by Sandra Hill
She pressed her fingertips to his mouth to halt his words and shook her head. “Don’t apologize. It was the best sex I’ve ever had.” She paused and added, “How soon can we do it again?”
She felt his laughter all the way down to his half-limp penis, which was still inside her. Which proved to be convenient.
Chapter 15
Piña coladas and peppermint sticks . . .
Cnut wasn’t about to ignore an invitation like that.
He flipped over so that he was on his back and Andrea was on top, straddling him. And the best part was, he was still inside, even if only half ready for action.
She thought to shock him by saying she’d just experienced the best sex of her life, but he had news for her. It was the best sex he’d ever had, too, and he had a whole lot more years under his belt, so to speak.
She blinked at him. “I didn’t mean right now.”
“Oh. Well, then, you can rest for a while.” He reached to lift her off, disappointed but not crushed that he would have to wait.
But she slapped his hands away. “I can relax where I am.”
He doubted that very much, but he wasn’t about to argue. He was no fool, leastways not all the time. Her eagerness excited him. A lot.
“Fine,” he agreed. “Just relax and let me . . . let me make it good for you.” He stroked his fingertips over her collarbones, along the smooth skin of her shoulders, then down to the curve of her elbow and over her forearm. He was fascinated by the fine hairs he was able to raise by just that soft caress. Was she tingling? He certainly was, just watching her reaction.
“Good? Good?” She stared at him with disbelief. “Any better than the first time and I might need shock therapy to revive me.”
Modern women had such a way with words. Rather jarring at first, but pleasing nonetheless. “I’m sure I can come up with something shocking.”
“As long as it’s not perverted.”
Jarring is too small a word. “Define perversion. There are good perversions and not so good perversions.” In fact, I recall—
“Hah!”
He was admiring her thighs and her buttocks, which rested on his own thighs . . . admiring with the palms of his hands, that was. That’s probably why she was nigh speechless for the moment—Thank you, God!—waiting for what he would do next. He wasn’t sure himself.
“You know a lot about perversions, do you?” What next? Her belly button, which was inverted in an adorable fashion, or her equally adorable breasts? he mused. Instead, he just made a quick pass over her blonde curls.
Her breath hitched, and she jolted, but still she was able to reply, “Plenty. Let’s just say Pete the Perv and leave it at that.”
So much for her speechlessness! He folded his hands behind his neck to prevent any further distractions, by himself. “Now you have me intrigued.”
“Golden Showers.”
“Huh?” Surely, she doesn’t mean . . .
“Didn’t you ever watch Sex and the City?”
“Um.”
“Carrie’s partner wanted her to pee on him during sex.”
He’d thought she was going to liken him to Mr. Big, but he hadn’t been expecting anything like a reference to urine. In fact, her reference had nothing to do with him, precisely. His eyes went wide and he burst out laughing.
“Do that again.”
“Do what again?”
“Laugh so your penis moves inside me.”
“Ah, Andrea, you are a delight.”
She smiled. “I don’t think I ever delighted anyone before.”
“I promise I won’t ask you to relieve yourself on me. There are too many other things I want to do to you, and you to me.” He thought of something then and chuckled.
“What?”
“Thorkel claims there is great pleasure in making a woman fart during sex play. A clear indication that the man has made the woman lose control.”
“Don’t you dare!”
“Okay. No Golden Showers and no farting.”
“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation, especially in the midst of you . . .” She motioned toward the place where their bodies were joined.
With his hands still folded under his head, he flexed himself to show he understood.
She gasped. “You’re good.”
“I know.” Then, like a master puppeteer, he began to pull Andrea’s strings. He took her hands and showed her where he liked to be touched.
Everywhere.
She, on the other hand, had a preference for breasts and the backs of her knees.
No problem. Then he placed his hands on her hips and showed her how to rock for the best effect on both of them. Forward, backward, fast, slow. They all worked for him.
She seemed to prefer slow and long rocking.
When her hips began to roll wildly, he put his hands on her butt cheeks to guide her in a more even rhythm. Her slickness, a combination of both their fluids, wept around him like hot honey, easing the friction of his massive erection.
“Kiss me,” she said, leaning forward, her glazed eyes drifting half shut.
“Open first,” he demanded, and when she complied, he thrust his tongue into her mouth, mimicking the strokes down below. At the same time, he moaned in pleasure and caressed her breasts, rubbing his palms over the turgid nipples, then rolling them between his thumb and fingers.
Her inner muscles convulsed around him.
So I can make her come just by touching her breasts. He tabled that information for future note.
She tore her mouth from his and gasped, “You taste like Christmas candy canes, and Halloween treats, and toothpaste, and everything peppermint. Clean, with a bite.”
“That’s me,” he laughed, “and you taste like coconut cream pie and piña coladas.”
“Nice combination.”
“We do make a nice combination,” he said, surprising even himself. He glanced down to where they were joined, pubic bone to pubic bone, a blend of her honey-blonde curls and his darker, almost brown ones, like gold and bronze. Let her think that’s what he meant, not, God forbid, a lifemate kind of combination. “Lean forward a little, sweetling.”
