21
Instead of taking me to the bed as I expected, Nakoa took me to the chair where I’d sat to play kiauo, just inside the balcony He went to get a bowl and filled it with water. As was his wont, he knelt on the floor, bringing us eye to eye. He maybe did it for that reason, aware of how his height and bulk intimidated me. With care he undid the ribbons holding up my stockings and slid them off, then picked up my feet one by one, examining the soles and gently washing them in the basin.
I hissed at the sting, then again when he slathered on the salve. They’d just been getting better, too. The protection of the stockings had helped, but only so much. I reached to pick one up off the floor. They’d burned through, great ragged holes in the knit. Nakoa pinched a few of the straggling yarns together, shaking his head at the destruction, then looked up at me.
“Sorry for your stockings.”
It made me smile, his concern for something he knew I valued that did not belong in his world. Moved, I sat up more, tossed the ruined bits away, and leaned to brush a finger over his cheek, as he liked to do to me. “No sorry, Nakoa.”
He shared the smile, but it carried a sorrowful edge. “Yes sorry. This.” He touched my shredded stockings, then over my heart, and to the bed. “All this. I do not wish you unhappily defeated.”
The term he used came from playing kiauo, meaning to lose the game. He meant that he had not wanted to force me—though he’d made that abundantly clear—and had concern that I’d been cornered into this. Which, in truth, I had. But the stakes were hardly worth it. My virginity, even if it meant being sealed forever into this marriage, didn’t compare to a man’s life and the well-being of an entire people. A lot of people, judging by the size and spread of Nakoa’s island kingdom.
“It’s not important,” I told him. “A small thing.”
He didn’t like that and frowned at me. “It’s not small. This is a big, most important thing.”
For some reason a joke that Jepp liked to tell ran through my head, one where lovers argued about two different issues, the man believing she insulted the size of his member and he insisting it was a big thing. I couldn’t help it—I giggled. Then, at the incredulous consternation on Nakoa’s face, broke out into a full laugh. His puzzlement only made me laugh harder, until I was pressing my hands to my belly, a few tears of laughter squeezing from the corners of my eyes. A release, I supposed, of the tension and fears of the day.
By the time I composed myself, out of breath and far more relaxed, Nakoa wore a full smile, along with his bafflement. “I do not understand,” he said.
“I know.” I shook my head at myself. “I’m full of emotions these days.” I put my hand over my heart. “I feel so much, so strongly, that I . . . I do not understand.”
He sobered, nodding wisely, laying his hand over mine. “You are full of fire and fury, like a dragon trapped in her cave. This is to be expected.”
Not how anyone had ever described me. And uncannily close to my childhood entombment. Enough to make me catch my breath at the dank, unsettling memory of blackness and trickling water.
“What troubles you?” he asked, searching my face as if he could read the memory in it. This was what he’d asked me after I struck him in my anger and panic. “Is it me?”
“No.” Well, not really “no,” exactly, and it wasn’t fair to him to lie. “Yes. I mean . . . Ergh! I don’t have the words.” I’d curled my fingers in frustration and he took my hand in both of his, carefully uncurling them as he’d done when he laid my little dagger in my palm, then sealed it between his. Not trapped, but held.
“Try,” he suggested.
“Shouldn’t we be—” I gestured at the bed with my free hand.
He shook his head. “We have until morning. Find your words.”
And it was only late afternoon. All right, then. Find your words. It sounded so simple, but I lacked the knowledge I needed to explain the enormity of how I felt. Perhaps even to myself, to be honest. If only I had my list of Nahanaun words. But I’d left my journal in the library and there would be no risking facing Tane and his cronies to get it now. I acutely felt the lack of it, my best fence against the world.
What lurked in the dark corners of my soul—and why did that place feel like the hole where I’d been trapped? Maybe I’d left a piece of myself behind in it, as if the girl I’d been had actually died there, entombed with the rest of her family, and I was . . . some sort of shape-shifted alternate form. Like in Zynda’s metaphor, my real self stayed in some other realm, living on a trickle of rainwater, while I used her shape to move about the world, a part of me forever trapped and under siege.
Ursula had been speaking to this, when she tried to explain that it took courage to let another person in, to open up enough to allow for the possibility of loving in return. Though this challenge wasn’t about love. I was much too old and cynical to believe in that fairy tale; my fence of knowledge worked far too well for that. This was about opening. Odd to recall that had been one of the first words of Nakoa’s I’d understood.
