Demon's Fire (10 page)

“I want to touch all of you,” she murmured. “You look so smooth.”

He managed to turn the groan he wished to utter into a grunt, much good as that did him. She took the sound as permission. Her hands shifted to his shaft, sliding over him up and down. She was cooing in admiration, but Pahndir could scarcely hear above the blood whooshing in his ears.

He thought of all the hands that had touched him, all the students who’d honed their erotic tricks on him when he’d been the Purple Crane’s captive teaching tool. Whatever pleasure they’d brought, he’d always chained the emotions that hid deep in a Yama’s soul. Now he wanted nothing more than to throw off those old constraints. He wanted to trust Beth, to simply be with her and enjoy.

But maybe these uncustomary inclinations came from her. Maybe they were seeping into him with her energy. He opened his eyes and found hers watching him anxiously.

“Is this right?” she asked. “Is this what you like?”

He put his hand over hers, guiding her to a smoother, harder stroke. She blushed when she felt the difference this brought to his reactions, how it heated his skin and caught at his breath. He was sitting on his heels, with her knees bracketing his. Their mingled scents perfumed the air. He thought he’d never seen a lovelier female, her human vibrancy preferable to any Yamish perfection. His eyes squeezed shut, just for a moment, when her thumb found a patch of sensitivity beneath his penis’s head. Reluctant to miss a thing, he opened his eyes again.

She was biting her lower lip with the most endearing concentration he’d ever seen.

He had to kiss her then, had to lick that cushy surface and taste her once more. She moaned, her grip tightening painfully. When he drew back, her eyes were squeezed as tightly shut as his had been.

“Oh, God,” she said, panting it. “I didn’t know I could ache this badly.”

The confession almost drove him mad. He forgot about not frightening her, about style or suaveness or anything but touching her. His hand was already opening her trousers, his weight already tipping her onto the leather meditation mat that formed his floor. “Let me bring you with me, Beth. It’s better not to come alone. I’ll only use my hand, I swear.”

She squeaked out some protest that changed into a moan the moment his fingers reached the creamy slit of her sex. She felt like the human heaven as he explored, so wet, so hot, so responsive to his every touch. Her hands left his erection to clutch his back, her hips working frantically up at him.

When his thumb slid over the bursting bud of her clitoris, she uttered a strangled sound no Yama ever had.

“Sorry,” she gasped even as her pelvis jerked in a hard climax. “Oh, please, do that again.”

He wasn’t going to disappoint her, or miss joining in. Yanking up her borrowed shirt, he shifted his hips to press his cock against her belly where the curve met her hipbone. That delight was eye-opening, her skin there melting soft. One of his legs had fallen between hers, and she was gripping it with both thighs. To be naked while she was dressed added one more coil to his excitement; power and vulnerability had always been equal stimulants for him. To experience both now gave him an almost giddy awareness of his freedom. He was no one’s slave tonight. He didn’t have to take orders.

Able to do as he pleased, he had just enough control to keep his fingers busy pleasing her—for which he counted himself lucky. She screamed out her second climax: softly, but she did.

Oh, Fortune, could I get used to hearing that!
he thought. The burst of energy pulled him over—a good, deep orgasm, even if it was dry. Wanting another for them both, he rubbed her clitoris with even more direct intent, seeking out the brighter flare of life force where the little rod was most sensitive.

“Wait,” she said, squirming wildly but not away. A second later, she shoved her hand between his abdomen and his shaft, pressing him against her skin. He wasn’t giving her much room to fist him, but she was stroking him as best she could, her hand perfectly positioned to swallow up the head. The technique might not have been sophisticated, but it was intense, especially with the tiny chakras in her palm shooting lightning bolts. When she hit her peak, there was no way in the universe he could hold his own pleasure back.

His eyes just about crossed when he came that time.

He didn’t realize he’d collapsed on top of her until she let out a muffled I-can’t-breathe sound.

He pushed back from her at once, his hair falling around his torso in a long dark cloak. Pahndir couldn’t remember the last time he’d done anything this inconsiderate to a lover. Worse, some of his horror must have shown in his expression, because she patted his arm.

“It’s okay. Truly.”

“It’s unconscionable. I’m far too heavy to lie on a human female. I could have crushed your ribs!”

Beth laughed, which flustered him. “I’m not that fragile. I just needed air.”

He was so unsettled, he shoved his hair back with both hands. “I’m usually more adept with women.”