“Why?”
“So I can fondle your breasts and bring you to peak again.”
She blushed. “While you lie there like a statue, unaroused?”
“I would hardly call this unaroused,” he said, and thrust his hips upward several times so she could feel how hard and big he was. Hot and pulsing with life. Un-statue-like, for a certainty!
“Holy . . . moly!” She leaned forward to hold on to his shoulders for support. “How do you do that?”
“What?”
“Keep yourself from climaxing?”
He shrugged. “Long years of practice.”
“This is embarrassing. I must have come five times already to your one.”
“You’re keeping count now?”
“Hard not to.”
“There is naught to be embarrassed about. Your peaking is my pleasure. It is as it should be.”
“Said the macho Viking.”
“That remark deserves a punishment, m’lady,” he said, and took one of her breasts into his mouth, areola, nipple, and all, and began to suck with a hard rhythm. He used the other hand to hold her in place by the nape of her neck. Then he did the same to her other breast.
By then she was a spasming mass of moaning, wanton want.
Not to be outdone, she took him in hand, right where they were joined, making room for her fist. Then she extended her fingers to tickle his balls. He about shot off the bed.
And the two of them shattered to a mutual climax that stunned them both. She held on tight, he held on tighter, lest they fly away, in pieces. For a long time afterward, he lay on his back, holding her in his embrace, her face on his beating chest, one of her thighs extended over one of his, the knee nudging his finally quiescent man part.
“Mine,” he whispered, kissing the top of her head. He had no id
ea what that meant or where the thought had come from. Luckily, she hadn’t heard him, or if she had, she wasn’t mentioning it.
Instead, she was circling one of his nipples with a forefinger when she asked idly, “When’s your birthday?”
“Huh? I have no idea. We did not mark birth dates in my time. Except for kings and those of great fame. Even then, they were guesstimates.”
“Let’s pick March 15 for your birthday, in modern times, several months from now. I’m assuming . . . hoping . . . that we’ll return to the future by then. We’ll celebrate with something special on that date.”
Uh-oh. Just like a woman. One tup and she is making plans. But he was feeling generous, so he put a hand on her rump and said, “You’ve already given me something special.”
“Not that,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve been concocting a special recipe in my head that would be perfect for a birthday cake. Candy Cane Coconut Cake.”
“I’m lying here wondering what carnal activity I can try with you next, and all you can-cock in your mind is food.”
“Who says food can’t be sexy?” She raised her head and winked at him and then, wanton wench she was proving to be, she crawled over him, knelt between his legs, and showed him what she could do with a peppermint stick.
Blend my WHAT?
They didn’t sleep at all that night.
Andrea should feel guilty about that, knowing Cnut had to be up early to go out into the frigid weather again and hunt for more food. But she didn’t, especially when he told her that vangels didn’t require much sleep. They stored sleep energy like some animals stored body fat and therefore could go long stretches without rest.
Besides, the little bit of blood he’d taken from her had energized him, too. Like a Raging Bull, the popular vodka Red Bull cocktail, with an Oyster Shooter for a libido lift chaser, he told her.
She had to think about that one for a while.
Cnut got up several times to put more logs on the fire to maintain some heat in the room. For a man who claimed to feel his phantom fat, he seemed at ease with his nude body, and she enjoyed watching him move. The supple pull of long muscles in his thighs and the tightness of his butt as he bent to lift more wood. The breadth of his shoulders and the strong tendons in his neck as he stretched. His narrow waist and hips. The human body—his human body—was a work of art.
At one point, they talked, in bed, while she combed and rebraided his hair. “Will you shave the sides again?” she asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Not while I’m here, anyway. Too much trouble.”
“And how long do you think we’ll be here?”
He sighed. “I know you want precise answers from me, but I just don’t have them. Mike is being ominously silent. I can’t reach my brothers. That’s deliberate, of course. I’m expected to figure out the mission on my own.”
“Like you being given a second chance to help your people in the famine?”
“Probably.”
“You sound doubtful.”
“Our missions are never that simple.”
“Something related to the demon vampires, as well?”
“Possibly. I may know more after tomorrow if I run into any more Lucies, especially if I can keep one alive long enough to answer some questions. In particular, why are they showing up in this time period suddenly? It’s not like the famine would affect them, unless people become more sinful during harsh times.”
“I still don’t understand why I’m involved.”
He remained silent.
“That lifemate nonsense?”
“I can’t discount it, especially after the kind of sex we just engaged in, which was beyond a physical act, you must agree.”
Must she? She didn’t want to admit to that, just yet.
“Or maybe you were just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Cnut went on, stretching forward so she continued the braid down his neck. “An accident.”
Andrea shook her head. The things that were happening—the emotions swirling between her and Cnut—they were no accident. No way!
“Tell me about your life before. Why do you think you became a . . . a . . .”
“Glutton?”
“No! I meant to say vangel, but I find it hard to refer to you that way, to think you are anything but a human being.”