He watched me as I read a book in a language I only partially understood, as if he could divine my thoughts from my expression, which maybe he could.
“When I was a girl, the palace, my family home, was . . . attacked.” It wasn’t exactly the right word, but I shaded it with the disaster and storm tonalities and Nakoa nodded thoughtfully. I kept going, using Nahanaun where I could, resorting to Common Tongue where I had to, so I wouldn’t lose courage. “I don’t remember very much except the awfulness of the siege, how afraid and angry everyone was. Boredom and moments of stark terror. Being hungry.” Other, darker things that I didn’t care to examine.
Nakoa squeezed my hand, dark eyes full of sympathy.
“I remember weeping and the shouts. People disappearing, never to return. The wounded, screaming in the night and the silence after somehow worse. Everybody died except me. The story is that a healer dug me out of a hidey-hole buried under rubble. Four days after the siege ended. I nearly died, they said, but it rained, so they think I lived on the rainwater that leaked through a crack. I don’t remember it.”
“You lived in a cave,” Nakoa said, “and I sent you rain.”
“You—what?” I reran his words in my head, checking my comprehension. How could he have known that? My practical-minded self insisted on the impossibility of such a thing. And yet . . .
“I saw you. Afraid. Death all around. Trapped and thirsty. I gave you rain.” He explained it slowly, as if the simple words would make the extraordinary sound more sane.
“How?” I settled on the one word to express all of my incredulity.
“I am king.” He shrugged at my scowl. “It is . . . within my power, even when I was only Inoa’s little brother.”
“You will always be Inoa’s little brother,” I retorted, making him laugh softly.
“Yes.” He sobered. “And always mlai for Dafne.”
I still didn’t know how to assimilate that. “Show me the rain.”
With a raised brow for my command, he gave me a slight smile. “Yes, my queen.” He stood and went to the window, raising his hands to the sky. Thunder rumbled in the distance, then closer. The sunny afternoon dimmed, clouds gathering with unsettling alacrity. The air grew dense and thick with moisture, pressing against my ears until they popped. Rain began to fall, pattering down gently, growing stronger until the skies seemed to pour water.
The Nahanauns treat him like a god.
For the first time, I wondered if I’d completely misinterpreted and Nakoa could have swum in the lava and escaped unscathed. A sense of intense awe swept over me, my skin prickling with goose pimples. Though that could have been the coolness of the storm. Or the presence of magic, as with Andi or Zynda and their skin-crawling power. Regardless, the intimidated part of me fluttered, light wings of the beginning of panic.
Then Nakoa turned and grinned with boyish mischief. “Rain.”
A smile broke out of me, wobbly from my uncertainty, but still elicited by his unabashed pleasure in showing off for me. “So I understand.”
His expression shifted, perhaps observing my timidity. “See to understand.” In three strides he had swept me up in his arms and carried me out into the rain. I shrieked as I never had in my life, half laughing, half in protest, as the rain immediately drenched me. I pushed at him, but Nakoa held me, laughing also in earnest delight, the rain running in rivulets over his dark skin, soaking his hair so the white streaks stood out in even greater contrast.
I found myself grinning like an idiot in return. “Rain,” I agreed.
“For my queen,” he replied, sobering, gaze going fiercely intent.
My heart skipped a beat, clenched, desire flaring deep inside at that look. “Did—did you make it rain last night, too, to keep us inside?” All the better to seduce me.
He didn’t hesitate. “Yes. I needed to. Needed you. Understand? Open, Dafne mlai.” He kissed me, the rain slicking between us, conducting the desire that seemed to grow with every touch, each intimacy.
For a moment longer I quailed behind my walls, the near hysteria of the moments before tearing at me.
It takes courage to let another person in.
I’d learned fortitude, how to hunker down and survive the onslaught. But never how to open the gates again once the war had ended. A small thing, perhaps, for another woman. Huge for me. Feeling as if I laid my heart stripped bare, I dropped my walls, letting in the light. Freeing, perhaps, that other self, long trapped in that dank hole, fenced in as much as I’d fenced the world out. Releasing a dark and passionate flame I’d never known lived there.
Nakoa had given me rain. I would give him fire.
With a cry of longing, I gave into the kiss, into him, taking his hair in fistfuls, kissing him with all my might. For once I felt like the dragon he’d called me, ferocious, my wrath transmuted to passion. He inhaled me, mouth meeting mine with a long-starved hunger that managed to feed my own, groaning in a way that articulated my own need. I’d been wandering the world in search of this. Physically, in my circumscribed way. Mentally . . . I’d scoured all the universe of knowledge seeking this moment, this vital connection to another human being.
