Arda: The Captain's Fancy

by Annie Windsor

  But he isn’t fully Ardani, the last vestige of her better sense insisted. My brothers believe he is their enemy…

  Time and again, Weil used his energy ribbons to drive her toward the peak only to slow the pace and stimulation before she could explode in orgasm. She thought she would collapse if she didn’t achieve release, but his erotic bonds held her in place, stroking, pinching, thrusting until all she could do was moan incoherently.

  Eyes half-open, she met Weil’s wild yellow gaze.

  “My spirit knows you,” he repeated. “Speak your name, woman. Say what you know to be true.”

  “Krysta!” she screamed as the energy fingers pinched her nipples and circled her clit, all the while claiming her in the same rough, ruthless way she wanted this infuriating barbarian to make her his own. “Krysta shanna Darkyn Weil!”

  And with that, all stimulation stopped instantly.

  Krysta cried out with frustration and pain, needing to come so badly she thought she might die.

  Her wrists and ankles weren’t bound any longer.

  And Darkyn Weil—oh gods, her new soul’s mate, claimed legally and fully by the ancient rites—stood before her with his hands at his sides. The yellow stone in his chest cast light around her like a halo, and his pa coursed along its double-axe design as if blown by stellar winds.

  Before she could fall, he caught her in his strong, encompassing arms, and let her sag in his embrace. Krysta’s head drooped backward as he secured his grip around her waist and lifted her, until instinct drove her to fasten her legs around his midsection. She lay back against his arms, her breasts vulnerable to his mouth, her quim pressed against his lower belly, her thighs tight against his waist. Her hair streamed toward the floor, and she barely managed to reach up enough to grab his biceps.

  “Look at me, hallas.”

  Krysta didn’t want to comply, but she did, and she shuddered from both excitement and fear. Darkyn Weil’s eyes blazed so brightly she thought they might singe her skin. Holding her gaze, he lowered his head captured one jutting nipple in his mouth. The pressure of his teeth on the blazing pa made her moan uncontrollably, and he bit her harder then, and harder still until she shouted without knowing whether she wanted him to stop or not. Her clit felt too big for its flesh. The walls of her quim contracted, and she thought she might expire if he didn’t ease her suffering.

  He released her nipple but kept her gaze hostage. Krysta dug her nails into his arms, gasping, “Now. No more teasing.”

  “I decide when.” Weil—Darkyn, she told herself, Darkyn, my mate—didn’t blink. The heat from his stare stoked the flames of her pa, her passion, the juices warming her core. “My pleasure is your pleasure, and yours, mine. Be still or we stop here, now.”

  A scream of frustration rose in Krysta’s throat, but she held it back. No doubt if she argued, he’d put her down and walk away, mating fervor or no. This man was no slave to desire. He was no slave to anything…but she was close, damn close, to losing her own mind from primal mating urges.

  With sheer force of will, she forced back all demands, all pleading, all moaning and yelling, and stilled herself in Darkyn’s arms. The tip of his cock nudged her quim, only a hair’s breadth from filling her in one rough thrust. Krysta’s inner walls spasmed at the thought, but still she held herself in check. Unblinking, unmoving, she stared at her sha.

  The dark angles of his face were rigid with determination despite the fierce desire burning in his cat-like eyes. His scarred muscles felt like damp steel, containing her in a way she had never allowed herself to be contained.

  She felt…suspended. Outside of normal time. Outside of normal space. But definitely not outside of her body. She had never been more fully present in her own skin before, not in her entire adult life.

  “Tell me what you want, Krysta. My hallas. Tell me, now.”

  The command made her heart pound. She opened her mouth to speak, but found her voice hoarse and choked with need.

  “You,” she whispered. “I want your cock inside me.”

  “Past that.” Darkyn shifted her weight down a fraction, and Krysta felt the head of his cock just inside her aching core.

  Her thoughts jumbled together as her madness multiplied. Her nipples felt like fire-rocks, aching for his wet mouth. “I-I want to know you,” she stammered.

  “And past that?” Darkyn’s low rumble made her shiver.