Beth blinked at that, which had him wondering if she doubted him. He certainly hadn’t shown her his best techniques. But she shook her head at whatever she’d been thinking. “I suspect we were both a bit out of control tonight.”

When her words sank in, they dumbfounded him. A sexually inexperienced human female thought
he’d
been out of control? Aghast, Pahndir watched her struggle to her feet to tuck her shirt back into her trousers. He wanted to convince her his control had never been better, except he wasn’t sure he could convince himself.

Just looking up at her, he was well on his way toward wanting her again.

“Well,” she said, standing over him. She looked awkward, which was probably his fault as well. “I suppose I should get out of here before Charles recovers. I don’t want him thinking I spied on him, even if I did. Thank you for—” She hesitated, at a loss for the correct term. “Thank you for sharing that with me. Thank you for not being angry about me breaking into your home.”

“I want to see you again,” he blurted out.

Her face went as dark as a damson plum, and rightly so. The rawest pup of a Yamish suitor wouldn’t have been so blunt.

“No, never mind,” he said before she could utter whatever polite refusal she was scrambling for. “Let me call a car for you. I want to know you’ll get safely home.”

She rubbed a spot between her eyebrows, a human gesture of perplexity. He couldn’t blame her. He was rather perplexed himself.

“That would be nice,” she said with a crooked, if unsure smile. “I expect my legs are too shaky to leave the way I came in!”

Never mind. Never mind. Never mind.

The phrase rolled through Beth’s mind like an endless train, first in Pahndir’s voice and then in hers.

Tonight was over. Done. And unlike the times she’d played silly board games with her older siblings, she couldn’t throw a tantrum and retake her turn.

She would have retaken it in a minute, if only to enjoy the feel of Pahndir’s hot, silken hardness in her palm again. She should have touched him more when she’d had the chance, should have caressed his face and those beautiful hands of his. Maybe just held him and stroked his hair.

That idea had her choking back a laugh. She could just imagine the icy prince letting her do that.

The irony of her thoughts did nothing to diminish her almost agonizing arousal. Knowing she shouldn’t have been feeling it (she’d been pleased three times, after all) she tried not to wriggle too obviously on the leather seat. The prince’s car was what Charles’s younger brother, Max, would have called the cat’s meow: a long, silver Daimler-Harris with a winged Victory on its prow. It rode so smoothly it put Charles’s pride-and-joy rattletrap to shame. An older human in a chauffeur’s cap was driving, his expression conveying as little interest in Beth as his employer’s had at the end of their visit.

She’d never seen eyes go as flat and cool as Pahndir’s had, and mere seconds after he’d declared he wanted to see her again. Had he recognized his own insanity? Or was it was hers that had put him off?

Evidently, her human energy could only interest him for so long.

She pressed a fist to her mouth and stared out the window, fighting to contain her inner turbulence. She must have lost her mind. Granted, most of tonight’s activities weren’t out of character for her—or not by much—but to throw herself at a man she barely knew, to beg him to pleasure her…that wasn’t typical. Fearless Philips or not, apart from a little adventuring, she’d kept her beaus within bounds her mother would have approved of. She was, technically at least, still a “good” girl.

Of course, now she knew that was only true because she hadn’t desired those other men as much as Pahndir.

Her groan of humiliation drew the driver’s impassive gaze to her in the rearview mirror. While this was embarrassing, his opinion was the least of her concerns. She’d probably been absolutely awful compared to the sophisticated women the prince was accustomed to. Why, he’d had to put his hand on hers to show her how to stroke him, a titillating necessity at the time, but now just another reason to feel inadequate. She hadn’t made him moan even once. She was reasonably certain men were supposed to, even Yamish ones.

And now that she’d mentioned moaning, what had he meant about Yamish royals going into heat? Would he be like a cat yowling in an alley? Helpless to turn her down? Desperate for the ejaculation he could only have once a month?

A fresh wave of arousal swelled at the idea. She really,
really
liked the sound of that.

“Hellfire,” she muttered, and bit the side of her thumb.

None of this mattered. She was never going to see the prince again. She was going to behave herself for the rest of her natural life. She was going to ignore her impossibly aroused body and turn her eyes the other way when males walked by. Only then could she be certain not to mortify herself again.

The perfect cap to the evening came as she held her breath and tried to shut the
haveli
’s door silently behind her.

“Bit late for a walk,” Herrington remarked.

The entry hall was dark, but she could just make out the hulking shape of him in the arch to the front parlor.

“You scared me,” she said, her heart abruptly racing. “I couldn’t sleep. I stepped out to get some air.”