Maybe I had been looking for him after all.
I didn’t know and, more, I’d lost the ability to think. Impatient to be even closer, I pressed to him, as if we could merge the margins of our bodies and become one being. He felt it, too, tearing at my clothes to bare my breasts. The sound of fabric ripping echoed the fraying of my boundaries and I embraced it, shrugging out of the torn cloth and melding my rain-drenched skin to his. We burned together, tongues tangled, hearts pounding in that now-familiar synchronicity.
Needing to touch him more, I turned in his arms, wrapping my legs around his waist, my core, as wet as the rain but burning hotter than liquid rock through thin silk, pressed against his ridged abdomen. It felt glorious.
It wasn’t enough.
I tore my mouth away, gasping for air I hadn’t noticed I lacked till that moment. “Nakoa mlai.”
This time, he didn’t question it. “Yes, Dafne mlai.”
He carried me inside, to the great bed, and dropped us both upon it, uncaring of how we dampened the soft sheets. Or how they tangled between us as we rolled, over and around each other, kissing with the desperation of long-separated lovers. My garland broke, the petals shredding a pale fragrant cascade over the white sheets, gleaming with florid luminescence where they stuck to his dark skin. I picked one off his shoulder, following with my tongue, licking Nakoa’s skin as his mouth fastened on my throat. Salt and sweet combined, flagrantly masculine flavors simmering with the fragility of the crushed blossoms.
He groaned as I licked at him, pressing my head to him with his hand. Loving the sound, and that I could evoke it from him, I bit, taking the satin skin and the bulge of muscle between my teeth. Growling louder, he returned the favor, sinking his white teeth into the juncture at my neck and shoulder. I cried out, releasing him and arching against the exquisite sensation. Taking advantage of the opportunity, his hands roved over me, ripping away the last of my tattered gown. The pantalets went with a snap that snagged my attention. Automatically, I moved to cover myself, but Nakoa brushed my hands away with gentle urging.
“Let me see you,” he murmured. “I need to see.” See to understand.
Sitting up and turning me on my back, he trailed light fingers over the length of my body, tracing the curves and hollows. Expression intent, he examined every inch of me, lifting my wrists and stretching my arms above my head to drape across the bed. I felt full of languid grace, the fire boiling in my veins but coaxed into channels with every brush of his hand. I lost my shyness in the utter sensuality of it, splayed naked before him in the rain-filtered light.
“I like these.” He caressed the constellation of freckles below my collarbones, where the sun found me. “Where they are and where they are not.”
True to that, he paid equal attention to my freckled extremities as to the pale inner curve of my elbow, the hollow under my arm, the curve of my breast, the rounded slope of my belly, and the curling hair over my mound. He stroked me without opening my thighs, savoring the texture with a smile of curiosity. Then continued on his journey, learning the round of my thighs, the narrowing of my ankles, taking a moment to study the abused soles of my feet.
“Painful?” he asked, brushing the side of my foot, and I shook my head, mute with wonder over being touched—even worshipped—like this. Maybe I’d feel it later, but for now the only thing that mattered was this sweet, transporting seduction. With a sly smile, he replaced his fingers with his mouth, kissing the top of my foot, then the hollow by my ankle bone.
In this way he worked his way back up my body, caressing first with light fingers, then molding with full hands and following with his mouth. Again, he did not part my thighs, though he kissed the hair on my mound, moving on to trace the line of my hip bone with his tongue. I shifted restlessly, the urge to have him touch me more intimately, to be inside me, rising with fierce-edged intensity. He prevented me, though, sitting over me so his knees pinned my thighs together, sliding slickly now.
“Nakoa.” I breathed his name, a plea in it, writhing as much as I could and grasping at his knees. With a slow shake of his head he took my wrists and moved them back over my head, holding them there in one hand as he resumed his slow perusal of my body. Before long, every part he kissed felt as alive and sensitive as every other. The underside of my breast as much as the taut nipple above it. The pulse beat in my throat, the hollow under my arm, the inside of my wrist. He finished kissing each finger, drawing them in one by one to torment with his teeth and tongue, and I held my breath, hoping that this would complete his journey. Indeed, he returned to my mouth, lavishing me with a deep kiss that cleaved me open.
I had no secret shadows anymore, it seemed. All of me, every quiver, breath, moan, and shaking sigh, spoke of things without words. He pulled them in, took me in.
