“Allow me,” he said. He took her by the waist and gently pulled her down until she was sitting on his erection.
He reached under her slip and took himself in hand. With one hand on her and the other on his cock, and with a judicious lift of his hips, the tip found the entrance of her body and pressed against the tender hole. With her hands on his shoulders, she moved up and then forward.
Accidentally—she was trying to look anywhere but at August—she met his eyes while steadying herself against the headboard. And once he had her attention, he didn’t let her look away.
He wasn’t smiling now, but the expression on his face was somehow better than a smile. His eyes were soft as he gazed at her face, and his hands gentle as he lifted her hips and guided her onto him. Lia felt pressure as she lowered herself onto his cock. Pressure and penetration as he entered her slowly, inch by inch, until she’d taken as much of him as she could. She rocked back and forth simply to make herself more comfortable.
August must have liked it because his eyelids fluttered, and his back arched against the pillows. Beautiful man.
“There,” he said, panting slightly. He put his hand on the side of her face and stroked her cheek with this thumb. “That’s not so bad, is it?”
Lia swallowed. “It’s all right. Not bad.”
The lacy hem of her slip lay over her thighs as she knelt on him. August slid his hands under it again.
“Do you want to make love?” he asked. “Or talk about your fantasies?”
“You’re a man. Don’t you need to come?”
“I’m not a normal man. I can stay hard for a very long time. Especially if a beautiful young woman is sitting on my cock and blushing pink as a rose. If I start to get soft, I’ll just peek.”
“Peek?”
He lifted her hem, and she slapped it back down again.
“Do not peek.”
“Lia, I’m literally penetrating you right this moment. We are having sexual intercourse. We are fornicating.”
“Fine,” she said. “You can peek.” He really did feel very good inside her. The cock in her throbbed and her flesh surrounding it throbbed in time. She placed her hands flat on his chest and rocked her hips into his. She was rewarded with a deep spasm inside her stomach, a spasm that traveled up her spine and down into her thighs. She braced herself, her hands flat on August’s broad chest, and did it again.
“Take your slip off,” he said, his voice hoarse. He was already inside her. There was no reason for her to feel modest, but her fingers were shaking as she tried for the zipper in back. He grew impatient with her fumbling fingers and pulled it down for her. When he’d bared her breasts, he looked at them so long and so longingly Lia blushed.
“You’re staring,” she said.
“Phryne of Athens,” he said. “The courtesan. When she was charged with impiety and taken before the courts, she bared her breasts to the judges. At the sight of them, they acquitted her. At the sight of your breasts, they would have crowned you empress.”
He squeezed them, molded them into his palms, fondled the nipples until they were so hard she hurt. He wrapped his arms around her waist. Her head fell back and she arched for him, gasping as he licked her left nipple, placed his lips to it and sucked it into his mouth. The slow draw, the tug, the moist heat on her breast, was bliss.
For the first time, Lia felt the line, the red cord of nerves that ran from her breasts to her sex. As he sucked the nipple, drew it deep into his mouth, her vagina grew wetter, riper, swollen.
She pressed her hips against him and felt the pleasure run down her back and into her hips. August pulled her against him again and pushed his hand between her thighs. Lia’s vagina ached around the thick organ inside her, and she moaned against his shoulder.
Never had she felt this good before, not in her own body. He took her breasts in his hands again—his large, strong male hands—and held them firmly. She covered his hands with hers, wanting to feel him touching her. Lowering her head, she pressed a quick kiss onto his knuckles. That one kiss, no matter how devout, wasn’t nearly enough for August. He grinned that wild dangerous grin of his again. He kissed her again with that wild dangerous kiss of his.
August wrapped an arm around her and scored her back with his rough fingertips. She’d never felt something so sensuous. Every time she moved, even the slightest bit, her clitoris brushed the shaft of his cock.
“August,” she said.
“Yes?”
“What?” she asked.
“You said my name.”
“I did?”
He slowly nodded. She forced her eyes to focus.
“Stop gloating.” She’d been clinging to the headboard, but August took her hands by the wrists and brought them down to his stomach.
“I can’t help it,” he said. “You’re beautiful and I’m arrogant. This is so much fun I can’t believe I get paid for it.”
“Are you really enjoying this?”
In lieu of answering, he rolled her onto her back on the bed.
“August—”
He took her legs and wrapped them around his lower back. Then he pried her hands off his upper arms and pressed them into the bed. To make matters worse, he put his hands over her hands, and locked their fingers together.
“You’re trying to make me feel something for you,” Lia said. “I know all the tricks.”
“I feel something for you already,” August said. “And this isn’t a trick.”
Slowly, and very deliberately, he began to thrust into her.
Slowly, and very deliberately, he let his full weight rest on her until she could think of nothing and no one but him.
“Remember what I said about the Fates?” he asked. A kiss on her lips. A kiss on her cheek. A kiss on her neck. “About the threads of our destinies being tangled together?”
