Blood Warrior

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Kavya had never stood naked before a man until that moment, when Tallis of Pendray consumed her with eyes darkened by hunger. He might consume her with his mouth and claim her with his body, but his eyes promised it would never be enough.

Promised?

Threatened?

She didn’t care.

On the inside she was trembling with anticipation and a touch of fear, but she stood before him calm and still and proud. She had borrowed too many images from other minds to doubt that she aroused men. That she aroused and had even satisfied this man gave her confidence. She felt hot to the touch, although her skin was pebbled with goose bumps in that small, enclosed laundry room.

“I want to kiss you,” he said, his voice rough and primal.

Her body was on instant alert—not in preparation for a fight, or to muster the strength of calm to inspire her followers—but because she knew the next few moments would change her forever. “Not until I wash.”

She flipped on the tap and, because there was no plug for the drain, she shoved her maroon sari to the bottom. Hot water soon filled the sink. He leaned heavily against the wall beside the sink, soaking in her every movement. She retrieved the bar of soap from their possessions and lathered it beneath the streaming faucet. The scent of sandalwood filled her nostrils and set off her imagination. She wondered how the notes of that fragrance would change when layered with the musk of Tallis’s clean skin.

The process of washing was simple yet luxurious. She lathered and rinsed, then bent over the filled sink to wash her hair. Tallis kept his hands tucked behind his lower back. His expression was turning. Changing. He was turning. There was little left of the thinking man she had come to know. The beast inside him was taking over—with sex in mind, not violence, although, the two seemed inexorably linked among the Pendray.

She should have been afraid, but her nerves and her fears disappeared with the last of the soap from her long, clean hair. In the field, beneath his mouth, she’d felt like a goddess, but not the one he used as a tease. She’d been both powerful and helpless. Tallis looked that way now.

She squeezed out the excess water, then snatched a towel from a stack of clean laundry on a wire shelf. The luxury continued, not because the towels were soft, but because she emerged from that enveloping cloth as a new woman.

Tallis took a deep breath. He yanked his gaze away from her naked body. The speed with which he washed made her smile, even as his nudity sparked gorgeous flames in her blood. He leaned over the sink. Kavya had the most exquisite view of his arched back, the strong ladder of his ribs, the taut clench of his buttocks, and the muscles that trailed from his thighs to his calves. His legs were sleeked with hair that darkened when he scrubbed with the wet washcloth. He remained turned away from her. Rather than the teasing way he’d washed his groin in the room above the high valley pub, he rubbed the cloth quickly between his legs as if it were just another few inches of skin.

Kavya was glad for it. She wanted the heart-deep, lung-deep shock of seeing him turn around, presenting her with an offering.

He would be hard. Yearning. For her.

Sandalwood and steam made her dizzy, as did anticipation. She wanted and craved and needed in ways she’d never thought possible.

He stopped washing. Water dripped from the ends of his hair, along the column of his neck and down the dip and ridges of his back. His spine was a single row of mountains, perfectly straight. Kavya liked that.

Moving slowly, she retrieved another towel from the shelf, then stepped to within inches of his tight, hunched body. His knuckles were white where he gripped the edge of the sink. Kavya started with his hair, gently tousling the dark mass until it was dry enough for the silvery tips to shine again. She caught the drips that trailed down his neck, back, ass—which is when he flinched. Not his whole body. Just those tight twin globes, powerfully shaped.

No, she thought. Not a flinch.

More like a thrust.

She couldn’t resist touching. As if to check the progress of her work, she smoothed a flat palm from his hairline to the span between the divots at the base of his spine. His ass, however, deserved more attention. She laid the towel over her shoulder and pressed her hands against his flanks. With her thumbs she caressed curving slopes of erotic muscle. Tallis hissed, then groaned. She glanced at his knuckles. Either he’d bust bone through skin, or he’d crush the edge of the porcelain sink into powder.

