Hers to Claim (21 page)

“
I hope so.” Hel took her arm and escorted her from the sickroom, a basket of spent diaman crystals held in his other hand. Adonia’s mind shied away from the implications of his statement.

Hel turned the heavy metal key in the door lock of the chamber he euphemistically referred to as “the game room.” A gentle push swung the ponderous arched door fully open to reveal several stout bondage frames placed throughout a spacious area devoid of any sort of decoration—unless one considered the whips, floggers, spreaders, hooks and harness that covered one windowless wall decoration. He heard Nia gasp at the revelation of the room’s contents. Elaborate cupboards lined another wall and held smaller items like dildos, butt plugs, gags, blindfolds, cockrings and clamps, but Nia couldn’t know that. One of the cabinets also held his copy of the
Libre de Diamantorre
, the great book containing the Great and Lesser Rites. He had come for the book, though Nia’s reaction to the room’s interior intrigued him.

He turned to
his wide-eyed partner. “Do you have any experience with sexual discipline?”

Nia stood silently for so long
it was on the tip of Hel’s tongue to repeat his question. Finally, she lifted her chin in a defiant gesture. “I lived among everyday people with simple tastes. I have no experience with anything other than man on top, woman on the bottom.”

“Your lovers were not adventurous.”

She slid him an uneasy glance. “Lover. Not lovers. One lover…and then not often.”

He cocked his head in surprise at her answer.
“How long were you together?”

“Over ten years.”
She spoke her soft answer to the floor.
“When I left Sh’r Un Kree, Klaran came with me. We were betrothed.”

“You left him?”

“No. He left me.”

“Then he was a fool.”

She jerked her head up. “It wasn’t
Klaran’s fault. I, ah, I…” She inhaled deeply. “I’d always been preoccupied with my medicines, and then we fought the Haarb…” Nia closed her eyes and her voice came out thready. “Klaran said I was hard and unwomanly.”

“No.” A fl
ash of fury blazed through him at the forlorn acceptance in her voice, and he pulled Nia into him violently, trapping her wrists behind her with one hand and holding her face up to his with the other. She closed her eyes, but otherwise didn’t resist.

“Look at me, Nia,” he snapped. When her brown eyes met his,
Hel stared as if he could ingrain his words in her mind with the force of his gaze. “You are not hard
enough
. You care too much for everyone but yourself. You risked your soul today for a patient to whom you’ve never spoken. As for womanly?” He ground the thickening length of his erection into her soft abdomen. “You are woman enough for the Prince of Nyth Uchel.”

Nia gave a sob and caught her lower lip between her teeth
. Her gaze slid to the side.

“Do I need to punish you again to remind you
of the consequences when you question your worth?” Her eyes flared and, for a moment, her body softened against his.
I think I do.
A soft laugh escaped his lips. “So that’s how it is. All right, my beauty. You will get what you’re asking for.”

Hel hauled her over to a square frame set waist high. “Bend over. L
ie face down on the supports. Spread your legs.”

He could feel his cock getting harder as he fastened
each slim ankle to a corner of the block with a padded cuff and then did the same with her wrists above her head. She watched him without sound until he stood behind her and gathered her long skirts over her waist to expose her bare legs and ass.

“Are you going to whip me?”
She had craned her head over her shoulder and met his eyes. Those brown glimpses into her soul held more curiosity than fear.

“No, B
eauty. I am going to spank you with a paddle until your buttocks are as pink as the
miku amar
nestled between your legs, and then I am going to take you to the
Chambre Cristalle,
tie you spread-eagled on your back and fuck you until all Nyth Uchel hears you screaming my name.”

Hel selected a broad, smooth wooden paddle from a cabinet behind him.

A long shudder ran through her body. “I read the entire
Libre de Diamantorre.
I don’t remember a lesser rite starting like this.” Before Nia hid her cheek against the platform, Hel saw her lips twitch.

Smack!
“Impudent girl.” She yelped, and he smacked her twice more where the cup of her buttocks met her thighs.
Smack! Smack!

“Oh!” She twisted her hips in an unsuccessful attempt to evade his next three paddles.
Smack, smack, smack.
“Please, Hel, please.”

“Please what, B
eauty?”

“Stop
. Please, stop.”

“No. I don’t think you want me to stop.” He slipped a broad finger through the moisture glist
ening between the swollen folds hiding the entrance to her hot interior. Hel had tickled the female
miku
into moving up to rest on Nia’s lower abdomen. The hard nub of Nia’s clit slipped back and forth as the pad of his finger slowly pressed and circled, lubricated by her generous arousal.

“That doesn’t mean anything. I’ve been like that all day. It’s the
miku amar
. She does…she does…she…she…aggh! Why wouldn’t she move for me?”

The needy
moan echoing off the diaman walls and the quivering globes of Nia’s red buttocks went straight to his painfully hard cock tortured by the blue
miku’s
rhythmic massage of his balls.

He knew it wasn’t kind
. He wasn’t feeling kind. He baited her. “She does what, Nia? What does she do?”
Smack!
“Nurse your clit? Bathe your soft pussy in warm caresses that never stop?”
Smack!

“Yes,” she sobbed.

“Do her tentacles enter your most private places and tickle you?”
Smack!

“Stop, Hel,” she whispered.

“If you meant that, I would—but you don’t, do you? I think you like receiving discipline as much as I like administering it.”
Smack!
“The pain feeds some masochistic part of you that whispers,
‘you deserve it’
.”
Smack!
“Bad girl.”
Smack!
When her only response was a muffled groan, he laughed, low and wicked. “It definitely satisfies me to deliver it.”

Nia yowled and jerked her hips in time to four more rapidly delivered
strikes of the paddle. Her breaths came in heavy pants. “Ohhh, Goddess, I need to come,” she groaned.