“You really believe that?” Her voice was breathless. His thrusts were so incredibly deep and slow she couldn’t help but move with him.
“We’re tangled together right now. Can’t you feel it?”
She nodded, too turned on to speak. He released her right hand and brushed her hair off her cheek and then cradled the back of her head. August pushed his knees in until they were at her hips. He’d tangled them together in a tight, tense knot of arms and legs and a hundred deep kisses.
“How’s this for a Gordian knot?” he said into her ear as he thrust into her again. Lia arched under him.
He kissed her mouth, deeper even than before. Their tongues touched and mingled as August moved in her with long slow strokes of his cock.
“We can stop if you want to,” he said. “Do you?”
She shook her head. “No.”
August smiled down at her, caressed her cheek with the back of his knuckles.
“I don’t know what he did to you,” he said, “but I’m going to enjoy undoing it.”
“You can’t change the past.”
“No, but I can give you a very good present.” He thrust into her again.
She laughed, a real laugh, deep and throaty and sensual. She sounded like a woman who was enjoying herself. He laughed with her, dropping dozens of tender kisses on her neck and along her collarbone. All right...so maybe he did want her. She relaxed underneath him and spread her thighs a little wider.
“Shall we play?” he asked. “I think the wine’s breathed enough.”
“What do I do?”
“Tell me your sexual fantasy you want to explore tonight.”
Lia tensed again. Two steps forward, one step back.
“You first,” she said.
“I’m a wicked king,” he said immediately.
“Oh my God.” How many of these insane sexual fantasies did he have?
“And a very powerful king at that,” he continued. “And there’s another lesser king who
has to send tribute to me. But this poor king has no gold or silver or diamonds to send me. All he has that I might desire is...”
“His daughter?”
“His only daughter,” August said. “She’s sent to me to be my concubine.”
“It’s never a secretary, is it? Or a juggler? The tribute always has to be a concubine.”
“And when she arrives at my palace, because I am so very wicked, I make her strip naked and show herself to me in front of the entire court.”
“You’re an absolute bastard. Worst king since Nero.”
“Nero was an emperor, not a king,” he said. “But don’t worry, she gets her revenge. When I make love to her the first night...she tries to stab me with a dagger she’s hidden under the pillow.”
“Good girl. I like her spirit.”
“But I’m not deterred.”
“Quitters never win,” she said.
“I decide that I can’t simply overwhelm her with power and might. I must make her love me. So begins my attempt to win her heart and obedience through a strict regimen of hand-feeding, spankings followed by forced orgasms, and tender poetry.”
“Poetry?”
“Yes, I tie her to the royal bed and recite poems to her until her heart—and thighs—melt.”
“This is an actual sexual fantasy you get off to?” Lia asked.
“Often.” August nodded. “Though there are variations. Sometimes it’s the king’s son instead of his daughter. And instead of poetry, it’s near-constant oral sex.”
“I’m speechless.”
“Your turn,” he said, his voice tender and coaxing. “I’m dying to hear what you dream about in that deep dark little corner of your mind, the one with all the locks on the door and Cerberus guarding it with all three of his vicious heads...”
He massaged her breasts as he spoke, and she did find herself strangely melting into his hands.
“Close your eyes, Lia,” he said as he then pushed his hands gently into her hair and tugged her head back to bare her throat to another hundred soft kisses.
She closed her eyes and sighed at the bliss of the moment—his beautiful cock embedded in her body, his fingers wound into her hair, his warm lips licking and sucking her neck and his hot breath on her skin... And his words, his perfect words.
“Tell me your secrets, Lia...tell me everything you want. I won’t laugh. I won’t judge. Whatever you desire, I can give it to you, but you have to tell me what it is...”
“You won’t laugh?”
“I really won’t laugh.”
“Well, to be honest... I wouldn’t mind playing in your fantasy.”
“You’d make a wonderful wicked king.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. “The bloody concubine, August.”
He pulled back, his eyes wide. “You disgust me.”
Lia pushed him off her. That act of rebellion was quickly quashed. August grabbed her around the waist, wrenched her slip off her and threw it across the room. Then he dragged her on top of him, and it took no convincing at all to get her to straddle him.
“So she wants to be a concubine,” August said. He took her by the hips and eased her down onto him again.
“No, I don’t want to be a bloody concubine,” she said. “It’s a fancy word for being a victim of kidnapping and rape.”
“But you fantasize about being kidnapped and raped.”
“In a nice way.” She let her head fall back and smiled dreamily up at the ceiling. “A sexy way. A not-at-all-real-in-any-way way. That’s what I meant.”
He ran his hands up her arms and drew her down to his chest.
“Who do you imagine being your keeper? Your captor?”
“Achilles,” she said.
“Ah, does that make you Briseis?” he asked.
“I think I’d make a very good captive queen.”