  Krysta felt like the man was tearing apart all barriers between her essence and his. She wanted to fight him, to rage, to demand satisfaction or push him away, but the mating fervor drove her almost as hard as her deepest, unspoken desires.

  “I want to be whole,” she said in a rush. “I want a worthy match—I want my turn!”

  Darkyn’s lips parted, half-triumphant grin and half-carnal snarl. Krysta’s body drew tighter than a bowstring. He squeezed her hips, shifted her downward, and thrust upward, slamming his cock into her waiting quim with all the power she had imagined—and more.

  Krysta moaned and clenched her thighs hard as her slick walls pulsed against his splendid erection. He felt like rigid fire inside her, melting her insides and molding her to fit him and only him forever more. She heard him draw a breath of surprise as the pa on the lips of her quim made contact with his shaft. Then, he rumbled with delight.

  So did she.

  Her clit and pa-coated bush rubbed against his lower hair, sending spasms of pleasure up and down her body.

  She tried to call his name, or form the syllables to call him her mate, but found both too great an effort. All that came out of her mouth was a single, loud, “Yes!”

  Wrapped in that one word were a thousand assents and instant compromises. Darkyn’s corded muscles rippled, as if accepting every one and offering his own.

  “If you want me to beg…” she stammered, holding him tightly, squeezing and releasing his cock as he pumped in and out of her quim.

  “As my shanna, you beg no one for anything, ever again. Except me.” Darkyn’s voice sounded harsh, but Krysta heard his possessiveness, his desire, and it doubled her own. In the mating fervor, suffused by the same emotions that drove ancient berserker warriors to take on whole regiments of invaders, he could and would kill to protect her honor or please her whims.

  He rocked her against his heated flesh with each thrust, holding her high above the earth floor as if to show his absolute power. Her own fervor grew by the second, bringing out a cunning and aggression she had heard of but never experienced. She wanted to bite her mate, hard, everywhere, and claw him. She wanted to lay on her back, legs spread, while he pounded into her for hours. She wanted to pull his hair until he roared.

  This man was hers. No one else’s. She would blast anyone who came near to him, who tried to harm him or claim him.

  “Hallas,” he groaned before ramming himself deeper yet and biting first one nipple and then the other. Krysta shuddered with a small orgasm, and he did it again, this time plunging to the center of her body, all the while biting harder and sucking. She came again, shivering from the fullness of his penetration, the heat of his teeth on her sensitive flesh.

  Darkyn lifted her nearly-limp body up and down his shaft, pumping and thrusting his hips with each motion. His strength was amazing. His hot, pulsing cock even more amazing.

  Krysta managed to grip his shoulders and pull herself forward as he repeatedly drove into her quim. She fell against him, chest to chest, and their pa mingled with a loud crackle and snap.

  They both let out sharp cries at the depth of the sensation. Krysta’s whole being shook, and she felt Darkyn bucking against her from the pure electrical energy.

  Somehow, he fucked her deeper then, with ever-harder thrusts, lifting her hips and bringing her down exactly where he wanted her. Their mouths joined, tongues mimicking the motions below.

  His mouth tasted like paradise and cool water, wetting her dry tongue, soothing her parched lips before he pulled back and whispered, “Come for me.”

  Krysta’s
pa snapped as he raised her hips and brought them down hard against him, his cock plumbing ever deeper.

  “I want to hear you scream. Come for me, Krysta. Now!”

  Her body answered him with shudders that seemed to begin in her toes and spread up, up, to her filled, aching quim, sailing along her pa to her breasts, her neck, her face. Screaming uncontrollably, she thrashed in his embrace until the molten jets of his answering orgasm shot deeper still into her waiting core.

  Her soul’s mate, her sha, bellowed as her walls contracted on his cock, squeezing until he spent himself completely.

  Then he sank to his knees, keeping her impaled upon his indeed fearsome weapon. Her ass resting on his thighs, she lay against his shoulder, glorying in his forceful yet tender embrace.

  For that moment, at least, her body had reached complete ease, and Krysta had a sense of homecoming she didn’t expect. She had never before had sex without a psi-connection, and yet this man could be no more connected to her if he lived at the center of her soul.