She kissed the back of his left hand before changing sides and kissing his right. So near, he pried his fingers loose and pushed damp strands of hair back from her face. She risked a glance up. His eyes were squeezed shut. He was touching her without looking at her, as if touch would be enough—or as if he were a man on the verge of losing himself to dangerous impulses.

She waited for that.

Had she ever entertained fantasies of how she would lose her virginity, she might have imagined tenderness. Care and comfort and soft touches. Her nightmares shoved violence into the picture, where giving herself was not an option. She would be taken—just another street girl assaulted or dragged into the underground sex trade. Just another Indranan woman valued as breeding stock and as fuel for continued warfare.

Nothing included this level of eroticism, where a sense of gorgeous control was woven with the knowledge that Tallis could steal that control at any moment.

Would he?

Would he hold back?

She didn’t know what she wanted more. If he took her, she wouldn’t have to make the decision.

But no, deep inside she knew that if she didn’t tell him otherwise, he would stand there naked and motionless, with hands ready to do damage to a sink rather than to her. They might don their clothes and pretend the incident had never happened.

Kavya returned to drying him. She pushed the towel around his sides to dry his stomach and chest. She smoothed the terry cloth around the tense caps of his shoulders, then down defined ridges of triceps, biceps, and stone-hard forearms. Only when she’d tended to everything else did she venture to the place that would end her silent, overt flirtation and take the moment past the point of no return. She traced his flanks once again, around, slowly, until she rubbed the towel between his inner thighs and up along his hard shaft.

Tallis groaned a curse.

He turned so quickly that Kavya stumbled away. She hit the wall at her back. A surge of air jumped from her lungs. Part of that was from surprise and the impact of her body against cinder block. Part of it because Tallis was tall, vital, intimidating, so very male. The light in his eyes was viciously blue, as if the color could burn down the whole city. Instead it burned into her and melted what little remained of her hesitation. His cock jutted up and toward his navel at an angle that suggested the upward thrust of what would be his initial penetration—and every tight thrust that would follow.

Kavya still couldn’t breathe. She was wet between her legs. So hot. Her skin was shrinking. Tension made her ready to burst free of that confinement.

Again she was drawn to the sight of his erection, which was even more intimidating than when he’d lain prostrate in the field. His body was worth admiring and worshiping with everything she had—her hands, her lips, and the clench of her untested sex.

“We’ll dress and find a room,” he growled.

The berserker was in him, not controlling him but certainly fueling him with urges that touched her primitive core. The Indranan were not primitive people—at least they didn’t like to think so. Mind above body, no matter their thousands of years of violence. At that moment Kavya knew without doubt that such pride and pretense was a lie. She was as deeply primitive as Tallis. She wanted to rise to that challenge, that dare, that shocking desire.

“No.” The word was a tight squeak, but she continued with assurance. “No getting dressed. And no room. I want you. Here. There’s nothing to stop us now. Show me, Tallis. Show me what I’ve never had.”

—

Tallis took the naked, brazen temptation of a woman in his arms before his next breath. He could have played the gentleman. He could have tried to talk her out of making such a decision in a rash, hurried way.

He could have, had he been a different man.

She lived half a life, and that life could end tomorrow. That she hadn’t experienced the most transcendent experience of body to body seemed an insult to the Dragon.

With arms wrapped around her low back, Tallis held her flush and tight. He kissed her, diving deep, relishing her moan that walked a delicate line between surprise, pleasure, and protest. The protest dropped away as she drew her hands up to clench his hair. She was divinity—soft of skin, firm of flesh, eager of spirit. She didn’t back away when he deepened their kiss. The angle of his head allowed him to push farther with his tongue. His teeth scraped her lower lip. Kavya repeated the motion. Her dainty teeth abraded thin, wet skin, shocking him with physical pleasure. More shocking was how he responded to making her wild.

