Her lips trembled when the thought made her realize how much she had lost because of her night’s work.
“I won’t excuse my actions,” she whispered.
“I did not ask for excuses. I ask for your repentance. I asked for your sin.” His tone was clipped but neutral, unfathomable to her. Was he angry or wasn’t he? She couldn’t read him! She would sense a tide of anger, but then he wouldn’t show a single sign of it. Then there was the distracting sensation of the sponge in his hand swirling steadily against her skin. She felt his fingertips at the edge of the sponge and her skin sparked longingly at the simple contact. Her nerves did not seem to realize the difference between their lovemaking this afternoon and his ritualistic cleansing of her stained body. In the end, Daenaira was so confused, she could only do as she was asked.
“I seduced Brendan,” she said stiffly, turning her face away so she wouldn’t have to see his expression. But he wouldn’t allow it. He caught her chin and brought her right back to his volatile eyes of gold.
“You made love with him?” he asked tightly.
“No! I just…I didn’t…I was afraid to take her on by myself! Nicoya demanded I murder Brendan, and I thought if I…if I seduced him first, it would buy some time for you to…” She raised a hand to cover her mouth, shaking her head as tears filled her eyes. “It wasn’t his fault. It just wasn’t fair to him. You can’t blame him for this. He misses Nan so much! He has been alone…and I think I p-pushed him too far. He hated himself for it. For the weakness of losing control. Please don’t blame him for this.”
“So I should blame you?” he asked softly.
“It was my choice,” she nodded, swiping at her eyes angrily. “It was supposed to be pretend, but I must have done something wrong. I should have chosen another position. Something less stimulating for him. But it was the only way I could think of to mask that it was an act. If…if I covered him with my skirt…”
Magnus’s attention had drifted back down to the water, but his gaze snapped up at that information. “You rode astride him?”
She nodded, her burning tears refusing to stop. “He…I didn’t know how to, really, so he took hold of me and I guess…the friction of my panties and…” She swallowed.
“And?” he prompted carefully.
“My heat. I didn’t expect to…but after a while I felt…”
“Stimulated,” he supplied quietly.
“I’m sorry. I never meant to do anything wrong. I’m so sorry. Please let me go. I’ll just leave.”
To her surprise, his hand came up and gripped her hard by her chin, forcing her to focus on his fearsome gaze.
“Step out to the right,” he commanded her. “Spread your legs.”
She warily obeyed, but quickly gasped and surged up on her toes when the sponge dove directly between her legs, hand, fingers, and all stroking over her intimately and thoroughly. The stimulation made her whole body shiver, her nipples tightening into thick points. He washed directly over her clitoris, the hub of nerves screaming to awareness and wakefulness despite the distress and upset of her warring mind and emotions. After several swirling passes, he crowded his body close to hers, his head lowering until his lips all but brushed her mouth.
“Body and mind do not always have to be in agreement to react to such direct touches,” he said in a low, calm sort of manner. “A woman can orgasm from simply riding against something. A saddle, perhaps. A man’s thigh. Nerves do what they are meant to do, regardless of the desires of the mind, especially in the body of a naturally passionate and sensitive make-up. Do you know the guilt you are feeling is common for women who climax during an act of sexual violence? They feel shame, embarrassment, and they blame themselves. They think they must have invited it or even enjoyed the attentions no matter how horrifying they know it really was.”
Magnus closed the final distance between them and kissed her lips very gently. The tenderness took Dae’s breath away, just as the sudden flush of hope did.
“Did you climax like Brendan did?” he asked softly. “Is that why you are so determined to destroy yourself over this?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head while rubbing her lips across his warmly and wetly. “But Brendan…I can’t forget the look in his eyes; the distress and his self-loathing as I forced him to feel what he felt was a betrayal of your trust. And of mine. Then I killed him and gave him no chance to make it up to you. Please, believe me. He wanted to make it up to you, to beg your forgiveness.”