“Well, the two are probably tied together, and I don’t have a clear answer for either one. Hoggstead was my mother’s home, and my maternal grandsire’s before that, but I grew up at the Sigurdsson estate with my half brothers. I was sickly as a child—probably some kind of respiratory ailment that I eventually outgrew—but while a youthling my mother coddled me, overfed me, would not let me run and play like the others, that kind of thing. She died suddenly when I was about ten, and I became lost in the immense household. My father had many wives and concubines and children, both legitimate and not. I was a needy child, craving attention, and when I didn’t get it, I filled the hole with food, and later drink and sex and other excesses. Not a new story. I understand that now, but back then I just became selfish and self-centered in my gluttony.
“Later, when I became jarl of Hoggstead, as long as I had food and drink, I ignored what was happening to my people. Even now, we here in the keep are fed sufficiently while others starve.”
“So, you were a glutton, but how did you become a vangel?”
“Make no mistake, Andrea, I am still a glutton. Why else would I be swiving you ’til I wear my cock down to a nub, uncaring of whether you are sore or tired or generally uninterested.”
She laughed and smacked him on the shoulder. “Idiot!” she said, but not with her usual disdain. “Do I seem uninterested? If I were tired, I would be asleep. Instead, I feel as if I’ve inhaled the same energy drink you have.”
He turned and smiled at her. “Pleased I am to have pleased you.”
More of the Viking talk! “You are so full of it. Pleased you are to have gotten your rocks off, multiple times,” she accused him.
“Guilty as charged. Can we do it again?” He repeated her words back at her, then took the comb from her hand, tossed it to the floor, and rolled over on top of her. “Have I told you about the famous Viking S-spot?”
He hadn’t, but he did now. And whoo boy, the Vikings could make a fortune by writing a book about that particular talent, hitting all the talk show circuits, becoming celebrity sex experts. On the other hand, they were probably better off keeping it a secret.
If that wasn’t enough—and, believe me, it was more than enough!—toward dawn Cnut showed her he was a modern Viking, as well. He’d read somewhere—probably Cosmo, though he denied it—about something called a Blended-O, and wondered if she’d like to try it.
Of course not. Silly man! Why would I want to top off the best night of my life with a showstopper of a carnal experience? Not that the Viking S-spot wasn’t phenomenal. But, jeesh, she might never get this chance again. What was it they said about a window of opportunity? Jump while the window is open, babe. So she grabbed him by the ears, yanked him down, and whispered against his gaping mouth, “Tell me.” Then she bit his bottom lip and added, “Show me.”
Amid bouts of laughter, and then no more laughter, Cnut showed her how a woman could have a blended orgasm of both the clitoris—though he called it her honey spot—and her G-spot from the inside—he claimed only Vikings with long fingers could multitask like this. Suffice it to say, she came like a Fourth of July fireworks. If the people below could hear her moans and screams—she hoped they couldn’t—they would think Cnut was torturing her. He was. Torturing her with pleasure.
She had the wits, still—and wasn’t that amazing?—to entertain a sudden thought. Cnut was going out tomorrow, hunting. Not just hunting wild game, but demon vampires, as well. In other words, dangerous. He’d implied earlier that a vangel was strengthened by taking blood. Did that mean that even the small amount taken from her, an innocent, so to speak—okay, not so innocent at the moment—would make him stronger?
She tilted her head to the side, in invitation.
He made a low growling sound, feral almost, and clamped his fangs, which were eerily long by now, onto her neck and sucked. She felt the suction all the way to her fingertips, her toes, her breasts, and the place where they were still joined. Cnut yanked his bloody teeth off her neck and reared back, roaring into his own inner fireworks. It was glorious to watch.
She fell immediately into a deep, sated sleep. He was gone when she awakened, but she could swear she’d heard him whisper in her ear before leaving. “Mine!”
Was that the glutton in him speaking, or something else?
Chapter 16
Then he got a devil of a shock . . .
Cnut couldn’t stop smiling the next day. And his men remarked on it. More than once. They were worse than his brothers, poking their noses in each other’s business.
“A companion he named her. Hah! I wish my companions could make me grin like a goat with two cocks.”
“How many times did you peak?”
“Was it good bedsport or so-so bedsport? Not that sex is ever bad for a man.”
“Was she an enthusiastic bed partner? Betimes my Solig lies there like a lump of whale blubber.”
“I wonder if she rode him like a cow man?”
“Dost mean a cowboy?”
“Boy, man, same thing.”
“Did ye make her fart?”
“Did she make you fart?”
He changed the subject by asking Thorkel about Dyna.
Thorkel sighed deeply. “I want her. Badly. But, holy Thor! None of my usual charms are working.”
“What charms are they?” asked young Atli, one of the squires, who was taking Igor’s place on Cnut’s hunting expedition.
The others snickered, but Thorkel took the question seriously. “Well, I usually regale women with tales of the battles I have engaged in.”
Ulf, Njal, and Ogot nodded at this.
“But I have not fought in any battles yet,” Atli complained.
“Then I let her know how much pleasure she will get from my bedsport skills.”
“By then, the women are usually drooling, ready to shed their gunnas before you can finish your horn of ale. Is that not right?” asked Ulf.