This would be no soft initiation. Whatever softness he possessed, he’d given that to her with his mouth, there beneath a blinding blue sky. She made her harder passions known with every pinch of her fingernails against his scalp, and the way she hooked her heel behind his calf. The rock of her pelvis against his shot white sparks through his blood.

He palmed both of her shoulders and pushed her back. Kavya struggled once, again, but he had her upper body pinned. Rather than question him or try to melt him with a pleading look, she scowled. Her expression was that of a child whose present had been snatched away. He grinned. He would not be her present, but her tool.

“If I ask for patience,” he said roughly, “it’s important. Look in my eyes. Tell me what this pause is costing me.”

She sucked her lips inward, then licked them, as if she needed to take more of him into her mouth now that she’d been deprived of the source. “You’re half wild.”

“Yes.”

“If we’d been preparing to fight and you held your seaxes, you’d be murderous.”

“Yes.”

“Instead . . . the beast wants to use that power with me.”

“Yes.”

“I’m happy you’re not trying to talk sense into me. But why stop?”

“The door.”

He pushed away and tossed towels onto the floor. Tallis wedged the wire shelf under the door’s handle. The precaution wouldn’t hold if someone was determined to get inside, but it would give Tallis enough time to arm himself.

Kavya stood where he’d pressed her against the wall. The sight of her made his mouth go dry. Yes, she was stunning, but the hunger in her amber eyes revealed how much she wanted this moment. Softness and tender caresses would wait for another time, if they had another chance at all. The quick lift and fall of her chest, which hefted and lowered her breasts in an erotic rhythm, was almost as exciting as her nudity.

I’m not going to stop.

“Good,” she whispered.

Tallis closed the scant distance between them and brought his mouth down to her neck. “Don’t do that again.”

“I can’t help it if you’re screaming.”

“Don’t do it again,” he simply repeated. “Stay with me.”

She nodded. “Right here, Tallis.”

She was clean and warm, delicious and intoxicating. He let his mind slip down to where he savored the elemental. The raw. The crazed. She responded with restless hands that skated over his chest, around his ribs, and down to his ass. As she had when she’d used the towel, she laid her palms flat. Only now, she grasped handfuls of muscle. He replied with a thrust. His cock rubbed between their lower bodies, nestled against the firm muscles and soft skin of her abdomen. Kavya gave him a long, mind-numbing exhalation.

He repeated the thrust every time she squeezed her fingers. His power was hers—for the moment.

Her breathing was sharp and uneven when he returned to kissing her lips. Taking those puffing exhales into his mouth was more proof of her excitement. Every hair and every pore and every deep clutch of her fingertips wrote erotic poems.

He sucked her tongue between his lips and bit the fleshy middle. The urge to use more force would’ve been enough to crush the bones of lesser men, but Tallis was still in charge of his inner frenzy. He only wanted to give her a sample of the aggression he withheld. Kavya slipped her taut hands up his back. She held on to his shoulders, bracing her weight against his, and accepted his testing assault. Only when he released her tongue and licked it, soothing, did he pull away to see her reaction.

Her eyes revealed every color of fire. “Again.”

Tallis recaptured her mouth. She forced her tongue between his lips, between his teeth. A dare. He clasped harder, holding the bite as if he’d sunk his teeth into the sensitive skin at her nape. The thought of claiming her in the Pendray way shook his control. That manner of claiming symbolized permanence among his clan.

He didn’t lose control. He didn’t bite deeper. But he realized that an imagination was a bad thing when he was already so overwhelmed. To picture him bowed over her body, both of them on all fours, was an invitation to ruin her first time by default—not because he would hurt her, but because he’d be some untried lad who came before sinking home.

He released her tongue, then traveled lower. She seemed to like his hair, because she threaded her fingers into the thickest locks at his crown. Her touch didn’t guide him, but as when he’d licked and sucked her pussy, she offered tiny flinches as signposts. She liked slick tonguing kisses on the undersides of her breasts, and she liked a hint of teeth across the tips of each nipple. She liked the way he breathed against her damp skin, and how he slid his caress down each gracefully strong thigh.

