Bloodstone (33 page)

“Am I hurting you?” he repeated, fingertips pushing ever so gently on rib after rib.

Despite the water she’d swallowed, her mouth lost all moisture. Her pulse throbbed at her throat, making her ears resound with it. The fingertips, ten points of delicious pressure, shot fire along her veins. “I—no.”

If she didn’t discourage him, didn’t move a muscle, those wonderful fingers would glide on down her torso. She bit her lip, wondering how long she could endure the incredible torture of his touch without crying out. Did he realize he was touching bare skin? How much of her flesh was exposed? The air was so thick and hot, she could be wearing nothing but the sodden garments clinging to her arms and not know the difference.

Yet none of that mattered. What mattered was he was touching her, like in her dream, and the sweet pain of the contact coursed through her body, setting off spasms in her womanly core, drawing her hands into fists while his palms grazed her hip bones.

And stopped.

Heartbeats later, he transferred his palms to her knees, and she remembered to breathe. Disappointment stabbed at her. She resented those hands, so impersonal as they avoided her hips and thighs and instead slid down each shin, lifted each foot in succession and pulled off the boot. Water sloshed out of each boot, a spatter of droplets neither hot nor cold but thick, and wetting her skin.

Like blood.

What in the name of the Dragon made her think her foot was bleeding? Just because her pulse hammered there like a smithy was no reason to—to—!

Her mouth opened to gasp, but her lungs seemed paralyzed, unable to draw breath to sustain the sudden wild thunder of her heart. Dots cavorted before her eyes, bright colors illuminating the darkness, but she saw none of them. Every particle of her focus concentrated on the ankle still enclosed by his fingers, on the tiny patch of skin under which her lifeblood drummed against his thumb.

He was shaking.

Tremor after minute tremor vibrated from his hands to the ankle suspended within them. His breathing had intensified too. She heard the rasp of it over the pulse pounding in her ears. A thrill ran through her, a jolt of feminine power. Touching
her,
skin to skin, had done this to him. She reveled in the thought, in knowing he was as affected by the contact as she.

She licked dry lips while his thumb traced feather-light circles over her ankle bone. Although her eyes searched for him in the absolute dark, following the whisper of his breathing, she could detect nothing but a faint glow, like a banked fire, that vanished when she stared at it.

“Mirianna,” he said, lowering her foot gently to the ground, “you seem to be uninjured.” His fingers loosened on her ankle.

“Don’t—!”

He stilled. “Does that hurt?”

“No—I mean, don’t stop.”

“What?”

“Don’t stop touching me...Durren.” There, she’d spoken it. Named him for herself. Chosen the identity, the entity she trusted.

“Mirianna...” His voice was hoarse, a plea.

She understood he might be afraid. It had been a long time since he’d been the man he once was. She had to help him remember how to be that man. That required her courage, all of the courage trembling inside where she’d gathered it to speak what needed to be spoken. “I want you to...touch me.”

He drew back with the hiss of an indrawn breath, and his fingers left her ankle. “If this is about that promise...”

The separation, the latent prints of his fingers, stung her flesh like a burn. She flinched with a hiss of her own, then summoned her courage again. “It is...but it isn’t.” The promise had bound her to him, had brought her on this journey she would otherwise never have taken, but that was the extent of its power. Obligation couldn’t compel her to act. To take the steps she meant to take required something else entirely. “I know who you are now.”

He groaned. “A shadow. A hollow creature. A failure.”

His misery cut at her. She sat up, intent on her purpose, intent on easing his pain. “You’re Durren Drakkonwehr and you’re the man in my dream.”

“Illusion, Mirianna. Nothing but damned illusion! You only see what you want to see. I learned that a long time ago.”

She heard the muffling of his voice, sensed that inches from her, a hand-span or so, ran the curve of the back he’d turned toward her. She imagined that curve running uninterrupted from the crown of his head down the full length of his spine. When she clung to him in the water, she’d been thinking only of survival, but the musculature of that naked torso had imprinted itself on her arms, palms, thighs, breasts. Those places sizzled now with the memory.

She cleared her throat. “I don’t see any illusions. I don’t see anything at all. But that’s not important. What’s important is the dream.
Our
dream.”

