TheKingsViper Read online

  It took an age for her to open her eyes when it was over, to dare to meet his gaze. The sight was less than reassuring. Severin’s lips were parted and two little lines showed between the sharp angles of his raised brows.

  “What have I done wrong?” she asked, nervous again.

  “Nothing. I just hadn’t expected you to be so…responsive.”

  “That’s not bad, is it?”

  “Bad?” His voice had sunk to a whispered growl that seemed to throb in his chest and made Eloise’s skin prickle. With a heave he raised himself up on his arms, just enough to swoop down upon her belly. His lips slid across her bare skin, making her squirm with fearful ticklishness. She sank her fingers in his hair. Then he did something then that nobody—not a single one of the servant women who confided and advised over the pickling crocks and the sewing frames in the Keep of Venn—had ever remotely suggested a man might do to woman, sliding right down between her thighs and nuzzling between them. His open mouth met the cleft of her sex, both of them wet.

  Eloise shrieked outright in shock. Nobody had ever said—and oh by all the Saints of Heaven they could not, they could not have told her, because there were no words at all for the wonderful sensation of his mouth on her, for the lap of his tongue on her clit and the way he was sucking her and the way her body was surrendering to that impossible pleasure. The sight of his head and shoulders bulked there between her spread thighs took her breath away. For long moments she went still, a helpless prisoner of the pleasure gripping her body. Then as the waves rocking her grew deeper, she began to move. First she stretched down to take his head in her hands, raking her fingers through his thick dark hair and pulling him down more firmly upon her mound. Then she began to move against him, heaving her hips in counterpoint to the rhythm of his supping mouth.

  “Yes!” she whimpered, and it was a Yes she meant more than she ever had done in uttering that word, repeating it over and over so that he would understand how much she wanted and needed what he was doing to her, so that he would never stop, so that he would keep on kissing and sucking and licking her like that forever. Then, all of a sudden, it became a different Yes altogether—not a plea but a cry of triumph, something wild and fierce. Her nails raked his scalp. She bucked and thrashed under his mouth, clawing at the sheets beneath her and digging her heels into the mattress as she pushed herself up like she was trying to force herself down his throat.

  Her collapse afterwards was just as sudden. Wide-eyed, her chest heaving for breath, she stared down the length of her torso at the man who had done this wonderful thing to her. Had he wanted her to cry out like that? Had she shamed him? Had she hurt him in her struggles?

  But she met a smile of such dark satisfaction that all her uncertainty fled. I please him, she thought, awed.

  Severin heaved himself briefly to one side to wipe his face on the coverlet, then knelt up, moving with the care of a man carrying a great burden by the edge of a very deep drop. Eloise found her bent legs draped over his thighs, and his perfectly erect cock jutting up like a lance between them, pale against his hair, dark with congestion when seen in contrast with his skin. He ran his fingers up the length of his shaft, rolling the ruddy head free of its cowl of foreskin.

  “Touch me,” he told her.

  She had to reach down the length of her torso to take his erection in her hand.

  “Yes. Good.” He guided her fingers, squeezing them about his flesh surprisingly firmly. Then he took the time to caress her lower body. His hands easily framed the narrow span of her hips. His gaze swept her from groin to eyes, but his own seemed to be focused oddly, as if he were looking somewhere deeper than her skin. His voice sounded thick and dreamy too. “Do you know what happens now?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  He slid his left arm under the crook of her leg, lifting that one higher as he shifted forward over her. “Tell me.”

  “You’re going to…” She stopped.

  A glint of teeth. “Say it.”

  “Have me.” A whisper, a secret.

  “Say it properly.”

  “You’re going to fuck me, Severin de Meynard.” Her voice wobbled over the taboo word, and he laid a finger warningly upon her lips.

  “Shh. Quietly with that name.” His weight was bearing down upon her pelvis now, the blunt head of his cock bumping against her hand and the underside of his shaft sliding over her clit as he rocked in her welcoming slit. She could feel the unquenched ember of her desire glowing into new life. “Give me your fingers. To my mouth.”