He knew, because she was one of the most articulate lovers he’d ever taken. She spoke with the unconscious language of her body. A week and a ream of paper wouldn’t have been enough to transcribe what he learned from dipping his tongue in her navel. She offered praise and encouragement with goose bumps, panting breaths, and restless hands across his upper body. Everywhere she touched, she trailed flame.

Kavya’s skin. Tallis’s skin.

They still had names. They were still contained in separate bodies.

Time to change that.

He knelt on the ground with one knee on the hard concrete and one accidentally padded by a strewn towel. Only once did he glance up. Kavya had lowered her chin and was staring at him with more of that unspoken fire. She smiled. “I like this part,” she said, the words full of husky teasing.

Tallis tasted and teased her honeyed sex. Every lick dragged him closer to the moment when he would need to be inside her. Somehow. Anyhow. He could become addicted to her as easily as he’d become a supplicant to his dreams.

But no.

He stood abruptly and kissed her again, sharing the taste of her by plunging deeply, giving no quarter. This was no dream. He was with Kavya. She moaned. The sound reverberated down his throat and his chest, until that humming excitement ratcheted his arousal. This was real because it was imperfect. A laundry room? The basement of a hotel he’d broken in to? Imperfect, yet just what he needed when the perfection of Kavya’s responses raised his suspicions that she was too good to be true. Too much like his dreams.

Her slender hand grasped his cock.

“Bathatéi!” He snatched her wrist and pinned it against the cinder block. “Don’t do that again.”

She held his gaze, flames watching flames, and smiled. “I have before.”

The shock of her other hand was just as powerful. Only this time, Tallis didn’t pull her away. “Fine,” he ground out, closing his fist around hers. “If you want to play, play.”

Her rhythm was more assured this time. Long strokes down. Long pulls up. Tallis pressed harder so that their hands became overlapping vises to torture his engorged flesh. He’d taught her the rhythm he liked, the speed he liked, but he hungered for the closeness of his closed fist around hers as they pumped.

“You’re big. Did I forget to mention that?”

Grinning felt out of place, but then again—no, she was smiling and he wanted to as well. “I am. And you did forget.”

“You’re practically monosyllabic. Although I’m impressed I can talk at all.” She wiggled the wrist he’d pinned against the wall, silently asking permission to be freed. He complied. Cupping his cheek, still gripping and caressing his cock, she gazed up at him with an expression of wonder layered over with frustration. “I didn’t think I would, but I wish I could read your mind right now.”

“I’m glad you can’t.” He grunted on a particularly fast trio of strokes.

“I wouldn’t like what I found?”

“No. Just . . . pointless. Thinking. Feeling. Inseparable right now. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Kavya closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the wall. The hand holding his cheek slid down, down, until she found the meat of his upper arm. She smiled softly, contentedly, although her body still hummed with want and pent-up energy.

“You’re not wrong,” she said. “Thinking, feeling. All the same. When I think about your size, my body aches. Thinking, feeling . . .”

“Come here. Up.”

He cupped the back of her head to drag her to face level. Her eyes were hazy, yet sharp with curiosity. He would’ve loved to fuck her against the wall, just taking, which would scrape the living hell out of her back. The demon in him wanted that overload of sensation.

Tallis released her hand and forced her to release his shaft. “Hold on. Your arms around my neck.” She complied, and he lifted her off the ground. The crooks of her knees locked over the inside bend of his elbows. He gripped her ass, then braced himself with his back to the wall.

“This is your first time, Kavya.” He shook his head. “I can’t trust myself.”

“Tell me,” she whispered.

Tallis closed his eyes. “Against the wall. Or down on the ground.”

“You’d lose control.”

“Yes.”

She purred in the back of her throat, with a cat’s smile to match. “Someday, maybe. But for now?”

“You’re going to fuck me.”