Pleasure (5 page)

Learning she was wrong about the nature of Demons had led her to understand she might be wrong about Vampires as well. There was certainly nothing overtly evil in this clever and intelligent man beneath her touch. She turned her thoughts back to the marvel that was his body, curiosity eating her up as she longed to know what he did to create such a physique. She knew now it wasn't merely a matter of “working out,” but it was some kind of task of his work as a
priest that required him to be battle-ready and packed with this much power. She trailed her fingers up over a tight buttock, her tongue slipping between her lips to moisten them as she ghosted her palm over him.

Val slid down into the curve of his lower back, her nails drifting into the valley of his spine, the central shaft that anchored so many of those intense muscles. She watched herself find his shoulders, and this time she noticed one was distinctly more developed than the other. Valera suddenly remembered the sheath and its missing sword. She realized that the hand she glided over his right shoulder was touching his sword arm. Swords! They used swords for weaponry. Valera delighted in her deductive reasoning, forgetting herself as she placed her opposite hand on the mattress beside his left arm to balance herself as she reached to stroke his biceps in fascination.

“Shall I turn over?”

The amused voice startled the hell out of her and she jerked away with a guilty little cry. He turned quickly, though, and caught her molesting hand even before she could clear the bed. With a powerful pull he dropped her down onto his chest and then rolled her off her feet and into the bed beside him.

“Come now,” he scolded her in a hot whisper against her temple, “fair is fair.” He chased the remark with the touch of his fingers against her shin, drawing it up over her knee to her thigh and forcing her to realize just how long he'd been aware of her exploration of his body. “Val,” he said with amusement in his eyes, “you're a bad, bad girl.”

She blushed furiously and slapped him in that huge shoulder.

“You rat! You were awake the whole time!”

“From the instant you first touched me,” he agreed in a tone low with intimacy. “How could I possibly stay asleep when your touch causes earthquakes within me?”

Damn, but he was poetic for a warrior. Then again, he
was also a priest. It was the most inconceivable mesh of two personalities she'd ever seen. And…

“Earthquakes?” she echoed, the concept fascinating her right out of her thoughts. That and the fact that his touch was running on to her inner thigh. “It was just a touch.”

“Just a touch? Is this just a touch?” His deft fingers turned into the juncture of her legs, running with slow intimacy along the seam of her jeans and making her entire body shimmer with liquid heat. She gasped for her breath, her face flushing as she reached to seize his wrist.

“I didn't…you were on your stomach,” she reminded him lamely, her chest laboring as her heart revved up in cadence. However, she no longer needed a clarification for his terminology of “earthquakes.” She was quaking, all right. She couldn't stop.

“Oh yes,” he agreed as if he hadn't known that all along. “That's right. Shall I turn you over, Valera? I have to confess, your backside thrills me just as much as your front side does. It will be no hardship for me either way.”

Not unless he counted the sweet ache in the lee of his hips and the incredibly aroused fullness of his cock. Gods, it had been so long since a woman had done this to him. Even so, he didn't remember it being so sharp and so clawing a need as it was with Valera.

“Sagan,” she panted in a soft panic, her eyes wild with her confusion. Torn between her mind and her body, it was obvious what she was feeling as he touched her. He dipped his head and nuzzled at her breast and the outthrust nipple at its tip. “You said…you said you couldn't…oh God, that feels…”

She couldn't seem to finish a thought and it made him smile against her. Baring his teeth, he nipped at her through far too much material. Sagan was very aware of how small his window of opportunity was with her. She was a woman of spectacular conscience. Very much like himself. She also seemed to remember the tenets that restricted him from her
arms better than he did. But he couldn't ignore how easy and natural it felt to disregard all that had guided him in these matters for a hundred and sixty years of priesthood. When he had entered Sanctuary it had been a resonant calling he couldn't resist, and now he was being called again and it was just as potent a need.

He reached for the hem of her sweater, shucking it from her body as quick as lightning. She was limp and distracted, making it so very easy for him to do. Now he had her in a much thinner shirt, a white creation he could see her bra through. White; an astounding color his kind never wore. Everything they wore was black or dark, making the ability to blend and dwell in the shadows seamless.

“There is a realm,” he murmured, “where it is always night, and there is never any light. We call this place Shadowscape. When I look at you, I think of what you would look like in that 'scape, with your brilliant eyes and your ever-so-fair skin.” He slowly pushed her shirt upward, baring the pale plane of her belly and the tempting oval of her navel. He lowered his head to that place, tracing his lips in light, damp streaks across her until he felt her shiver with her growing need for him.

She was silent and did not outright protest his explorations of her body, but he could easily hear the internal dialogue she was having about her tummy being “flabby” and that her ass was “the size of a small planet.”

Sagan disagreed with all of it and he made very certain she would know that. Shifting himself to a position between her legs, his chest resting on her pubic bone, he framed her waist between his hands and nuzzled her belly with his face and released a long, male sound of appreciation. After all, she smelled so good. So purely good. He flicked his tongue against her warm skin and he delighted in the way she jumped beneath him in response. She lay perfectly passive, submitting to him but not touching him as he continued to explore her and stimulate her.

He ignored below her navel for the time being, knowing that if he crossed that line, the dynamic between them would change quite dramatically. Instead he headed north, plowing away at her shirt until he found the snug and serviceable white bra she wore. Skimming away the blouse completely, he rose over her to view her nearly topless state.

Valera choked on her own breath as the incomprehensible reality of having so much potent nude male on top of her, where she could just feel so much, completely stunned her. Sagan moved against her intimately and without any reserve or shame, showing not a single sign that he was anything but confident and proud of the aggressive arousal of his body. In fact, it almost seemed incidental to him as he focused on the slow caresses of his fingers down her breastbone and across the tops of her breasts.