He shifted, the movement ghosting air across her cheek, and his breathing altered, but when he spoke, his voice was flat, dull. “Dreams are illusions, too.”

“Illusions are meant to deceive.” Startled by the words springing from her lips, she took a breath. She knew nothing of magic, of spells, yet she knew this as truth. He’d forgotten that somehow, or lost faith, and she had to convince him, make him believe again.

“Dreams are...s
hared
dreams like ours are foretellings. Premonitions. They tell us the future. We don’t always understand them, not at first. When my dream showed me a shadow of a man, a figure outlined against the light, I thought—I thought that when I met the right man...”

She trailed off, face aflame. Said aloud, her girlish dream of a lover, her childhood conviction the man in her dream was her destiny sounded so foolish. People fell in and out of love all around her in Nolar, madly passionate one year and yelling curses at each other the next. Why did she think she was different? Was it because in her meager twenty winters, she hadn’t seen a single man who even in some small way matched the man in her dreams? Or was it because when this one man spoke to her, when his voice echoed out of those Wehrland trees, her heart leaped? It knew him. It had always known him, his true nature, even while her mind refused to believe.

She ran her tongue over dry lips, inhaled deeply, and leaned toward him, toward where her heart tracked the great, tender, aching thing that beat within his breast. It drew her, always, like iron to a magnet. “I thought when I met the right man, his face would appear on my dream-lover, but I was wrong. What I didn’t understand then is I’ve always seen
you,
Durren, just as you are...inside. It’s not your face that matters; it’s your heart, your touch. No one can ever touch me as you do.” She reached out and laid a hand on that lovely curving spine.

For a moment, they could have been statues—living, breathless statues. Then, in a faint reddish blur that registered only after the motion, he caught her hand, shifted his grip, and held her away by the wrist. “Mirianna!” His anguish reverberated from the chamber walls. “You can’t just...
touch
me! I’m not—”

His flesh was warm, the fingertips separate and defined as his grip encompassed the fine bones of her wrist. Her pulse beat against the pressure, sending a drumbeat of echoes along her nerves. Along his, too, or the words wouldn’t have died in his throat. The contact linked them, communicating the tension of sinew and muscle, the heat of blood, the imprint of flesh on flesh. And this—this was the certainty.

“I
have
touched you, Durren. More than once.” Quiet and sure, her voice filled the chamber without echoing. “I know you’re not empty, not a hollow specter sheathed in black. In the water, I felt your skin. And the pulse at your throat. Your fingers have nails. Your limbs have muscles, bones, flesh to cover them. You’re substance, not shadow, Durren. And I want to touch you again. I’ve always wanted to touch you.”

“Do you know what you’re asking?” he said on a ragged breath.

“Oh yes.” This time, she knew exactly what she was asking. It was the thing she was most sure of. “Make love to me. Please.”

He groaned and his hand captured her head, fingers snagging wet strands of her hair. She gasped—into his mouth. At first there was nothing but the overwhelming tang of sulfur and a sensation of pressure, wetness, and heat. Then he breathed, and the taste of him filled her mouth with rapture. Her lips awoke beneath his, opening to the invitation of his tongue sliding along her teeth. She fisted her hand in his hair, long, thick hair that wrapped around her wrist and slid like wet silk between her fingers.

He broke the kiss, their gulping breath echoing in the chamber as he pulled her full length against his body. “Mirianna ...sweet, sweet Mirianna...” whispered along her throat while his mouth trailed wetly down its curve. “You don’t know how long I’ve dreamed of this. Of you...like this.” His hand brushed her breast, the contact expelling air from her lungs. His hand returned, trembling, while their gasps mingled. “Dear Koronolan, I want you so badly...but not here.”

Panicked, she clutched at his neck when he pulled away. “Don’t...stop, please.”

His breath rushed over her face. His hand returned to her breast, cupping it, exploring its fullness and limits before stroking a fingertip over the nipple. She convulsed and cried out. His fingers dug into her flesh. “I’m not...stopping, sweet. But not here, not on these rocks. There’s a better place, and you can lie on my clothes.”

