It was not possible that they could deceive her in such a way, she thought firmly. Garreth cared for her and so did Davine. She was reading too much into it.
Deciding that was the way of it, she turned away from the hall and left.
For Davine’s part, she had known all along that Sarielle was there, watching them. In fact, she had timed things just so Sarielle would see them. Which was no mean feat. But she had pulled it off.
Now she had an entirely different task to accomplish. When Sarielle had left the entryway, Davine hurried after Garreth. She swept a cloak out of the hands of the serving girl she’d had waiting in the shadows of the hall and put it on, pulling the hood over her head. She had called for a horse to be ready and brought to the side of the keep’s bailey. Garreth’s horse was in the bailey itself, awaiting its master just as it did every night before dusk. Garreth was out of the keep and onto his horse in a swift display of strength almost seconds after she had gotten herself in her saddle. She was not used to riding, so she felt awkward in the saddle, but she did not care. She needed to find out the nature of Garreth’s nightly disappearances. She knew this was a point of contention in Sarielle’s relationship with him, and therefore it could be an effective weapon.
She did not think he went to meet a woman. No, if she was reading the situation right, he was definitely devoted to Sarielle. More so every day. But she was at a loss to explain what it was he could possibly be doing every night. She had decided there was only one way to find out and that was to follow him. Doing so with stealth was the only trick. She had to keep a good distance between them, and yet she was afraid of losing sight of him. She was grateful when they reached the orchard because the trees provided a good deal of cover that the open fields had not.
Once they reached the depths of the orchard, she realized he had stopped and dismounted. Some distance away, she did the same and held her horse, keeping it quiet as she watched him pace restlessly in a small circle in amongst the trees.
Was he waiting for someone? Perhaps he was meeting a lover after all. That would be a definitive nail in the coffin of his relationship with Sarielle. However, it would rob Davine of the opportunity to bring about such an end in a way that would make her appear indispensible to Dethan. But she was really good at reading people and she would truly be shocked if infidelity were the case. In fact, she would dare to say that Garreth would rather cut off a limb than do purposeful harm to Sarielle.
The sun dropped below the horizon and Garreth came to a halt. As she stood watching, she saw his breath begin to cloud on the air, which was odd because it was not that cold. Not right away, anyway. But as she stood there, hiding, she felt the temperature drop rapidly. So rapidly she began to shiver with the shock of it. Though at a distance, both horses nickered with discomfort, but if Garreth heard them, he was not visibly reacting to it. Instead he seemed to be focused entirely within himself.
And that was when she heard the first crackle of sound, the sound of creaking wood under strain. Frost began to coat the ground at Garreth’s feet, a sheet of white that grew outward in a near perfect circle.
Then everything began to freeze. Sheets of ice began to form on the ground as Garreth shouted out in a sound of pure tormented pain. He fell to his knees as his body shook, and ice crept over him. He froze fast to the ground before Davine’s stunned eyes, his hair forming into icicles, his skin a frosted, frozen sheet of ice.
She saw him draw in a last breath before he was frozen into a solid, unmoving block of ice.
Davine did not dare move any closer, the cold of the area surrounding him beating her back, not to mention her pure fear of the situation. So this was his secret, she thought as the hours wore on. This … this … curse. This happened every night? He suffered this every night? It was beyond cruel. It was, she realized, the work of the gods. That was the only explanation. He was cursed by the gods themselves.
For a moment she was torn between the fear of getting too close to a man so cursed and the sudden sickening feeling that she was so incredibly wrong to be thinking of robbing him of the only solace he had in the face of this. Robbing him of Sarielle.
But his brother had to know all of this. Dethan had to know Garreth was cursed in such a way. He was far too sharp a man for something like this to go unnoticed by him. He knew of this and yet he still wanted to take Sarielle away from his brother.
Perhaps, she thought with a feeling of total dread, it was because Dethan knew something that neither she nor Sarielle was aware of. Regardless of his reasons, they had to be worth heeding. It was unwise to meddle in the affairs of the gods. Davine worried that Sarielle would be caught up in this curse along with Garreth. Perhaps that was Dethan’s worry as well.
That was when Davine realized a small part of her had actually grown to care for Sarielle. That, to her increasing shock, she had actually begun to feel like a genuine friend to the wrena. Sarielle was an innocent in all of this. She didn’t mean any harm to anyone. She was just a girl in love with a man.
But he was not just any man. He was a cursed soul. It was wrong of him to potentially expose her to such dangers. Very wrong. He knew it himself or he would have already told Sarielle about the curse. And Davine knew he had not told her. She knew that their friendship was one in which Sarielle trusted Davine with even the most intimate of details concerning Garreth. Sarielle would have told her.
Davine did not need to wait to see what would happen next. She needed to get back to Kith long before they closed the gates for the night, long before she would be missed. As she rode hard for the city, she was more determined than ever to drive a wedge between Sarielle and Garreth. And she was afraid she knew exactly how to do it.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
About a week later Sarielle was playing with the twins, but her mind was troubled. She continued to find herself coming around a corner here or there and running into Davine and Garreth, alone, together. It was now happening far too frequently for her to dismiss. She wanted to ask her friend about it, but she was afraid she was mistaken and asking might cost her the only friendship she had.