“He did beg my forgiveness. And I have given it. To both of you.”
Her look of utter shock made him smile down at her. He forgot so easily how unused to benevolence she really was.
“But my forgiveness is not even required here, Daenaira. You did what you had to do to try to save as many lives as you could without foolishly throwing your own away. I would rather you have done what you did than die.” His thumb reached to brush wetly over her cheek. “It is enough to know both of your hearts were pure and trustworthy.” He frowned in the next instant. “But you are never to get that close to another man ever again, do you understand me?” The hand between her legs tightened up against her through the softness of the sponge. “You and all that is sacred to you belong to me now. Just as I will always belong to you.” He let the sponge go, leaving nothing to interfere with his touch as he came tightly against her and caught her parted lips.
Daenaira was still trying to conceive of what he was saying, but it was the bare touch of his fingertips over her sensitive tissues that really snapped her out of her shock. She gasped, lifting onto her toes reflexively again. Then his tongue was slipping into her mouth and engaging her in a breath-stealing kiss.
“And while I do not know if he will survive the day,” he said softly against her, “Brendan was alive when I last saw him.”
“He was?” Magnus saw her tear up again, and her sudden show of sensitivity warmed his heart. She didn’t realize it yet, but she had already come to care for her new friends and new home far more than she admitted to. Had he come to mean as much as well? Or was he foolishly asking too much after she’d spent so much time being angry with him?
He probably was.
Magnus decided he would have to be satisfied with her other affections in the meantime.
“Would you like to know what your penance will be, K’yindara?” he asked quietly as he nibbled at her bottom lip, the flesh of it so succulent and sweet that he found he needed to suck on it and taste her. “There should be a punishment, after all, for tempting any other man but me.”
She laughed, the little snort as sarcastic as it came. It was perfect.
“If that earns me punishment, then I’m going to be doing a lot of penance. Men are too damn easy to tempt.”
“True. I suppose I will have to choose the punishment to fit the crime.” He reached for her thigh, drawing it up to his hip and stepping securely between her legs so she could feel the prodding of his rapidly growing erection. “How about, every time I catch you torturing some poor bastard with your very existence, you have to submit to me in any position I choose?”
“And if I find some woman drooling all over you?” she countered, her hands finally resting to touch his shoulders. The contact was a relief he felt to his very soul.
“Then it becomes lady’s choice. But women do not drool over the leader of Sanctuary,” he said dismissively. “I am too intimidating to them.”
Again, she snorted in laughing disbelief. “Yeah, right. I can name three women right now who want you so badly they cream when you walk by.”
Magnus’s eyes widened, his brows lifting. “Is that so?”
“Though perhaps I won’t tell you, lest you get too fat an ego.”
“That sounds suspiciously like a cop-out.”
“And that sounds suspiciously like you are fishing with bait.”
He chuckled. “Well, I will not believe you unless you give me examples.”
Daenaira smiled and began to drop slow, meande
ring fingertips down along his wet chest. “Greta,” she replied. “Even Nicoya knew this. She sent Daniel to her wearing your scent and told him to leave behind one of your shuriken. He took her so she never saw him, and she believed it was you.”
Magnus stared at her incredulously. “Greta thought I would do such a thing?”
“She all but sank her venomous teeth into me when I first arrived, she was so hot with jealousy.”
He frowned darkly. “I will speak with her. I am insulted she would think me capable of such hypocrisy.” He narrowed his eyes on her. “Who else?”
“Condilaya.”
“Connie?”
“Mmm.” Dae slowly traced the pads of her fingertips down the ridges of his tense belly.
“You are mistaken. Condilaya is a sweet young woman who is much too shy to—Why are you shaking your head at me?” he growled.
“Connie was sitting to the right of us when we were doing the hair-brushing exhibition in Brendan’s lecture. Your attention must have been elsewhere, or you might have noticed how she couldn’t sit still to save her life and stared at you with stars in her eyes.”