“I thought I heard a motorcar drop you off.”

“Oh, no, that was a lost tourist looking for his hotel.”

He stared at her, saying nothing, his demon eyes glittering coolly in a thin moonbeam. He was as bad as her mother for making a person worry that her lies were written on her face.

Just stick to your story,
Beth advised herself.

“I took your torch,” she said, pulling it out to show him. “The perfect weapon, should anyone have wanted to interfere with me.”

He accepted it from her hand. “It seems that Charles has ‘stepped out’ as well.”

“Has he?” Beth brushed a fallen lock of hair from her eyes. “Well, I’m sure he’s fine. Charles is old enough to take care of himself.”

“You’re both my responsibility to keep safe.”

“We
are
safe. Safe and happy and grateful for all you do. And now I really should get to bed. I don’t want to oversleep tomorrow and be late for work.”

Charles would have teased her for laying it on too thick, but Herrington simply turned his head to watch her climb the stairs tread by tread.

“Sleep well,” he said, long after a human would have responded.

Knowing he’d see even in the dark, Beth nodded in answer and tried not to look as if she were running away from him.

Though it crossed her mind, she didn’t have the nerve to ask what
he
was doing out so late.
Out
was where he had to have been. The great Herrington’s boots had been caked from toe to ankle in desert sand.

Once she’d disappeared into the darkness, Herrington laughed softly.

How lowering was it that a twenty-something-year-old human had the power to hurt his feelings by lying to his face? The sting was a sign of how long he’d lived among Beth’s kind. By contrast, the part of him that would always remain Yama admired her facile tongue. She was a smooth deceiver, cool as a cucumber. If he hadn’t seen her get out of the motorcar with his own eyes, he’d have been tempted to believe every word.

She was fortunate his culture didn’t believe in confronting others for deliberate lies. If they had, he’d have blistered her human hide. Herrington had been (and still was, on occasion) both diplomat and spy among her kind. The highest ranks of Avvar society had opened their homes to him. An invitation, however, was not the same as acceptance. Beth’s parents were among the rare humans who simply treated Herrington as a man they liked. He’d promised to look out for their daughter, and he had no intention of letting her run wild until he’d approved of whoever her partner in wildness was.

But that was for later. For now, the tasteful crest that had gleamed on the expensive private auto’s side was burned into his memory. After six seasons digging in Bhamjran, Herrington had built a good intelligence network. He’d make inquiries before he acted. As to that, he’d like to know what Charles was up to. Both the young people in his care were “acting dodgy,” as the humans said.

Welland Herrington knew better than to let a trend like that go unchecked.

If one was a royal Yama, there were reasons for adding men to one’s sexual bill of fare. Pahndir was contemplating them while staring blankly at the striped red satin walls of his brothel’s long bedroom-floor corridor.

There was boredom, of course. No pampered royal was immune to that. Nor could the charm of variety be underestimated when one was bonded to a single female for life. But the primary reason royals ventured into playing with their own gender was their glands.

They had extras—three, to be precise. The common rabble weren’t supposed to know about them, but when royals hit their heat, their body chemistry went haywire.

The two glands in their necks pumped a hormone known as kith into their saliva, which could then be passed with a kiss. Kith was a powerful aphrodisiac that heightened the sex drive of matched partners, ensuring that those Yama who were likeliest to have healthy offspring would be highly motivated to reproduce. Royal Yama sometimes needed help in that department, the duplication of their extensively adjusted and inbred genes depending on conditions being just so.

The third gland, the one that was foremost in Pahndir’s mind tonight, was called the kingmaster. It piggybacked atop his prostate, and it, too, generated kith. When released inside a Yama’s mate, through involuntary contractions that shot it up his urethra, the hormone made her as incapable of resisting sex as he was. Heat lasted five days, during which time the couple threw themselves into reaching climax as often as possible.

They might have done this even if they didn’t have to. The orgasms royals had while under kith’s influence were indescribably pleasurable. Pahndir held the opinion that this was fortunate. A female who wasn’t so well rewarded for her efforts might not have wanted to engage in a carnal marathon that long.

Or so went the theorizing among genetic scientists.

The problem was—if you could consider anything that inspired such ecstasy a problem—the kingmaster gland was always sensitive, whether the male was in heat or not. As was the case for the human prostate, prolonged manipulation could produce climax. Fingers could be put to the task, or other creative toys. Some Yama, however—Pahndir among them—developed an affection for the feel of a man’s erection running over it: living flesh, throbbing and jerking and taking its own pleasures. His wife had been understanding. A few of the threesomes Thallah had arranged were among his sweetest memories of her. His most painful, too. It was difficult for him to fathom how a woman of Thallah’s generous spirit could have felt the need to end what they’d shared by taking her own life.