He
l grunted and threw the paddle down next to her head.
Poor girl. She sounds desperate.
After the day’s earlier events, combined with what he knew was to come, it would be cruel to provoke her further. It was the work of moments to unhook her gown to her waist and un-cuff her ankles and wrists. He pulled her lithe form into his arms for a punishing kiss then murmured against Nia’s lips, “Fly up those stairs. Get rid of the dress and lie on your back on the dais.”

“Where will you be?”

“Right behind you. And, Nia…you don’t want me to catch you.”

With wild eyes and a chirrup of
alarm, Nia gathered her skirts and fled, taking the stairs two at a time before disappearing into the
Chambre Cristalle
. Hel pulled the
Libre de Diamantorre
from its cupboard and held it under one arm while he closed and locked the ‘game room’ door. With a snarl of desire, he loosed the predator that always lurked just beneath his veneer of domestication and vaulted up the steps after Nia.

She was climbing onto the dais as he prowled through the door
, her dress a puddle of color on the chamber floor. “Fasten those corner cuffs around your ankles then lay back.” He watched her as he laid the diaman crystals in the grooves around the center slab. She hissed when her brightly colored buttocks contacted the cold rock, but otherwise she obeyed him exactly. He stripped his clothes off rapidly, leaving them in an untidy pile and strode to the head of the dais.

“Your cock and balls are blue.” The brown eyes examining him widened further. “You’ve, ah,
gained in…girth.”

Hel barely restrained a snort of laughter. “Yes, and your pussy is hot pink
and undulating. Like you, this gods-be-damned creature has had me semi-aroused all day. Are you beginning to understand why the
miku amar
are called companions in love?” She nodded silently. “Stretch your arms above your head, Beauty.”

He
cuffed one wrist to each corner of the dais and pulled the ties taut. The bindings allowed Nia little movement. With a satisfied grunt, he moved to kneel between her outstretched legs. The hard stone bit into his knees but he welcomed the distraction from his over-eager cock. The ill-behaved organ jerked and wept in anticipation of plumbing Nia’s moist inner core. “Now, your first formal lesson, the fourth level rite for kinetic power. Repeat after me….”

Adonia
found concentrating on the words shaped by his delicious lips impossible. Perhaps the wild light in his storm-gray eyes promising forbidden wickedness shattered her focus—or the throbbing of her buttocks spread-eagled on the dais. Always, his sculptured body fascinated her. But, all of those faded into nothingness when the plush head of his heavy cock began a slow repetitive stroke from her clit to the entrance of her wet sheath—and then the real torture began. The pink
miku amar
elongated impossibly and slid between the cheeks of her ass. Its gentle probe of her anus morphed into full penetration from a rubbery, pulsing tentacle. Several more crept into her moist channel, creating an insidious tickle.

“Hel, I
can’t hold on. It’s too extreme.”

“Concentrat
e, Beauty. I promise whatever you feel now only intensifies as we delve into the more complex rites. Master your body. Control your arousal. And, Nia…don’t climax without permission.”

Adonia
shuddered at the expression on Hel’s face. She’d seen the same on great hunting cats as they closed on their victim. She’d become prey. Gathering the shattered pieces of her self-control, Adonia choked out the phrases Hel snarled into her face for what seemed an eternity. She managed to keep her climax at bay—until he penetrated her.

The
sear of her over-full sheath stretching to receive his
miku
-enhanced cock knocked her arousal down just enough to prevent instant climax. The tissue of her inner channel throbbed in protest to his invasion. Hilted inside her, Hel stilled, his face mere inches above hers. His eyes, framed by a thick fall of almost black hair, burned with demonic light. Regular explosions of his breath washed her face with his hoarse enunciations of the rite.

Then,
the
miku amar
made her presence known. Within Adonia’s sheath and back passage the creature’s rhythmic pulsations intensified. A tsunami of sexual sensation swamped her, a combination of both hers and Hel’s. Suddenly, every nerve in her pussy, clit and anus quivered with electric excitement. If Hel moved—at all—she was gone. With a vicious growl ripped from his gut, Hel withdrew and slammed home—and she lost it.

“I can’t…coming!
I’m coming!” In her extremis, her back arched and strained against her bindings, lifting both their bodies from the surface of the dais, holding them suspended for untold minutes. She barely recognized when Hel’s guttural cries combined with hers. Pleasure unlike any she had known, raped her mind of conscious thought and she blacked out.

~
~ ~

“Nia
?” Warm lips pressed to hers.
Hel.
“Nia? Come back to me, Beauty.”

Disoriented, s
he fluttered her eyelids. Bright light flashed through. She kept her eyes closed, unwilling to abandon the maternal cocoon enfolding her mind. The motherly presence slipped away as awareness infiltrated her senses. “Mmm-hmm.”

Adonia
lay in Hel’s lap, his arms wrapped about her. The fine material of his clothes caressed her bare skin.
I am nude.
She didn’t care. She wrapped her arms around his torso and snuggled into the velvety softness of his tunic.
He’s become my shelter from the storm.
The thought wandered into her mind as she lay against his hard body, her own rising and falling with his breaths.
I would willingly spend a lifetime with this man.
The deep thrum of his throaty laugh tickled the ear she pressed to his chest.

“I know your connection with our Mother is
unusually strong; so, I tell myself, each time, to expect the extraordinary. Even so, the results of our pairing continue to astonish me,” Hel stated on a laugh.

“Mmm
-hmm.”

Hel’s
arms tightened around her as she burrowed deeper into his hold. Again, his chest rumbled in her ear with low amusement, and he shifted her in his arms. “Get up, Healer, or I’ll dump you on the unforgiving stone floor currently wearing a hole in my ass.”