“You need to feed and rest.”
I needed this, needed even more of him inside me. But I couldn’t say so with my mouth full of his blood. So I cheated, using the magic of Calanthe to reverse his intention so his hand released its grip on my wrist and fell away. He uttered an oath of surprise as I tugged at the laces of his pants. The pressure of his erection and the slide of our bodies had him springing free of the confining leather. I wrapped his shaft in my hand, working him hard, and his head fell back in abandonment. “Lia,” he moaned. “How I love you. Have me then. Have everything.”
I slid up his body—my mouth still fixed on his throat—and impaled myself on him. The convulsion took us both, twin cries of need climbing from our bodies. Pressing down, I sheathed him in the glove of my body, releasing the pressure of my mouth. Then I rose up, slowly, titillating us both, and I sucked hard, fresh blood filling me. He moved with me, flexing and filling, giving me everything.
And I reversed the flow to give back to him. All the verdant, fertile daylight pleasures of Calanthe as I remembered them. The sounds of bees in the blossoms so heavy with pollen and nectar their heads drooped with it. The scent of sea air and sunshine-heated leaves. The blue of the sky and the soil-dark richness below. The song of birds and the caress of petals on naked skin, the bite of thorns and the pain of birth. I rolled over him like gentle thunder before the downpour lets loose. His hand cupped my head against him, the other bracing my hip, helping me to work the plunging rhythm as old as the tides that surged onto land.
He stiffened as I did, the impending climax seizing us both in a grip as relentless as time. Tighter the tension coiled, our hearts racing in tandem, the magic of life and death pounding in cycle of blood and sex and love. A keening sound filled my ears and I realized it was me, the cry building to unbearable heights, and he thrust into me chanting my name like a prayer to his own personal goddess.
And we came together. The climax rent and sealed us, bound together by my mouth drawing his blood from his heart, my sex drinking the seed from his balls, and all of my skin sending life, and gratitude, and love back into him.
We rode that point of impossible ecstasy together, then crashed, falling into a long spiral of light and darkness, the dense fertile soil of Calanthe catching us, salt and sea, blood and flowers.
* * *
Lia went lax against me, lissome and fragrant. The sweet scent of blossoms rose from her skin, softly new, like springtime in Oriel when the snows first began to melt, withdrawing in patches to reveal those white and purple star-shaped flowers my mother had loved.
Lia nuzzled my neck, making a sleepy sound, and I stroked her head and back, soothing her. It seemed the fuzz on her scalp had grown, which surely was a good sign. I cradled that hope tenderly, unsure how to properly coax it into being.
Instead of succumbing to sleep, however, Lia shifted, giving my neck a last kiss that both stung and soothed. Pushing herself up, she sat over me, and I anchored her there. Her flimsy sleep gown had parted over lush breasts, nipples tight as rosebuds, and her tilted eyes dominated her delicately boned face. Devoid of her elaborate masks of makeup and jewels, her beauty took on an unearthly cast. It went beyond the bicolored eyes, one bright green, one deep blue, or the blood reddening her full lips. For the first time, I understood how easily she’d be spotted as someone not entirely human. In that moment, it amazed me that I—or anyone—could ever have seen her otherwise.
She took a corner of the sheet and wiped my lips with it, tenderly and carefully, not meeting my gaze. “Thank you, Conrí,” she murmured.
“You’re more than welcome, Your Highness,” I replied in turn, and her brilliant eyes lifted to mine, her faintly green brows rising with a glint of her dry humor.
“Is that what this was, service to a queen?”
“You ask me that with my body still joined to yours?”
“Many have serviced their kings and queens so,” she reminded me, dropping the sheet to run a fingertip over my lower lip.
“With the blood of their veins and the lust of their groins,” I replied, feeling as if I quoted something.
She smiled, her former wicked humor blossoming. “There’s a song I haven’t heard in a long time.”
“Is that what it is? Hmm.” My own memory seemed to be serving up patchy offerings of its own lately. I’d gone so long remembering nothing of before the mines, thinking of nothing but the vengeance that fueled me, that having memories of spring flowers and ballads made me feel like a different person.
“At any rate, I meant to thank you for … feeding Me.” She seemed tentative, fragile in some indefinable way.
I flexed my hands on her slender thighs. “Anytime. As often as you need it.”
“That might get unsustainable.”
I shrugged against the pillows. “I’m a big guy. I have a lot of blood, and I can make more.”
“Even you aren’t invincible, wolf,” she pointed out with some asperity. “What if I take too much?”
“I’m stronger than you are. I won’t let you.”
“I can use My magic.”
“You won’t, because you’d have to think about it and once you did, you wouldn’t.”
I wasn’t sure that chain of words made sense, but she considered them, head tilted as she trailed a finger through my beard, dropping to my chest, tracing the skin where my shirt had parted. “Maybe so. Though I seem to have the upper hand now.” She flexed her internal muscles, rocking on me, and I rode the wave of almost too-intense sensation.
“Because I’m allowing it.”
“We’ll pretend that’s true,” she answered with a soft smile, then she sobered. “Con—how did you know what to do?”
“The wizard told me.”
“Did he?” She pursed her lips, thinking. “I don’t think that’s true.”
“What do you know,” I mock-growled, “you were out of your head.” Dying. I didn’t say it, but she met my gaze, the troubling knowledge in it.
“I think this makes twice you’ve saved My life. At least.”
“Since I’m the reason you nearly lost your life in the first place, that seems only fair.”
She considered that seriously. “I don’t believe this sort of thing comes down to accounting.”
I cast about for an answer to that, feeling oddly exposed. The orchid caught my eye. “Look, Lia. The orchid ring.”
“Bracelet, gauntlet, armband,” she corrected idly, without bite, as she held up her hand, turning it, surveying the orchid growing from the narrow part of her forearm, just above the stump of her wrist. Green vines twined in an intricate pattern worthy of any court jeweler, wrapping around her arm with curlicues and forming the dense pad her twig fingers sprouted from. The blossom itself had sprung to life along with Lia, flushed a deep red with shades of blue and purple. The scalloped petals billowed, wafting a rich, sweet scent. “Does it draw life from Me or do I draw life from it?” she mused.
“Maybe you both draw life from the same source.”
She cocked her head at me. “How philosophical My snapping wolf has become.”
“I had a lot of time to think,” I commented, my voice rough as I recalled those dark days and sleepless nights.