  Obediently she lifted her hand to his lips and he sucked her fingers into his mouth one at a time, slicking them. The hot embrace of his tongue felt disconcertingly intimate and deliciously ticklish. A flick of his glance sent her wet hand back down to embrace his cock, her fingers slithering over its smoothly domed helm.

  “Eloise de Venn,” he breathed, leaning down low over her, his arms braced wide on the bed, his voice so soft it could not have been heard by the mice in the walls. “Believe this—I want you. I want you now.”

  Appetite flared in the deepest core of her. “Do it. Take me.”

  He bared his teeth.

  “Do it. I want you. Fuck me,” she whispered frantically, his cock jabbing between her fingers and feeling bigger and harder than ever. “Please—fuck me!”

  That was too much for him. She understood that even as it happened. “Ah!” he cried, as his seed gushed out and spattered over her. Blaspheming, he ground his hips hard, rubbing her clit into fire while jet after jet of his semen pumped from his cock. Then he fell forward, trying to save her from the bulk of his weight and partly succeeding, his body sheened with a sudden gloss of sweat.

  Oh God, she thought. That’s how it is. I know now. I know. She was dizzy with the import of her new understanding. The whole world had changed. She saw her fingers steal out and sift through his hair, like white fish swimming through a dark sea.

  Coming back to himself, Severin turned his head to catch and kiss her fingertips. Then he rolled off sideways and lay beside her, his chest heaving. Like a broken necklace, the pearly splashes of his ejaculate lay all across her lower torso. One had even leapt far enough to lie now in the cusp between her quivering breasts.

  Eloise stared down at herself for a long time, letting the sight sink in, feeling a new and unfamiliar sense of completion. Her blood was slowing little by little, but still pounding so hard that she could see the pulse jumping in her belly. Finally she looked at the man beside her. That still felt strange. He looked just like the Severin de Meynard she was familiar with—that bitter, grave and unyielding man—yet somehow he was naked and stretched out on his side next to her, eyes half-lidded, his mouth hooked in a rueful and disbelieving smile, and she found it all but impossible to reconcile what she saw before her eyes with her memories.

  She ran her tongue uncertainly across her upper lip. Was she supposed to say something? What should she say to the first man to lie with her?

  “Look at you, little mouse,” he murmured. His hand looked very dark against the pallor of her hip. “You’re beautiful.”

  Such tender intimacy was unnerving, coming from him. “This mouse finds the serpent fair too,” she answered shyly.

  His eyelids lowered in acknowledgement. “That’s her tragedy.” His hand lifted, stroking the tufts of her pubic fleece, hovering over the plain of her belly. He touched the milky spill of his seed as if mesmerized by the sight of those splashes on her skin. Then he brought those fingers up and brushed the swollen nubbin of her left nipple, wonderingly, painting that tip with semen. Her dusky pink areola glistened with his moisture as he played, drawing circles on the firm cushion of her breast.

  Emboldened by the sight, Eloise drew her own fingertips through another of the splashes he’d bestowed upon her, testing the slippery stickiness for the first time. She lifted them to her face, breathing the most intimate scent of him—a grassy green odor, she thought, like trampled haycocks in the rain—and without th
inking stuck her fingertips in her mouth to taste it too. Rather too late, she cast Severin a quick glance to check that she had not offended convention, and froze with her fingertips between her lips.

  He made a strange noise, deep in his chest. Suddenly he was leaning over her again and kissing her once more, his tongue unlocking her mouth to slide inside, and she knew that he was tasting himself in her just as she was tasting her own sex on him. Meanwhile his hands moved on her body, rubbing the slick trails of his semen into her skin from throat to hip, all over her breasts and belly, an action unmistakably proprietary and possessive.

  I’m his.

  Then he rolled onto his back and flipped her on top of him. For a moment she felt like she was pinning him, she was kissing him, she had him at her mercy—and then he pushed her upright so that she was sitting astride his hips. She looked down, touching herself between the breasts, then running her hands over his ribs and chest. His flesh was hard and furred in places—so different to her own. His nipples were dark and flat. She could feel the striations of muscle just under his skin. She felt drunk with wonder.