Then he was lifting her and she was pressed to his chest, to the wide expanse of skin and muscle rippling under her palm and fingertips. He kissed her while he walked, and she lost herself in the taste and texture of his lips, teeth, tongue, so beguiled she noticed nothing until he drew back and she saw his head and shoulders outlined in a faint red glow, like a stenciled silhouette, before he bent and closed his lips over her breast.

With a cry, she arched upward, raking her fingers across his shoulders. He suckled, pulling at the nipple, taking a mouthful of her breast between his teeth until she whimpered and bucked in his grasp. When he shifted his mouth to her other breast, she seized his hair, convinced she’d die of the pleasure. Somehow, what remained of her garments disappeared. She knew they were gone when he lifted his mouth from her breast and trailed scorching kisses down her belly.

“Open for me, sweet,” he murmured, sliding a hand up her thigh. When it grazed her mound, lightning shot through her nerves and exploded stars behind her eyelids.

“What—what did you do?” she panted.

“Did you like that?” He trailed his tongue along the soft inner side of her thigh. She shivered, and gooseflesh ran along her skin, but she wasn’t cold. Her skin burned, and the heat of his mouth intensified the fire. While she panted, he stroked down her abdomen, increasing the pressure as he approached her mound.

“What—what are you doing now?”

“I’m going to touch you. Here.” His palm slid over her mound and cupped it. She jumped, but he pressed her down, holding her body captive as his finger touched her. She sucked in a breath. Her body hummed with tension, all her attention focused on one tiny spot that waited for a single fingertip to touch it again and slay her with its magic. Pain, pleasure, agony—and then he was touching her, sliding his finger, slick with her own wetness, between the folds, probing the tight inner space where no man had entered.

“Durren!” she gasped, and his mouth came down on hers as he pushed his finger deep. She felt as though lightning struck. Shot through every nerve with pulsing fire and light, convulsing around that hot, hard touch that pushed with her, pulled with her, teased every last quiver from her body until she fell back and exhaled into his mouth and he released her lips.

“That was...that was...incredible,” she breathed while her body spiraled down into a sweet, nerveless lethargy.

“Not as incredible as you, Mirianna.” He placed kisses on the corners of her mouth, her chin, the base of her throat where her blood beat just beneath the skin. “So soft, so...delicious ...”

Even in her dreamy state, all the tension gone out of every muscle and nerve—or because of it—she heard the edge in his voice, the unfilled need. She reached up and tunneled her fingers into his hair. “You’ve done it again, Durren. Given of yourself. I came here to give to
you.
”

He touched his forehead to hers, and his breath flowed sweetly across her face. “My darling Mirianna, you don’t know how much you’ve already given me.” His hand skated the length of her arm, circling the fine bones of her wrist before his fingers spread over the backs of hers. Turning his head, he pressed slow, tender kisses to her palm and each fingertip. “Just your being here, in my arms like this, is a gift.” With a sigh that seemed to come from the depths of his soul, he bent and kissed her with the utmost care.

She could barely breathe past the ache in her throat, past the swell of unshed tears burning there at the thought of his loneliness, the years he’d spent alone without a single soul to touch him, to hold him. Intent on rectifying that need, she wrapped her arms around his body and set about caressing every inch of skin she could reach. The rumble issuing from his throat startled her, but she took it to signify pleasure when he cupped her face with both hands and deepened the kiss.

Sighing, she stroked her hands over his face. As her caressing fingertips took their time, she discovered something she hadn’t noticed in the first mad rush of passion—a tracery of fine ridges scoring his skin. As she widened her explorations, she encountered more of them, at irregular intervals, cross-hatching his shoulders, arms, back and chest. Scars, she thought, thin and faded, like old memories. She stroked over his brows, finding across one a ridge like a knotted rope.
Another scar.
Her heart thudded, hard and heavy, at the evidence of his suffering, at the truth of what he’d endured.

Framing his face with her hands, she pushed gently until his lips released hers. “I want to give you more.” A breath apart, she held him at bay and spoke past the lump in her throat. “I want you to take me...as I am. I want you to take pleasure in me, Durren, not just give me pleasure.”