He shifted so she could guide his cock into her. The sweet heat of her, the slick feel
of her sheath enclosing him was the closest thing to heaven he knew he would ever
experience. He slid into her moistness with his eyes closed tight, his breath held.
Though every instinct screamed at him to take her hard, to take her quickly, to
carve a niche for himself within her, to master her with that fleshy tool, he held back
and very slowly and with great care began to move gently inside her.
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Lea sensed the shifting of his feelings from immediate gratification to loving
restraint and she eased her arms around his shoulders, holding him closely to her.
“I love you, Bevyn Coure,” she whispered in his ear, drawing his earlobe between
her teeth, her tongue lightly plying the interior.
Bevyn shivered at that feeling and increased the depth of his penetration just a little,
though he held himself in check, kept his body from crushing her as heavily as it had a
moment before. He was bracing his body above her, his hands doubled into fists, his
weight resting upon them.
In and out with slow, precise strokes that brought warm honey to coat his shaft. He
felt as though he were sinking into the purest of pleasures and the ache that he was
experiencing in his rod was so intense, so powerful, sweat was popping out all over his
body along with the gooseflesh.
Lea lightly dug her nails into his back to speed up his thrusts. She was aching for
him to ride her, to grind against her and she lifted her hips in invitation.
“Slowly, wench,” he said through clenched teeth. “I want it to last.”
She smiled against his neck, her lips trailing along his salty flesh. “I am here for the
duration, milord,” she replied. “Make it last as long as you wish.”
She was his, he thought as he felt her words drive straight to his libido. She was
entirely his—no one else’s—and she had given herself completely to him. It was such an
exhilarating feeling he experienced at that moment, he thought he might well be able to
do anything he set his mind to.
But the moment she lapped at the vein pumping so furiously in his neck, the exact
instant that warm, wetness stroked over his skin, he could not restrain the wild emotion
that reached out to grip him. His entire body itched to thrust into her. His cock
hardened to the point it was acutely painful and he had no choice but to pump into her
with strong, sure strokes that had the bed beneath them rocking.
“I’ve got to remember that,” Lea mumbled to herself for the next time she wanted
to spur her Reaper on.
She brought her legs up and locked them together behind his waist. Her arms held
him surely—a willing captive to her sweet scent and honeyed flesh. Her fingernails dug
a bit deeper into the flesh of his back.
“Ahh, Lea!” he groaned with deep satisfaction, his speed increasing, his thrusts
coming hard now and deep.
In the parlor, Cornelia glanced up at the ceiling where the chandelier was swaying
to the motion of what was happening in the smaller of her two spare bedrooms. There
was a soft bumping sound, muffled grunts, a soft little whimper. The black woman’s
chubby face broke into a wide grin and she chuckled lightly as she snapped the two
halves of the newspaper spread in her hands and continued reading.
* * * * *
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Penthe had followed the Reaper on foot, running along as swiftly, tirelessly and
professionally as she had trained on her world to perform. Though he was well ahead
of her, she kept his scent in her nostrils and followed the trail unerringly. It helped that
she already knew where he was going—had followed him there before—so when he
outdistanced her, it didn’t matter.
The town was silent when at last she entered it. She spied her target coming out of
the stable then striding quickly to the dark one’s house. A ripe moon had burst forth
and was hovering golden red on the eastern horizon, lighting a path for him. There was
no wind by which he could catch her scent, but from the way he walked—barefoot and
shirtless—she knew his mind was elsewhere and not on her. As she made her way to
the dark woman’s house and looked up at the window behind which she knew the
Reaper would be.
She sniffed the air and the odor of spent sex came to her from the open window and
her lips twisted. Kennocha was no doubt rolling over in her grave knowing the priest
had freely given a woman what her ancestor had demanded of him so long ago.
“No longer pure, are you, Reaper?” Penthe snarled, her fingernails digging into her
palms. “You’ve taken a mate.”
Thoughts of the pale woman she had seen walking beside Coure earlier that day
flitted over Penthe’s mind. She wasn’t much, the Blackwind surmised. Short, her
muscles flaccid, her abilities worthless—the human female was useless in Penthe’s
mind. She would be no match at all for Penthe’s superior warrioress’ skills should it
come to hand-to-hand combat.
Not that the human female would fight for the Reaper. To even contemplate such a
thing was ridiculous and Penthe grimaced. A frail being like the one called Lea would
not pose a challenge and was to be left alone. It would be punishment enough for the
inadequate being to lose the Reaper to Penthe’s Dóigra. The ineffectual creature was to
be pitied not harmed. She was—when all was said and done—a female and deserving
of some manner of protection, the Blackwind reasoned. It was not her fault she had
succumbed to the dangerous black arts of the Reaper.