  “My spirit knows you,” she murmured. “munas, made of stone.”

  “Darkyn Weil, sha Krysta—I don’t know your family name.” He kissed the top of her head. “My hallas, now and always.”

  Even in her sated stupor, Krysta had to fight not to tense. She had known the truth before, from what Akad said and showed her, but reality didn’t strike until that moment.

  Her new and properly bound mate had no idea he had just wed the enemy. Akad hadn’t told him, and neither had she.

  She opened her mouth to force out the words, but instead buried her face deeper into his neck and sobbed.

  Chapter 6

  Darkyn Weil knew his mind, his skin, had to be aflame, yet the burning came from within. Already, his cock grew stiff and demanding, still captured in the welcome of his new mate’s pa-lined quim. Her lower lips felt like slowly working tongues against his erection, maddening his flesh in a way he hadn’t before imagined.

  And then she was crying, cradled safe in his arms, protected from all that might harm her.

  Tears. Darkyn searched his thoughts desperately as he pressed his lips against the brow of his hallas, trying to find the source of her unease. Ancient instincts flared and roared, demanding that he maim and slay whoever caused her pain. As his heartbeat doubled in speed, he ground his teeth and contemplated the fact that he could easier handle an army of miscreant cousins than a flicker of sadness from this woman.

  “I wish we could speak mind to mind,” Krysta whispered against his ear, her voice heavy with emotions.

  With a woman’s secrets, a woman’s passions.

  She sighed. “I wish I could give you what I feel.”

  “Is that why you cry?” He heard the husk in his own voice as he shifted her hips, positioned his cock in her pleasing depths, and gazed into her glistening eyes.

  Krysta didn’t answer. Instead, she bit the flesh between his ear and throat with a ferocity he didn’t expect.

  Darkyn grunted in response, convulsively thrusting deeper into her quim and drawing a satisfying shudder from his hallas. The musk of her satiation and redoubling arousal blotted out most rational thought. He barely had time to realize how short-lived had been his relief from the relentless drive of his mating fervor before his lips found hers and the cycle began again.

  Krysta caressed the sides of his face, his shoulders, the back of his head as he plied her tongue with his own. It felt so right to be joined with her, mouth to mouth, cock to quim, pa to pa. The stone in his chest accepted the touch of her flesh as if she were his blood-family.

  Taking care to cause her no pain, he eased her backward until she lay on the floor beneath him, then rested between her thighs. The warmth of her eyes drew him closer, but he thought he could see flickers of sadness—maybe even fear. Each tore at his heart in ways he scarcely understood, penetrating the fog of mating desire just enough to allow a single question.

  “What troubles you?” He kissed the soft hollow of her cheek.

  She kept her fingers in his hair as she drew a slow, quiet breath. “I never expected—so fast—you don’t know me, Darkyn Weil.”

  Darkyn inhaled her bayflower scent and rocked forward, pushing his cock deeper into her channel. “I am learning,” he said earnestly as she moaned.

  The next time she looked at him, it was with the same blind passion he felt. The sweet wine of her kisses, the wet heat of her walls around his cock, the way her mark joined with his own at every possible point made his blood run as hot as the drylands sun.

  He trailed his fingers down her cheek and ear, moving his hand to the earth beside her head. Another kiss, and he placed his other hand in a similar position. Braced above her, holding himself against her skin but supporting his own weight, he began a slower, wordless claiming ritual.

  “Mine,” he managed in a belly-delving growl. “You…are…mine.”

  Did the ancients feel like this when they mated?

  Each time his cock thrust forward, Krysta groaned and pushed up to meet his stroke. Behind them, the natural pool let out long hisses of steam, mingling fresh water with the salt of their sweat until they moved together like matched currents, flowing, ebbing, breaking, then flowing anew.

  Darkyn ceased understanding or caring where he finished and she began. The urge to possess her was total. The drive to please her complete. Rekindled desire scorched him as he picked up speed, burying his cock to his bollocks each time, roaring with each of Krysta’s heady moans. She seemed so slight, to take him so easily. A warrior, yes, to welcome a man in fervor without fear, and meet that fervor with her own.

