Alaric opened his eyes and turned his head to nuzzle her palm. “I was dead,” he said, “until a fortnight ago when I heard a fiddler’s music on the cliffs.” A soft kiss danced across her lips. “I didn’t think it possible, but you’ve grown more beautiful with time,Beth.”
Beth. Everyone, even her grandfather, called her Elsbeth. Only Alaric had ever called her Beth. Sometimes teasing, sometimes passionate, it belonged strictly tohim.
Elsbeth blushed. “Oh, yes,” she said and smiled. Her fingers sketched delicate patterns on his arms. “All these new lines on my face become me sowell.”
Hands, both graceful and rough, slid into her hair, cupping her head. Alaric no longer smiled, and his eyes narrowed. “The woman who bewitched me eight years ago had only half the grace and beauty she has now. You will grow lovelier with every passing year. If you live a wyvern’s lifespan, you will only enthrall memore.”
Blood, heated by desire and elation, ran hot in her veins. She slid her arms around him, embraced him fully. It seemed more desperate daydream than reality, but he was in her arms once more, the lover she thought gone forever. Elsbeth spread her thighs wider, bringing him fully against her so she could feel his erection through her trousers. He moaned, hands tightening against her head, hips thrusting lightly in response to her silentinvitation.
His lips teased hers with half kisses. “We’ve much to discuss, Beth.” The sweep of his tongue on the underside of her upper lip sent tingles dancing down her arms and legs. “I came back foryou.”
She dug her fingers into his back, shocked at that confession. She wanted to know, desperately wanted to know what happened to him during those lost years, why he had not found her when he returned for her, and who was this man that wore the guise of awyvern?
Her hands mapped the ridges and valleys of muscle, moving lower to caress his lean buttocks. “Not yet,” she whispered, trying to capture his mouth for a deeper kiss. Her legs wrapped around his, pulling him closer into the juncture of her thighs. “Not yet. Give me this. Convince me this is real. That you’re real. That I won’t wake up alone in the fallow dark, with nothing but the memory of you next tome.”
Alaric didn’t hesitate. He traced his tongue across her lips, held her head still and opened her mouth to stroke and plunder. New and yet familiar to her, he tasted and felt as good as she remembered. She helped him remove her tunic and trousers, pausing when she lay before him, covered only in the mage-light illuminating thecavern.
His hand trembled as it hovered over her hip. “I’ll say it again.” His voice was soft, reverent. “You’re more beautiful now than you were eight yearsago.”
He stood and helped her rise. Elsbeth blushed as he did a slow turn around her. She knew he viewed her with partiality. Nearly a decade had brought the inevitable changes. She was not so firm in some places, a little wider in others. But she chose not to point them out, content to let him admireher.
Alaric, on the other hand, was as flawless as she remembered. The gift of wyvern magic, she supposed. Lean and muscled, he moved with a feline grace, unaware of his extraordinary effect on her senses. Or so she thought. He met her gaze with an amused one of his own. Not only was he aware of her perusal, he reveled init.
“Still find me appealing, beautifulBeth?”
“I’d be blind not to,” she said, gaze drawn to his cock, stiff and jutting from a nest of black curls. She smiled. “Still as proudtoo.”
He brought her into his arms. Elsbeth sighed in sheer pleasure at the feel of his skin on hers. “Eight years,” she said. “Yet this feels thesame.”
“No.” He bent to kiss the sensitive spot where her neck and shoulder met. “This isbetter.”
Alaric made slow love to her then. Unlike the first time they coupled years earlier, this wasn’t frenzied or desperate. He took his time, and Elsbeth savored his touch. He kissed and licked her everywhere, leaving no part of her untouched by his mouth. When he spread her thighs and lowered his face to her curls, she’d sucked in a breath, eager for the feel of his tongue on her, inside ofher.
He played havoc with her body and her senses, stroking and sucking while she pleaded with him not to stop and then begged him to halt before she expired. When he brought her to orgasm, her cries carried throughoutMaldoza.
She returned the favor, pleasuring them both by taking his cock in her mouth. He stood before her, hands buried in her hair as she knelt, sucking him leisurely. It was a slow torture she performed. Her tongue ran the length of his shaft, the sensitive vein along its underside. His bollocks were cool in her hands, his taste salty in her mouth. It wasn’t Elsbeth on her knees who was the supplicant, but Alaric whose thighs shivered beneath her palms and whose hands clenched her hair. His climax was as intense as hers, his knees buckling as he filled hermouth.
They loved through the long hours of the afternoon. Alaric reasserted his earlier claim, taking her in ways that left no part of her untouched or unbreached by him. It was a loving debauchery, and Elsbeth gloried init.
In the aftermath, they lay spooned together. Elsbeth, satiated and exhausted, was almost asleep. Alaric’s fared no better. His voice was faintly slurred when he spoke. “Do you want abath?”
It was an effort to respond. “Later,” she mumbled. Her eyelids dragged down, despite her best efforts to keep them open. She was half afraid of slumber, afraid this was indeed a dream, wondrous and fleeting as a zephyr. And she had so many questions. Instead, she yawned and entwined her fingers with Alaric’s where they rested between her breasts. “I like your scent onme.”
He hugged her close and chuckled. The sound soon changed to a gentle snore. Elsbeth fell asleep to its steadylullaby.
“Why didn’tyou tell me in Ney that you were more than a man?” Elsbeth crouched in front of a wash bowl Alaric had given her and sponged herselfclean.
“Because you might have thought me less than a man if I did.” He bathed beside her, golden skin glistening with water droplets in the lair’s magic light. “Think on it, Beth. I had a difficult enough time convincing you to even speak to me, being that you thought me nothing more than a drifter with a glib tongue and evil designs on innocent village maids.” His mouth turned up in a faint smile. “You were wrong about that youknow.”
Her eyebrows rose. “What? The part about your glib tongue, or the evil designs on villagemaids?”
Alaric laughed and danced tickling fingers down her ribs, making her wiggle and laugh as well. “The last. I had designs only on one woman, and she did not fall easily to mycharms.”
“That’s because you used the wrong charms at first. I fell quickly enough after you ate my cooking without complaint. Had I known then you could just as easily enjoy an uncooked haunch of ox, I might not have been so seduced.” She toweled off with a dry cloth and returned to their pallet, keen to have him against her oncemore.
“And you’ve still the sharp tongue to go with that fiery hair.” He joined her, reaching out to curl a lock of her hair around his finger. His smiling face sobered. “The wyvern is who I am, Beth. The man merely an enchantment. One that took me nearly three hundred years to master and another fifty to grow comfortablewith.”
She captured his hand and kissed the back. “But the heart’s the same. Do you know there have been times when I’ve watched your face and seen something beyond the scales and those horrendous teeth—an expression, especially when you made some joke, that reminded me of Alaric the bard. I thought it just the sad yearnings of a lonely woman. I wanted to see similarities simply because you shared the samename.”