Glancing around her, Penthe decided to bed down in the stables with the mounts.
She needed shelter and had no compunction about sharing space with her equine
brethren. Stealthily, she made her way to the livery and slipped quickly inside, having
no trouble finding the Reaper’s mount among those stabled. She entered Préachán’s
stall and ran an expert hand over the black horse’s withers.
“You are a worthy steed,” she said, hugging the great head to her breast. “I shall
claim you when I have taken the Reaper’s head.”
* * * * *
After using a washrag to bathe his dirty feet, Bevyn waved away his pants and
climbed back into bed with his woman.
“All settled for the night?” she asked him.
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“I would have felt terrible if I had left him tied to Cornelia’s fence,” Bevyn said of
his horse. “I gave him some hay and a bucket of water.” He chuckled. “If I know
Préachán, he’ll have overturned the bucket by now.”
“What does his name mean?” she asked, snuggling up to her Reaper.
“It is an old Chalean word meaning ‘crow’,” he replied, and reached up to touch the
tattoo on the side of his face. “It is also the name of my clan tat.”
“Milord?” she asked softly. “Why is it you have the Coure marking? Did you learn
who your father was?”
She didn’t think he was going to answer her. His arm had tightened around her and
she could hear him grinding his teeth. She decided if he did not wish to tell her, she
would no
t ask again for obviously it was something that disturbed him.
“It was Morrigunia who told me who my father was,” he said at last, and his body
was as stiff as a board beside her. “It was She who had both tattoos put on me. Had it
not been by Her hand, neither would have stayed upon my flesh, for anything that was
not there before I Transitioned would heal.”
“Will you tell me of your father?” she asked.
Again he was silent for a long time. “I never met him so I only have second-hand
information,” he said at last. “He was dead long before I was born. I was told he died in
battle but Morrigunia did not believe him worthy of resurrecting.”
He pushed himself up in the bed, leaning back against the headboard, pulling her
up to sit beside him. She saw him look down at her and through the faint glow of the
moonlight shimmering through the window, his face was expressionless.
“I will tell you this but once and then we will never speak of it again,” he stated.
“All right,” she said, holding his dark gaze for a moment before he turned his head
and appeared to be staring across the silent room.
“There are twelve primary clans that are dear to the goddess’s heart,” he said.
“Clans She reckons worthy of Her protection and help. She safeguards those clans,
makes sure they survive from one generation to the next, one world to the next. They
are not all in one universe but spread out in what She calls the megaverse. She calls
them WindWorlds. From those twelve clans, She chooses those She will make Reapers
and those whom She will make Shadowlords. Some clans have both Reapers and
Shadowlords and some have only one or the other.
“Ben-Alkazar, Belvoir and Tarnes are always Shadowlords while Gehdrin, Kiel,
Cree, Tohre, Kullen, Belial and Coure are always Reapers. The Jaborn and Sorn clans
can have both. There are other clans She has given Reaper powers but they are not as
important to Her as what She calls the Dháréag, the Twelve.”
“Dháréag,” Lea repeated.
“It is not spoken of, wench,” he warned her. “That is to be kept between us.”
She nodded. “I understand, milord.”
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“I don’t know how my fellow Reapers met their fate, if they knew they were of the
Dháréag before or after their Transitions by having the tribal tat placed on their faces.
For all I know, I may be the only one who was marked during my rebirth. What I know
of the man who sired me was that he was a prick of the highest order and I was a
product of rape.” He rubbed his fingers over his right eye. “When I asked the goddess
why my mother did not attempt to expel me from her womb, She said She would not
have permitted that to happen. She said She knew I was the one She would want from
the moment of my conception and that She had kept me safe.”
“So it was not truly by chance the priests came by where you had been abandoned,”
Lea said.
“I guess not,” he said, not having thought of that.
“Were they good to you, milord?” she asked.
“The priests?” He shook his head. “No, wench, they were not. The Brotherhood of
the Domination is not known for being good to its members. Pain and humiliation is
beaten into the novices in order to make them strong or to break them. Either way, the
brothers gain.”
“What did…?”
“I won’t speak of my time at the monastery,” he said. “Not now and not ever. Let it
suffice to say I was glad to have been sent from there to Rathlin until I found myself in
hands nearly as evil as the brothers.”
He was silent for a long time after that. Lea said nothing, giving him the time he
needed to come to terms with whatever memories their talk had dredged up for him.
When at last his body relaxed and his desperate hold upon her eased, he placed a gentle
kiss on the top of her head.