  “Ella,” he murmured, stroking her.

  “Oh,” she answered weakly, as his thumbs invaded the wildlands between her thighs.

  “Will you tell me something, little mouse?”

  “Anything.”

  “Do you ever touch yourself when you’re alone?”

  She looked away. Did he know? Had he guessed? “Yes. Sometimes.”

  “Show me.”

  “Show…?”

  “Show me how you do it. I want to see.”

  Biting her lip, she slipped her right hand down over her pubic fleece, parting the split there. One finger, her longest, dipped in to find moisture and circled the flushed ruby of her clit. “Like that.”

  “Do it,” he whispered. “All the way. I want to see you fall.”

  She blushed. She hadn’t thought he would make her blush, after the first time, but what he was asking for made her feel self-conscious. “What about this—isn’t it a shame to leave it unused?” she asked, wriggling her rump back against his crotch and his raised thighs. To her surprise, he laughed.

  “Mercy, you wanton—you have to give me a chance to reload. The older a man is, the longer it takes him to cock his bolt for another shot.”

  “You’re not old!”

  “Hh.” That laugh was more than half sigh. “I feel old, most of the time.” He stroked his hands up her thighs. “But not now. Not with you. I feel…” He bit off his words. “I’m not even going to pretend to understand what it is you do to me, little mouse.”

  She held her breath at that, shocked by the confession. Then he tipped his chin up and she knew the subject was closed. “Frig yourself for me, Ella,” he commanded, his voice like black silk. “I want to see it. I want to…have it in here.” He touched his temple.

  She understood what he meant by that. It hurt her. But it seemed a small dim hurt against the great glow of her desire for him right at this moment, and her delight in pleasing him, and the warm dance of the lamplight on his face and body. With a faint nod she obeyed, sliding her hand back down between her thighs.

  Oh, she said to herself. What has he done to me? She’d already climaxed twice, but it was as if his touch had heaped armfuls of fuel upon the brazier of her desire and it took only a draft to set it roaring again. Her clit was swollen, her tissues inflamed from his rough kisses. And while every other time in her life this had been done furtively, with as much stealth as possible, now there was no constraint. Through half-lidded eyes she could see him watching her.

  So she began to stroke herself, and as her finger worked in little magical circles Severin touched her, very softly. He didn’t seem to be trying to interfere or to take part. His caresses were too light for that. It was as if he were trying to trace the path of the blood through her veins instead, or read the rush of her arousal as it quickened in her skin. He laid his palms flat against her belly as the muscles there tautened, and he stroked under the lifted vault of her crotch as she raised herself on her thighs. His hands rose to brush the sweet softness of her breasts, ghosting over the warm silken flesh, learning the invisible pathways of sensation that made her shiver and writhe and arch. Then as she grew warmer he sat up beneath her so that she was cupped in his lap, and he could inhale the scent of her skin and hair as his fingertips wrote poetry on the skin of her back. She lifted her lips to his but this time he would not seize on them, would not wrest from her the command of her pleasure. His kisses came no closer than his warm breath. His face brushed hers so gently that she could feel the strokes of his eyelashes. Only when she came to her final crisis and she rose up on her knees, trembling with strain, did he slip his hands about her and press his lips to her throat to taste her heat as her pulse throbbed against his lips.

  As she subsided, panting, into her afterglow, she found herself blushing from head to toe, shocked by how much she had shown him. His hands drew her into a warm embrace, and then he lay back down so that she rested upon him, her head on his chest.

  “That was quieter than last time,” he murmured, running his fingers up and down her spine in a caress that would have made her shiver until now.

  Eloise considered. “It’s different when I do it myself.” Her voice was husky.

  “Different?”

  “When you do it to me, it feels like I’m out of control. As if the rules don’t hold anymore.”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  His heartbeat thudded steadily under her ear. Eloise lifted her cheek from his breastbone and rested her chin there instead. “I’m thirsty,” she confessed.