Achilles and his best friend and shield-bearer Patroclus were her two favorite characters in The Iliad. She loved how much they loved each other, protected each other. And from her first reading, she’d secretly envied Briseis, the enemy queen who Achilles took as his personal concubine.
“Let’s find out.”
Still underneath her, August reached for the kylix and wine bottle on the bedside table. He splashed in a little wine and offered the cup to her. Lia’s heart beat madly as she took it from him and cradled it in her hands.
“Ready?” he asked. She took a shuddering breath.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Her toes were already curling in anticipation and excitement. But fear, too. Real fear. What on earth was about to happen to her?
Lia lifted the kylix to her lips and drank deeply. Her hands shook so badly August took the cup back from her. He drank from it and set it on the table again. Then he rolled them over so that he lay on top of her again.
“Nervous?” he asked.
“Very.”
“You’ll be safe,” he said. “I won’t let anything happen to you except the preauthorized capture and very pleasant rape.”
“Good, thank you.”
“Until then...” He kissed her deeply on the mouth, and his tongue tasted of wine. She wrapped her arms around his back and held on to him tightly. Before she knew what she was doing, Lia opened her thighs for him again.
August entered her with a thrust.
“My lovely concubine,” he said.
“You’re more my concubine than I’m yours. I bought you.”
“Rented,” he said. “Do you really want to play my concubine, or did you just want to see me in a leather kilt?”
“It’s called a pteruges,” Lia said.
August laughed softly into her ear. “I know what it’s called, and you didn’t answer my question.”
Lia started to answer it, but before she could speak another word, the world went dark.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lia ran.
She didn’t need a torch to light her path. She knew the fastest way from the palace to the temple. Those had been her servant’s last words to her as the old woman lay dying on the floor by the great stone hearth.
“Hide in the temple. They may fear the gods. They fear nothing else, it seems,” Hagnes had said, coughing on the last word, blood on her lips. She died before she could take her next breath.
The temple, just ahead, gleamed like polished silver in the moonlight. Behind her, the battle sounds raged on. She heard the screams of men and wondered if any of the sounds belonged to her brothers. She did not wonder about her father or her husband. They had been among the first to fall under the sword of Achilles.
She reached the temple and found it eerily silent, eerily dark. No fires burned in the braziers. The priests were all hidden. Or dead, too.
Lia ran up the marble stairs and searched for shelter. Under the great altar, perhaps. There was a room that led deep into the bowels of the temple, where the sacrifices were offered. She saw the altar ahead. The eternal flame on the wide table still burned. But for how long?
She ran toward it, naked feet slapping the mosaic floor. As she neared, a shadow moved, coming out of the dark, and seized her by the arms.
A man. A soldier. An enemy, likely Athenian.
He asked her no questions. He simply looked at her face as she writhed in his iron grasp, trying to free herself. A beast of a man, grizzled doglike face, breath like rotten meat. Lia braced herself for death, expecting he would run her through with the short sword on his hip. Instead he threw her over his shoulder. As he started off with her, she reached for the handle of the iron brazier burning on the altar. She yanked it with all her strength and brought it down to the temple floor where the smoldering coals inside struck the soldier’s feet and legs. He screamed and dropped her. She hit the ground running. Hagnes had been wrong. There was no safety here. There
was no sanctuary to be found anywhere but in death.
Lia raced through the temple, hoping to make her way to the mountains, the trees, somewhere she could hide until the army returned to their ships. Male voices shouting, barking orders, and still more screams followed her into the dark night.
Another man appeared, another soldier in armor with a sword. Lia threw herself behind the marble column next to her and clung to it for life. She crouched, column in front of her, trying to hide, to will herself invisible.
Wide-eyed, panting and panicking, she glanced around, searching her surroundings for a better hiding place.
She heard footsteps, the flat of sandals ringing against the marble steps. Men approached.
She counted five Greek hoplites, two carrying torches, the other three carrying their swords. They stood at the top of the steps, at the entrance to the temple, speaking in low tones. She tried to creep around the column but either her white gown was too bright in the moonlight or they heard her breathing...but one of the soldiers sprang forward and captured her, quick as a hare. She struggled in his grasp, but there was no use. She went limp to avoid getting run through with his blade.
“What’s that?” one of the other soldiers called to the one who held her.
“Pretty girl,” the soldier said, laughing.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” said a man with a booming voice.
She was dragged by the hoplite to the men holding the torches. Their faces were grotesque to her. Under other circumstances they might have been handsome, or at least not repellent. But even the oldest man, old enough to be her father, stared at her with a rapacious hateful gaze. She’d seen that same look in her husband’s eyes right before he put a spear through a stag’s heart or a crueler spear in whatever poor slave girl he ordered to his chambers every night.
“Who wants to be first?” asked the soldier who held her with arms pinned behind her back—so that if she were to try to run, he’d wrench her arms out of her shoulders. “I went first last time.”
The oldest soldier, who wore a gray beard and was heaviest around the chest, stared at her face in the torchlight.
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