“I am grateful I have you, sweeting,” he said. “That is all that matters to me.”
“A lot was done on the house today,” she said, her palm flat on his chest, feeling his
stalwart heart beating strongly against it. “I think you’ll be pleased.”
“It can’t be finished quickly enough for me,” he said. “I like sleeping beside you
and if our taskmistress won’t allow it beneath her roof, I’d just as soon move back over
to Mable’s until our place is finished.”
Lea tucked her lower lip between her teeth, wondering why he had not mentioned
the surest way to remedy Cornelia’s restriction. Perhaps, she thought, he did not want
to tie himself down to her with a Joining.
“It isn’t that,” he said, easily reading her mind.
She craned her neck to look up at him. “Can I ask why then?”
“Two reasons,” he said. “One, I’m already in deep enough trouble with the High
Council for having taken you to mate without first garnering their permission.”
“Bevyn!” she gasped. “You didn’t tell me that!”
He shrugged. “It’s not all that bad. The punishment should be miniscule but—”
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“Punishment?” she echoed. “What are you talking about? What kind of
punishment?”
The Reaper sighed. “Sweeting, don’t concern yourself about it,” he said. “It will be
negligible. Trust me.”
“Bevyn…” she said, her eyes clouding with fear.
“I’ll no doubt spend a week in one of the containment cells,” he said. “Solitary
confinement. That’s all it means.”
“No pain?” she asked.
“No pain,” he lied, knowing full well that week would be spent without tenerse or
Sustenance. It would be a minor hell but well worth it in his estimation.
If he was allowed to keep her.
He refused to consider otherwise.
“You promise?” she whispered.
“They are not going to torture me, wench,” he said with a laugh. “Just punish me
for acting rashly. Now had I compounded the issue with taking you to legal wife or
transferring one of my hellions to—”
“No!” Lea snapped, pushing away from him. “That you will never do!”
“I have said I wouldn’t and I won’t,” he said. He soothed her, running his hand
down her arm.
“Swear to me, Bevyn,” she said, and he realized she was trembling.
“I will not give you one of my fledglings, sweeting,” he vowed. “On my love for
you, I swear I will never do that.”
And without doing so, he knew he could never legally Join with her. He would not
take the chance of leaving her his widow without the protection of a parasite to keep
her safe. A leman, a mistress, was one thing. A wife was something entirely different in
his world.
Lea calmed and returned her cheek to his shoulder—twirling a strand of his chest
hair around and around her index finger. “Just the thought of having one of those
beasties inside me scares me to death, milord,” she mumbled.
“I know,” he acknowledged.
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Chapter Seven
Hiding in the stable loft, Penthe watched the men going to work on the shell of a
house being built nearby. She crunched a couple of apples she’d found in a bin for her
The Reaper had been up at dawn—his paltry human female alongside him—and
Penthe could not help but admire the pure male beauty that was his as he began work.
He had come out without his shirt and in denim jeans instead of the black leather that
was part of his uniform. She thought his ass fit the jeans exceedingly well, the material
lovingly cupping the strong muscles. Sweat was already glistening down his heavily
muscled chest and she wondered what it would taste like to run her tongue over that
trickling stream.
Though she knew he was off limits as far as breeding material went—Reapers only
begat males since their tainted seed would not allow them to create females—she
regaled herself with fantasies of chaining him to a breeding bed and raping his
magnificent body over and over again, drawing that very substantial seed from a cock
she knew would be just as glorious as the rest of him. Oh the sons they would make!
But that was indeed a fantasy—and a forbidden one at that—for to bring more
Reaper males into the world would be a sin against her Amazeen heritage.
While it seemed as if the entire town had gathered around the house Penthe
overheard was going to be the Reaper’s abode, the Blackwind climbed down from the
loft and went in search of something more substantial to fill her belly. She managed to
gather quite an assortment of foodstuffs in a basket—along with several bottles of
water—before slinking back to her hiding place, stretching out to watch the building
construction.
Off to one side, the human female was sitting with several like herself but Penthe
noticed her gaze was never far from the Reaper. The one called Lea was giving off a
scent the Blackwind could not miss and apparently it did not miss Coure’s attention
either for he kept sending the female heated looks that no one else seemed to catch.
“She is your world, isn’t she, Reaper?” Penthe quietly questioned as she swung her
attention back and forth between Coure and Lea. “I wonder what you’d do if you lost
her?”
That thought bore some speculation, Penthe thought as she munched happily on a
pie she had swiped from some female’s kitchen window where it had been left to cool.
* * * * *
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