His attention had been somewhere else. He’d been completely focused on Dae and the glorious sensation of having her hair in his hands. It was unnerving listening to her take note of other women who saw him as a man, rather than as a priest. He had not seen himself in a normal sexual way for so long that he had completely eradicated his notice of it in others, and of others noticing it within him. Until Daenaira had come to him. Now he was taking notice of a great many things. For instance, the feel of her provocative fingers sliding with ghostly sensuality beneath the water and through the thatch of pubic curls at the root of his sex.
“And the third?” he asked a bit roughly, his cock nudging insistently up against her in response. He could feel her fingertips and her sexual heat against his ragingly sensitive skin. He didn’t hesitate to nudge himself snugly to her, the thickly swollen head to his shaft finding that nice, cozy notch to her entrance.
“Me,” she said softly as she lifted her other leg to his hip, wriggled the angle of her hips until he was about an inch inside of her, and sighed as she began to tighten the clasp of her legs and bring him farther in.
“Is that right?” he asked with a sound between a groan and a chuckle. “Even when you were angry with me?”
“Perhaps especially then,” she confessed on a noise quite similar to a purr as she arched upward and offered her delectable breasts to his mouth. “Anger is so passionate an emotion, you know. That, and your ass is quite gorgeous.” She reached to caress him over his backside, pressing him deeper inside her at her own pace for her own reasons. Magnus availed himself of a sweetly plump nipple, sucking so hard at her that she contracted around him in her surprise.
“I wear a tunic,” he pointed out through nipping, sucking lips that rimmed her large areolas, one after the other and back again. “And a weapons belt. You can’t see my ass.”
“Oh, yes, I can. And you take your tunic off when you are in the training hall. Then not only can I see you, but I can smell you all the better.”
Grasping her hips in hand, Magnus suddenly surged the rest of the way into her, a savage sound of satisfaction stuttering out of him as he threw back his head and let himself simply burn within her. She gasped and moaned at the masterful intrusion, her entire body from hands to legs to pussy reaching to clasp him ever tighter into her embrace.
“The smell of lemon oil, sword polish, and the clean sweat of a hardworking warrior. Your skin,” she breathed, her mouth opening against the crest of his neck and shoulder, teeth scraping and tongue and lips stroking, “gleams like glazed toffee, and all I want to do is taste you over and over again.”
Magnus had to reach out and brace a hand flat against the wall as his balance was affected by her seductive words and lips, not to mention the heavenly tight heat of her sheathed around him. She was so tight, in fact, that it forced him to remember she was still quite new at this, despite her ability to make him feel like he was in the arms of a well-trained seductress.
“Are you still tender from earlier?” he asked roughly, his entire cock throbbing with eager need for friction as he forced himself to await her answer. He hadn’t even properly prepared her…
“No. Not at all,” she assured with an enticing wriggle that bathed him in wet, wet heat. “Please,” she begged softly, her body and hands urging him to move. “Fuck me, Magnus. Hard. Fast. Deep. I need to feel you like that.”
“Such language,” he teasingly admonished, even as he pinned her tight to the wall and surged as deep into her as he could manage.
“You like it,” she countered breathlessly as he began to grind himself against her, the pressure rubbing her clit with maddening results, as it was intended to do. “Magnus!”
“Right. Hard. Fast. Deep,” he echoed just as he began to obey her with passionate diligence.
Daenaira simply couldn’t believe he was even there. She had thought she would never feel this sacred, stunning connection again. She had feared he would never want to touch her again. But he did touch her, and touched her deeply. Her whole body strained to take him in, to join them as tightly as possible, and the pleasure of it bolted through her in time to her racing heart and the fire rushing over her sensitized skin. It was a raw joining, no preliminaries, and she liked it that way. So did he, by the feel of him, so heavy and thick with excitement inside her. This was absolution, she realized. The glory of this feeling and of having him so powerfully alive and in need of her was the ultimate in forgiveness. But it should be punishing, and it should be hard, and it quickly became both as Magnus’s need intensified and his territoriality finally released to rise to the surface.