  “There’s a tankard of beer over there on the chest.”

  She rolled from his body, sliding her feet down onto the rag rug and giggling in shock when her legs threatened momentarily to fold beneath her. Picking her way with a tipsy wiggle over to the chest, she picked up the leather tankard, which was more than half full. “Do you want some?” she asked, remembering her manners.

  He’d propped himself up on one elbow to watch her. “You drink what you like.”

  She took several swallows of the weak, yeasty beer. Strangely, despite what they had just done together, she was struck by how intimate this simple thing was, drinking from a man’s cup. Walking back, she sat on the edge of the bed. Severin lifted a heavy hank of her damp hair, stroking it from her face and then winding her curls in his fingers before lifting them to his lips, a sight that made Eloise’s heart leap. Only when he’d kissed her tresses did he accept the cup from her and sip.

  Eloise let her gaze drift down from the cusp of his working throat to the sculpted flat of his belly, and below. “May I touch?”

  He lifted an eyebrow and nodded.

  The lie of the dark hair on his torso fascinated her. It had a definite grain, she found, bristly when she stroked it upward, smooth as she followed its flow down to the glossy curls at his crotch. His cock lay against his thigh, still thick with arousal but not so stiff and straight now, and definitely more decorous now that its helm was hooded once more. Eloise thought it looked proud and a little smug. She stroked it with one finger while Severin watched her, his eyes crinkling with amusement over the rim of his tankard.

  His balls, she thought, felt like two ripe damson plums in a fine calfskin pouch. Even as she explored its texture with her fingers, the skin wrinkled and tightened.

  “Always gently with those,” Severin murmured. “You can be firmer with the other, especially as it hardens.”

  She had so much to learn, she thought. “That thing you did to me—with your mouth?”

  “What of it?”

  “I liked that.”

  “Mm. I thought you might.”

  “What’s it called?”

  He uttered a tiny grunt of amusement. “Hh. Coney-hunting.” The glint in his eye as he took another drink suggested to her that there were other, and probably rather coarser, names.

  “Am I allowed to do it to you?”<
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  Some ale went down the wrong way and Severin snorted. “Allowed?” he said, clearing his throat. “Certainly, if you like.”

  She bit her lip in a quick, nervous grin and wriggled slowly down the bed so that she could tuck her head low enough. “How…?” she asked, hesitating.

  “Just remember—no teeth.” He dropped the empty tankard on the mattress and stroked the hair back from her forehead. As she inclined her head over his crotch he gathered her hair lock by lock, holding it up in a bunch out of the way of her face. Whether it was courtesy or the desire to watch, Eloise didn’t know; her attention was on the task before her. His cock lay like a sleeping lion. Cautiously she reached out to lick it.

  It stirred, jerking more erect. Not sleeping then, watchful. Catching it in her fingers, she guided it to her lips and took it into her mouth.

  Oh that was strange. Strange and wonderful—new tastes, new textures, a whole geography of flesh beneath the tip of her tongue. She had the feeling she was supposed to find this shameful, but it made her feel strangely excited, as if this was the only way she could be big enough to embrace Severin, and not the other way round for once. He didn’t react vocally in the way she had—nothing louder than a hitch in his breath—but to make up for that slight disappointment the response of his body was unequivocal. His cock filled out, thickening in surges, pushing against the roof of her mouth. She had to adjust her angle to suck him deeper in, but soon found that the more she tried to take the more there seemed to be. He was all the way to the back of her throat and still there was more.

  Then he pulled out, using his grip in her hair to unsheathe himself from her open lips. “Ella—just stop.”

  “Have I—?” she started.

  “Lie down.” His eyes were dark pools again, and full of private intent.

  “Did I do it wrong?”

  “Wrong?” He touched his straining erection. “Does it look like that to you? If I died while you were doing that to me, I’d find Heaven a sore disappointment.” He shook his head. “I want you to lie down.” Not waiting for her response, he lifted her into the center of the bed. “On your side, there.”