,” she said quietly.
Daarik nodded. “True. He’s even older than my father.”
They fell into silence again, Shannen still curled against Daarik’s body, his arms strong and solid around her waist.
Old. He’s very old, she thought to herself. She ran her fingertips along Daarik’s muscular arm. It would likely take more than the tiniest of pushes.
If it came to that, of course.
She snuggled back into Daarik, and he pressed a kiss to her shoulder. He moved his hand from around her waist and gently started tracing his fingertips over her back, pulling back from her just a little. She shivered at his touch.
“Where did you get these?” he asked quietly. “Scars like these are not something you expect to find marring the flesh of a princess.”
He continued tracing them, line after line, and she closed her eyes. “I was not an easy child,” she finally said.
“I can’t imagine that you could have done anything that warranted these,” he said. He gently nudged her so that she was lying on her stomach, and she felt him rise next to her in bed. Instead of his fingertips, now she felt his lips tracing each line on her back. “Tell me.”
She closed her eyes and relished the way he was making her feel.
“I was fourteen,” she said quietly. “My uncle introduced me to some minor lordling, surprising me with his presence at dinner one evening. He told me that I would be marrying the man once I turned sixteen. He was a pious man, and he insisted on a pure, innocent wife.”
He’d continued kissing his way over her scars, and was now near her lower back. She trembled when he licked his way over one scar, to another. “I decided that if purity was what mattered to him, it was the only thing in my power to take away. I snuck out that very night and propositioned the first guard I saw. Less than ten minutes later, I was no longer pure. The next morning, I confessed it to my uncle.”
“Did he do it then?”
Shannen shook her head. “He told the man, and apologized. Part of the marriage contract was to have been all of the minor warlords that fell under the man’s domain. They would have joined the army, and my uncle badly needed the soldiers at the time. So with the marriage contract broken, the man rescinded the offer of his warlords. My uncle was forced to surrender a few days later, outmanned and overpowered. When he arrived back at the palace, the first thing he did was summon me.”
She stopped talking, remembering walking into the throne room, her uncle with the whip in his hand, the rough way his guards tied her to one of the columns that flanked the throne.
“It seemed to go on forever,” she whispered. “He went on and on about how I’d lost the war for him, that I’d destroyed his chances to finally
beat Elrek. After the first few lashes, I was in so much pain I wanted to die, but I was also so angry I wanted to live just to spite him. I told him that he would have lost anyway, because he was nowhere near the king my father had been.”
“Shannen,” Daarik murmured.
“Yes. The punishment went on quite a bit longer after that. It wasn’t until my aunt begged him to stop that he finally threw the whip aside and stalked out. He kept trying to make marriage deals for me, to anyone who would have me, but every time, the deals fell apart as word of my promiscuous ways reached my prospective grooms. Until you. He was almost gleeful when he told me that I would be coming here. He said he hoped you chose me, because then maybe I would appreciate what he had tried to do for me.”
Daarik kissed his way back up her spine, then held her for a long time, his heavy body resting over hers. “It would be an honor to kill him myself, just for putting you through that.”
“Maybe someday you will,” Shannen said. Daarik kissed the side of her neck, growled a few things in his language in her ear as he cupped her breasts.
“What did you just say?” she asked on a gasp.
“I said, ‘mine.’” And when he entered again, they both groaned in agony and she was forced to agree that she did indeed belong to him in every way that mattered.
Chapter Fourteen
When Shannen woke up, the sun was shining brightly through the window and Daarik’s side of the bed was empty. She smiled when she realized that the blankets were tucked snugly around her body. She burrowed beneath the covers, her mind still in a state of lazy satisfaction. Her body was still exhausted. She could still feel the aftereffects of Daarik’s enthusiastic lovemaking. She blushed, remembering the way he’d been with her, and then she laughed at herself, blushing like a virgin after sex. It was almost too ridiculous.
Still chuckling, Shannen tossed the blankets aside and padded to the small wash room. The cool late morning air made goosebumps rise on her naked flesh, though she knew this coolness would not last. This day, like every other, would be hot, dry, and dusty, even in the middle of the forest. As she washed and dressed, then braided her hair, she thought back to the less-pleasant parts of the previous night. Undoubtedly, Daarik was holed up somewhere with Baerne and his other trusted warriors. He’d told her he would likely be with them all day.
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