“Look at you,” he rasped in low heat, peeling away the cover of her bra until he could see both of her nipples. “I can see in these pretty pink buds, so tight and so upthrust, how much excitement you are feeling. You may try to hide in your passivity, Valera, but your body tattles on you like a town gossip.” Sagan followed the keen observation by catching her suddenly between his teeth, drawing on her roughly until her nipple pulled free just as suddenly.

Val nearly exploded off the bed in reaction, her back arching high and hard, the strength of it lifting him as well in the wave of response. She cried out in lust and pleasured pain, her nails suddenly attached to his shoulders and her strength dragging him back for more.

“Sagan,” she groaned, the lusty sound of his name rushing into him like an ocean tide drowning a parched desert beach. He flooded with a wicked combination of need and unexpected desperation. Sagan latched on to her again, this time drawing her deep against his tongue, sucking on her with tight hunger. “Sagan…”

Not
M'jan
Sagan or even
Ajai
Sagan, but just Sagan. For
the first time, he felt stripped of his personas of priest and Shadowdweller and was only a man. It gave him a glorious freedom all in a rush and that liberty powered his craving for her, jacking it up into astounding exponents. He teased and tortured her breasts, devouring her until he knew she was nearly raw with sensation. Sagan then launched himself upward to seize her mouth and reached to draw up her thighs to frame his waist.

Valera transformed beneath him as she fed off his escalating aggression. Passivity disappeared and she met his mouth with wild appetite and such erotic response that it made Sagan's head reel. Her nails scraped down his back and this time he was the one to arch in response and groan with incomprehensible lust. He snapped her bra free, ripping it in his haste to bare her against him. A moment later they were both reveling in the contact of heated flesh matching to heated flesh.

Valera touched him everywhere she could reach, and not only with her hands. Her mouth, legs, and even her feet stroked against him. Sagan reached for the snap of her jeans and she was lifting her hips for him even before he had pulled the zipper.

“I need you on my tongue,” he whispered in a heated rush into her mouth as he pulled her pants down her thighs.

“Oh yes,” she gasped, tears stinging across her eyes as she helped kick away the last of her confining clothing. “It's been so long since anyone touched me.”

Sagan felt that keenly because the same was true for him. He surged down her beautiful body, licking himself a path along her sweetly dampened skin. She was misted with a fine layer of perspiration, the slick and sexy moisture speaking to him of how excited she truly was. As for himself, he didn't think he could be any harder or any more eager than he was. His fingertips paved the way for him, drawing down through soft copper curls and seeking the wet declaration of
her need for him. He could already smell it on her, the exotic aroma of a woman aroused. Sagan dropped down and caught the backs of her thighs against his shoulders, his drenched fingers spreading her open to his approach.

Valera was gasping for every breath in anticipation, and when he kissed her intimately she sobbed with aching emotion at the unexpected act of tenderness. Then his tongue touched her in a fluttering tease and her body was awash in fire. It wouldn't take long for him to make her come, she knew. She was so ready to feel that extreme of passion that it would take almost no effort at all. Val reached up above her head and grabbed for the spindles of her headboard, holding tightly as her body writhed beneath the wickedly quickening play of his lips and tongue. He sucked at her sensitive clit again and again, then drew himself a tongued path to her entrance where he teased raging nerve endings mercilessly.

Sagan was not prepared for the divinity of her taste. He thought he would be, but he had overestimated himself and underestimated the delicacy she would be to him. Just her rich flavor alone drove him out of his senses, but she intensified it with the wanton reaction of her body and her strangled cries of pleasure. Valera abandoned herself completely to the magic he worked on her body and he felt her legs clutch tightly around him just before she wrenched into an explosive orgasm. Sagan heard her screams with only half an ear. He was much too focused on lapping up every creamy drop of the release he had coaxed from her body.

“Stop! God, Sagan, please!”

She was on overload and he could very much appreciate the sensation. He was feeling something quite similar. It was that and the overwhelming need that rode him to plunge deeply into her.

But this was the moment of his sharpest reckoning, he realized as he drew up her bare body to kiss her. Not that he hadn't already crossed several lines to have come this far
with her, but this would become a very purposeful flouting of the vows he had taken and adhered to for sixteen decades. He realized nothing could ever come of whatever this was that raged between them. He was a priest. He was immortal and she was a human woman with over a third of her lifetime already past her. She would age and become a host to an array of human illnesses as her body systems broke down and failed her.

It was because the very idea of it so suddenly paralyzed him with such unexpected emotion that he froze into stillness and stared down into her passion-clouded eyes. It had been mere hours since he'd met her, he realized with shock. And yet, now he felt as if he had wasted precious time. He hadn't taken enough of her by far, and hadn't given enough to her. Rules, he realized, didn't matter. Couldn't matter. They interfered with each precious moment he had with her. She was…

His.

Maybe not for eternity, but for this moment she was his. Sagan took that desperate feeling to heart, letting it seize him and take control of him. He disregarded her limp, sated state and set his cock in the hot, wet bath of her sweet pussy. A chill of raw need raced along his spine and met up with the heat the contact sent erupting through him. He shuddered as he soaked himself in her, reveled as she came alive beneath him once more.

“Give me your mouth,
jei li,
” he demanded of her even as he set himself ready to enter her. He took her willing offer with heat and frantic desire. But he disregarded the primal urge he had to plunge into her deep and hard and instead burrowed into her in slow, inching movements. He savored every instant of it, from the incredible tightness of her to the way she raked his back in protest of his pace. Even so she undulated under him with every new inch of his invasion. Sagan's blood rushed loudly in his ears, his chest aching
with the raging beat of his heart. He was almost sheathed completely when the urge to climax rushed over him, reminding him of how unpracticed he had become.