The civilized man of the gods had kept control, had managed her with logic and exoneration, but the dominant Shadowdweller male would be satisfied with nothing less than a claiming that marked her as his once more.
“I’m yours,” she whispered into his ear, her teeth nipping at him hungrily. “None but you will ever have me.”
“You’re goddamn right about that,” he hissed as he shoved himself deep with a crash of pelvises. “You’re mine, Daenaira. Drenna gave you to me and me alone. I’ll never share you. I’ll never release you.” He growled roughly as he began to speed his tormenting stroke inside her.
Dae realized then that it wasn’t just a possession he spoke of, but a promise and a commitment. He was flooding every statement with an emotion she’d never heard anyone use toward her before. She felt it resonating through her mind like a clear bell.
I will always need you.
I love you as I love life and my gods.
One day, probably quite soon, I know I will come to hold you above Sanctuary itself.
“Never that much,” she whispered against his shoulder. “I would never deserve that much.”
“That much and more,” he said heatedly, the thrust of his fervent body into hers making them both moan in a deep chorus of surging desire. “Gods, Dae,” he gasped, his hands shaping and framing her head and face reverently as he slowed to a lusty, meaningful cadence inside her. Golden eyes bored into hers with nothing short of adoration and painfully undeserved admiration. Daenaira reflexively shook her head, but he held her still and forced her to watch and to feel the raw need and pure love he felt for her.
“Why?” she almost sobbed as he overwhelmed her physically and emotionally.
“For the same reason I have my faith and my devotion to the tenets of my gods and my place on this earth. Fate has demanded it of me, jei li, and my heart needs you to complete its will. Don’t you see?” He broke off to heed the spiking need rushing through his body, a soulful groan erupting out of him that she felt all the way to the heart of her womb. Every move he made, every passionate word he spoke drove her higher and faster toward release.
But it also drove her into a panic like nothing she had ever felt before.
“No!” She tried to shove against
him, even as her whole body screamed in protest at her disruption of her focused bliss. “Let me go!”
“Never!” he spat in breathless countermand.
“Stop! Stop it!”
With a furious roar of masculine dominance, he turned them, holding her struggling wet body tight until he was climbing the steps out of the bath, every step pounding vibrations into the core of her body until she made a pitiful sound of resisting need. Magnus dropped her back onto the chaise even as he knelt on the floor, never once decreasing the depth to which he penetrated her. She immediately tried to gain purchase, but he easily subdued the attempt by pulling her hips up high to meet him, her knees almost draped over his shoulders as his hands locked to her hips and pinned her for his pleasure.
His next thrust was brutal; without the water to act as a buffer for the impact, it resonated through her every bone and made every muscle quiver. Her head hung back limply over the opposite side of the chaise, the position exposing and submissive in the extreme as she became completely quiescent to his pistoning hips.
“Bituth amec,” she groaned, in no way meaning it against him so much as it was meant against the desperate need of her own hungry body. The whole of her flesh tautened, an arching and bowstring tightness snapping her back tighter and tighter as he pumped his beautifully thick cock deeply into her.
“That’s right,” he all but snarled at her, “you take it, K’yindara. Take it all. None of it gets left out, none of it denied. You will not shut me out.”
Every word brought him to a harder pitch, until all she felt was the impact of their bodies reverberating through her and the sound of their wet flesh slapping heavily together. His relentlessness stole her will and her resistance in a sweeping wave of uncontrollable release. Her orgasm came through her like a berserker rage, obliterating everything until all she felt was heat and the passion of their struggle against one another. She burst into a fury of spasm and arched high and hard against the chaise and his strong body. He plowed through her as she strangled him in muscular contortion, giving no quarter to her until he thrust her so high into mindless ecstasy that she could do nothing but scream, vibrate, and clutch helplessly in his hold.
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