Chapter Thirty-Two

The Inevitable

Alodie’s backside stung. Between her legs, she throbbed with heat. Her skin had turned acutely sensitive. He merely had to brush against her to stir the pleasure simmering just under the surface.

He withdrew his finger and smacked her bottom again, holding nothing back from the force of his swing. She shrieked like a terrified ghost.

She ached to open her legs and have his hardness fill that empty place inside of her.

With the blacksmith, she’d wanted to know what sex felt like. With Thorvald, she wanted him. How she could hate a man with such burning, bubbling vitriol and still be so desperate to impale herself upon him made no sense, but Alodie was past rationality. Whatever her life had become, she was going to take this now. It was hers because she wanted it.

“Enough, please, I beg you, Thorvald. Enough.”

For the first time, Alodie was not questioning herself when she thought of Thorvald as a man.

He said nothing. He simply put her on her feet, stood, and pushed her back down on the bed. Below her body, the furs were soft and fine. Thorvald was upon her in a flash, his kisses hungry and urgent and desperate upon her mouth as he pushed up her skirts. He slid himself down and pushed open her legs so he could look between them.

His eyes glazed with pleasure. “I’ve dreamed of tasting you.” With a strange tenderness he’d not displayed previously, he nuzzled his nose in the hair and inhaled.

Then he began working her with his mouth.

It was nothing like she’d ever imagined a man and woman would do together.

When he began kissing and sucking, all thoughts vanished. She was nothing but a receptacle for pleasure and the sensations built quickly.

He pushed her higher and higher. Alodie was reaching for what she knew was possible but didn’t believe could ever happen again. Beauty like that couldn’t happen twice in a lifetime. Reaching and reaching and reaching. It was so near and so far away. How much more of this could she take?

Then…it happened.

In one sweeping moment, her back arched and she burst like a heavenly body, spilling fire and light out through every glimmering fiber of her limbs. It was better this time. Stronger. The awareness drawn-out, tingling.

She was slowly drifting back, recovering with heavy breaths, when it all changed again.

He sat back long enough to tear away his belt, pull up his tunic, and push down the waist of his trousers to expose the length of his cock. Long, thick, and wholly erect.

He grinned wickedly at her. “Still think you can take me?”

“I will die if I don’t.”

With a growl, he pressed his body upon hers. The pressure of his weight could have sent her spiraling into the abyss all over again.

“I need to feel you moving under me.” He pinned her down. “Tell me this is all right.”

“It’s all right.”

“If you want to stop—”

“I don’t. Oh heaven help me, but I don’t.”

“Alodie…”

“I give myself to you.” The tip of him pressed against her entryway. Her breath caught. Holy Lord, forgive me this—

Their bodies began to join.

“Oh.” She tensed as he slid inside of her.

“You’re beautiful, princess.” He kissed her with rough urgency, pushing himself deeper and deeper.

Alodie had believed herself prepared. She wasn’t. She wasn’t fueled by curiosity, or as frightened of what she was doing as she was aroused.

No. The physical process itself might have been the same, but with Thorvald, it was different. It wasn’t simply a test of how a man’s part would feel. She was entrusting herself to him. It was a completion, of sorts. Everything she’d never known she needed.

Thorvald began to move inside of her, each stroke strong and powerful, even if he didn’t move quickly. He turned them together as one, angling them onto their sides, and jerking her top leg up so she was wider, her thigh high where it rested on his hip. Her fingers dug into the heavy musculature of his thick arms.

He reached back and smacked her bottom. She screamed, the burst of pain making her passage clench down upon his cock. The rush of warm pleasure made her relax again.

His strokes became harder. More urgent. She was growing sore, but cared not. He grunted, hitching himself so deep, it made her breath catch. He clung to her as his cock pulsed inside her body.

They held each other, staring at the underside of the thatch above them. A thought played in Alodie’s mind like a loose thread in a breeze. She could confess everything now in the soft pink mist of intimacy. After what they’d done, she wanted to tell him who she really was. If afterward he took her in his arms and kissed the top of her head and told her everything would be well, she’d believe him. “Now what happens?”

Whether she would tell him the truth about herself depended on how he answered.

“Now…” He inhaled and sighed. “Now we go back.”

What?

She untangled herself and pushed up on her arms, glowering down at him. “Go back?”

He pulled himself to sitting and rose from the warm nest of furs. “We have no other choice.”

Her hand curled around her pouch of beads that had somehow ended up on the bed with them. Without a thought, she hurled it straight at his head. “You have every choice. That’s what life is. What we choose. And don’t you dare say to me that there is something different about the ways of your people that I don’t understand, because the ways of people are merely habits, and habits can be changed.”

“You’re not wrong.” He began pulling on his first layers. When he bent to put one foot after the other into his trousers, his penis hung between his legs in silhouette.

If that’s all she’d wanted, she should have been satisfied.