Then turned me over and started anew.
He laughed, a soft chuckle at my cry of frustration, especially when I lost it in a sighing groan at the press of his mouth to the small of my back. Working his way up my spine with the same slow technique that unraveled me past imagining, he finally reached the back of my neck, moving my hair aside to kiss and nip at the tendons there.
It drove me wild. Enough so that he laid his weight on me, pressing my palms flat to the bed as he ravished my neck and my senses. In that position his cock thrust hard against the back of my thigh, hot through his thin garment. Not above payback, I wriggled against it, hoping also to urge him on. With a sharper bite of reproof, he moved his hips away, then took himself back down my body, leaving me to curl my fingers in the sheets and moan helplessly as he found each new secret place that undid me that much more.
The dimple of my buttocks.
The unscathed arch of my foot.
The thrice-damned backs of my knees.
At some point I gave up trying to urge him on. I might as well schedule the rain. He kept at me until I melted utterly, completely pliant to the least caress. When he stretched over my back again, hands over mine, mouth on my sensitive nape, his weight somehow gloriously satisfying, it took me a moment to realize he’d shed his kylte and lay naked against me.
I moaned and he hummed, matching my tone and following the undulation of my body. Sliding his hands beneath me, he gathered my breasts in one hand and slid the other into the desperate heat between my thighs.
I’d been on the edge of climax for so long, had become this single throbbing organ of sexuality, that it almost didn’t matter—his touch there no more devastating than any other. But he slipped a finger inside my slick channel and pressed his hand tightly against the rest of my sex, rocking there. Then he pinched my nipple and bit the juncture of my neck and shoulder. Hard.
I came apart in glory. Like the dragon exploding from the volcano, soaring to numinous heights, anchored by Nakoa’s body, wrapped around me in relentless warmth.
Before I regained myself, another surge pushed me up, his hand giving me no surcease, two fingers inside me now, driving the ache to be filled as he murmured florid words in my ear that meant nothing to me, but still burned with unquenched fire. I buried my face in the sheets, gripping as if to hold myself to the earth, and this time he let me spread my legs, meeting at least that one urge. Shattering again, this time I cried out his name, begging him for more, for anything.
Still in the throes of the climax, I felt him turn me over, but his face so close to mine took me by surprise. As did the brief glimpse of his large cock as he positioned himself between my thighs. Goddesses, would it—
I lost the apprehension in the drowning kiss he lavished on me, desire washing away whatever I’d been thinking. Our hearts pounded together, echoed by that third great heart. Together. This was Nakoa, and I clung to him, digging my nails into his muscled shoulders, opening myself to him, welcoming the hard intrusion against my opening. He stretched me wider and I tensed, but he spread a hand against the small of my back, lifting me so the angle of my hips changed and he thrust inside me.
All at once.
Flashing pain. Astounding ecstasy.
Filling me as I’d never been, skin to skin. As if I’d carried a hollow space that could be completed only in this way. A wracking shudder took me, my breath rattling in panting mews. No, the island rocked, the bed swaying as if we lay in one of the Hákyrling ’s rope hammocks.
Nakoa levered himself up, seeming not to notice, face set in lines of ferocious determination. He withdrew slightly, then pumped in again, sending ripples of fire through me, forcing a cry of strangled pleasure from my mouth.
A cry echoed by the nearby trumpet of the dragon.
Slowly, picking up pace, Nakoa thrust in and out, bracing himself on one arm and holding my hips with the other. Each stroke inside me sent ripples from my center outward. Circles of brightening light that radiated to my toes, fingertips, even the tips of my hair. I held on to his shoulders, receiving him over and over. If the volcano erupted, if the island broke apart beneath us, none of it mattered.
Only this.
His body tightened, face going blood dark. He threw back his head and roared to the sky as he erupted inside me, the near violent thrusts of his body lifting me from the bed. I cried out with him, not with a climax, though it seemed I’d never quite stopped, but with the excruciatingly intense sense of connection. For a moment I saw myself through his eyes, damp and flushed, my eyes unnaturally bright, like amber jewels. And I saw the sky, the sea, the scatter of emerald islands amid the sapphire waters.
Blood surged through my heart, air pumping into my lungs with each massive stroke of my wings.
I flew. I flew so high the blue sky darkened to black and Danu’s stars glittered in unforgiving icy points. Moranu’s moon and Glorianna’s sun danced a waltz around our world of ocean and island. I flew under. I had no air to breathe.
Then I plummeted back to earth.