  Her nipples rubbed against his chest, the pa coating on the right one snapping with every rocking thrust. He shifted her hips closer, and it was that nipple that brushed his stone, and each time, he caught the tip of her thoughts.

  Deep…

  Ah, gods…

  Perfect…

  These inner moans drove him harder. He held her head pinned between his forearms and gazed full into her eyes, almost daring her sadness and reserve to return.

  It did not.

  As he drove his cock home again and again, she offered only ecstatic acceptance, joy, and increasing fervor.

  In the old days, Darkyn might have been a wolf, and he would have howled. A bear, and he would have clawed his own chest and bellowed. A greenwild cat, and he would have shrieked his triumph loud enough to rattle the vines and bend the trees. As a man, he simply bared his teeth and rumbled his delight at how she felt, how she smelled, how she looked, at the goodness and truth and passion he sensed each time he touched her thoughts.

  She closed her eyes, her body a complete extension of his, or his an extension of hers. “Fuck me,” she half-yelled, using an odd word.

  Darkyn didn’t understand the term, but well grasped its meaning and how it pleasured his mate to use it.

  Krysta grasped her ankles, pulling up her legs to take him deeper.

  Darkyn obliged with a louder roar of pleasure. The world around him blurred to nothing, leaving only the exotic blend of dark and light that was his new shanna, his hallas.

  She came with a scream then a sigh, clenching his cock in the burning well of her quim. He could do nothing but follow her, spilling himself like a boy-man with no control over his own body. She took his control, this Ardani she-witch, and he gave it over without protest. It belonged to her. He belonged to her, and she to him. He knew truth in that instant, as he barely shifted his weight before collapsing beside her and wrapping her in his arms. He knew the future would be none of what he had planned before seeing her.

  He had touched her now, Krysta, his mate, his made-of-fire lover. He had known her pleasures, her wants and needs. He had found emotions he thought he had been born without, and he knew he could never leave her.

  Yet, even as he drifted toward sleep, his guilt rose to protest that line of thinking. The part of Darkyn that had been Ta’Tanna Kon’pa since he was but a boy called him weak, told him he was s
urrendering the lives of his people for his own pleasure.

  Will you sleep and rut while the universe wails? Will you give over your life’s purpose for the weakness of the flesh?

  Will you for once be silent and trust the patterns of the universe? Not all things lie within your hands, Darkyn Weil.

  That last admonishment came in a genderless, ageless voice not unlike that of his mother, or his father, or the leaders through the centuries, all the way back to the Great Migration. He had heard it before, and always obeyed it. He felt as if he couldn’t disrespect it, as if it came from somewhere…beyond.

  From the time before time, when all of Arda yet followed the old ways, those who knew, the old ones, the wise ones, sent The People to Uhr to preserve the mix of blood, to accomplish the most important task in history. The time is near at hand. What am I doing here, with this woman, straying from the path so clearly laid before me?

  Hush, said the always-obeyed voice, which at times seemed singular, and other times seemed to be the twining of three. Or twice that. Six. Yes, six. Tend your heart. Mun’halla, Darkyn Weil. The stone that burns cannot be denied.

  Krysta shifted in his embrace and sighed, and the crystalline sound vibrated through Darkyn’s fervor-besotted brain. He felt cleaved and caught between the undeniable and the unforgivable.

  Ignoring the twist in his gut, he drew his mate closer still and kissed the top of her head. The admonishments of the forceful voice settled in his gut, and he allowed the possibility that there were things he hadn’t foreseen. He also allowed the possibility that those things might not be all bad.

  Indeed. How could I be anywhere but here? Or with anyone but her?

  Darkyn fell asleep, unable to answer those questions.

  He woke, still unable to answer them—and after that, quickly lost track of time and space. They moved about the house like a joined beast, on this floor, or that chair, finally wending around to his bed, where they seemed to belong. The yellow-white of day blended with night’s subtle gray without changing his focus in the slightest. Other than to eat and bathe, he had one activity, one obsession.