Pahndir closed his eyes and blew out a breath. He’d put that loss behind him. He’d had to, for the sake of his sanity. Thallah must have had her reasons, and if he’d been a part of them, he couldn’t change that now. His only power was to change the shape his life took from here, or at least to try.

A door opened down the hall, reminding him where and who he was. A longtime customer flung her bright evening wrap around her shoulders and inclined her head to him.

“Very nice,” she said. “As always.”

He nodded back, not trusting his voice just then. She’d been with Samthan, a young man who offered her a bit more forceful treatment than she got from her harem. Pahndir made a mental note to pass on the compliment. He believed in paying his employees with more than coin.

The corridor was quiet after the woman left, all his rooms being well soundproofed. The downstairs party had wound down as well. Pahndir glanced at the small silver
3
above the door he faced. He knew very well why he’d been woolgathering outside it, rather than going in.

Making a fool of himself once tonight was enough.

He lifted his fist to knock, then brought it down to his side again. Would the human want to be checked on? A Yama wouldn’t have, but—as his ineptitude with Beth had proved—his knowledge of what humans wanted might not be as accurate as he’d believed.

To the Void with it,
he thought. One misstep did not a habit make. He wasn’t going to let second-guessing himself paralyze him now. He knocked and turned the knob at the same time.

Charles looked at Pahndir when he entered but did not rise. He’d pulled the sheets to his waist, and his arm still lay across his forehead. Its shadow deepened the circles beneath his eyes, though even that couldn’t dim his beauty. He looked doomed and lovely, a human angel dragged to earth by his own desires.

Pahndir stopped a foot from the rumpled bed.

“You’ve had a hard ride,” he said, inviting a response but not demanding it.

Charles rolled his face toward the wall. “I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

Pahndir wouldn’t have pushed one of his own race, but for the human he bent his knees and sat on the bed’s low edge. He touched Charles’s shoulder lightly with the back of his hand. The human’s skin was warm and damp, his muscles hard. Pahndir had time to feel the visceral jolt of that before the contact brought the young man’s haunted gaze back to him.

“I hope you’ll forgive my saying so,” Pahndir said, “but you don’t look fine.”

Charles pressed his lips into a line. “I don’t feel better. I thought maybe I could exorcize this need, but—God help me—as empty as it was, it felt so good.”

“You have regrets.”

The human shook his head in a half-denial. “I know I’d have done it some day. Eventually. Wanting to made me feel guilty enough.”

“And why pay for the sin and not commit it? Except it isn’t a sin unless you make it one. My people aren’t the demons you call us. You can’t give up your soul to us.”

“I know that,” Charles said, but his tone was uncertain.

“No one was harmed tonight. You brought your partners great pleasure.”

Charles’s mouth twisted. “I’m not sure they needed me for that.”

“They may have. I don’t know, or care to ask, what pleasures Donjen and Darja allow themselves on their own.”

Charles shifted on the slippery sheets, apparently uncomfortable with the reminder of his reaction to the cousins’ relationship. The sheet covered his groin, but Pahndir suspected he was experiencing a certain level of recovery. Though Pahndir wanted to capitalize on the response, he wasn’t certain how. He was spared the effort when Charles spoke himself.

“I used to work in a place like this.” He looked at Pahndir, daring him to disapprove, which he was hardly going to do.

“You and I have something in common then.”

Charles seemed to think that over. “Are you sorry I didn’t let you do the deed?”

“Are you?”

Charles pursed his lips wryly. “You Yama sure don’t give anything away for free.”

“And here I thought I was being especially forthcoming. I’ll answer if you like.” He drew a breath to pull his thoughts together, the expectation of honesty one he was not used to. “No, I’m not sorry, as it happens. I’m interested in you and, consequently, I prefer not to be associated in your mind with an event that caused you discomfort. Moreover, I know what it’s like to be an unwilling partner. I don’t want anyone, for any reason, to be an unwilling partner to me.”

Charles’s eyes narrowed. “What if I can’t promise I’ll ever be willing?”

“Then I can only hope my…excess of willingness will persuade you.”

A smile ghosted across Charles’s mouth. He seemed to appreciate the delicacy of the answer. “You’re all right, you know. For a prince.”