She was making herself sick over it. Very often she would be sick to her stomach after finding them together in yet another close situation. She also found herself unable to sleep. Her body was weary from head to toe from the lack of it. But then every night he would call her to him and make love to her so fiercely she realized she had to be mistaken. He could not possibly treat her with such ferocious devotion and yet be deceptive at the same time … could he? And Davine could not possibly laugh and keep secrets with her and help her learn more ways to seduce her lover each night when she might be trying to seduce him herself … could she?
No. It was impossible. She should not suspect either one of them, she thought as she gnawed on her lower lip. All she had to do was remember that very morning …
She had been sitting up in bed, watching Garreth sleep, the early morning sunlight spilling over him, turning his tanned skin to a beautiful golden color. He was lightly freckled in all the places the sun touched him. He was on his stomach, one of the thick, down pillows tucked up tightly under his unshaven cheek. His hair was curling softly around his ears and against the back of his neck. As he breathed deeply in sleep, she was amazed at how the sound of his breathing, his signs of life, made her feel so incredibly good and so alive herself. It should be against the laws of nature to feel this good about someone, and perhaps it was. Perhaps it was a very bad idea to be allowing herself to adore him this thoroughly.
“That is very unnerving,” he murmured sleepily.
She smiled. “What is?”
He stretched, rolled over onto his back, and smiled. His smile creasing across his face first thing in the morning had to be one of the most beautiful things she had ever seen.
“To awaken because I am being stared at.”
She scooted down so she could rest her cheek over his heart. “I cannot help myself. You are simply too beautiful to resist.”
&nbs
p; “That amuses me because I was going to say the same thing,” he murmured against the top of her head.
She smiled again and blushed warmly, emotion blossoming through her like pure happiness. There couldn’t possibly be anything bad in the world that she couldn’t face when he made her feel like this.
“What else were you going to say?” she asked. “Tell me and I will tell you if I was going to say the same thing.”
She knew he was smiling. She heard it in his voice when he said, “I was going to say what a lovely day it is.”
“Mmm. Me too,” she said, lifting her head and beaming down at him. Their mouths were now scant inches apart.
“I was going to say I have never seen anything as remarkable as your eyes.”
“Me too,” she said.
His tone lowered significantly. “I was going to say that how much I want to kiss you right now cannot possibly be measured.”
“Me too,” she breathed, just before he put a hand to the back of her head and drew her down to his mouth in a blistering kiss. He devoured her mouth easily and with great passion, as though he had not kissed her for many days of separation rather than a few hours of sleep.
He drew away from her to add, “And I was going to say how much I wanted to put my mouth on the most intimate areas of your body.”
“Me too,” she said on a sigh before she realized what she was saying. She did realize it when he chuckled though. “Oh! Very funny,” she said. Then she lifted herself a little, looked down into his eyes, and said silkily, “Me too.”
“I—” He cut himself off when her hand suddenly slid beneath the warm bedding and wrapped around his thickly rousing penis.
She licked her lips and his cock stiffened almost instantly in her hand.
“I was just teasing you,” he said, his voice low from more than just being awakened.
“Now so am I, teasing you,” she pointed out, her thumb coming to rim the crown of him. He sucked a breath in through his teeth and let it out slowly. His hips shifted, pushing him against her palm.
“And a fine job of it you are doing,” he praised her.
“This is merely a fine job,” she pointed out. “Wait until I do an excellent job.”
She pushed back the bedding, exposing him to the cool morning air. She slid down his body a little and the hand in her hair tightened instinctively. She breathed against him, inhaling the musky, masculine smell of him. The edges of her nails drifted down the length of him and she watched him lift into her touch as though he were a well-heeled pet answering to her every command. It was a powerful thought. A powerful feeling. To have such a man as this—one so strong and virile, so dominant and potent—submissive to her desires, it was beyond compare. And because she enjoyed the feeling so much, she was willing to do everything she could to experience more.
She licked her lips again, and again he twitched.
“Would you like my mouth on you?” she asked in a husky whisper.
“More than you will ever know,” he said intensely.
“Well, far be it for me to deny you anything,” she said with a sly smile.
“Mordu,” he groaned just as her kiss was dropping on the tip of his erection.
She liked it when he invoked the god of love and passion. Of hope and dreams. Every other moment of the day his attention and devotion was to Weysa. But here, with her, it was always Mordu. Surely … surely that meant something, she thought as she touched her tongue to him. Surely it meant that he felt something for her. Something he gave to no one else.
He tasted salty on her tongue, musky with sleep and the remnants of their lovemaking the night before. She licked him, down the entire length of him, all the way to the thatch of curls springing up around the base of his hard staff. She licked him all the way back up again, as if she were painting him with her tongue. It was such an erotic idea that she shivered a little. Then he shivered too.
“Gods, woman, you’re enough to make a grown man weep for joy.”
She smiled at that and decided to reward him by employing the use of her hand. She scraped her nails along the underside of the soft sac beneath his cock and felt him tense. But she knew she had not hurt him in the least, had not come even close to it, and she was pleased she had come so far in her knowledge of her lover’s body. In her knowledge of what pleased him. She pleased him, she had come to learn. There was little she could do that was wrong in his eyes, especially when they were in bed together.
She wrapped her hand around the thickness of him, as always quite amazed by the sheer girth of him. Then she placed that girth within her mouth and against her tongue.
He groaned soulfully, his hips lifting once again, pushing himself farther in, past her lips, as his hands came to frame her face. She drew him in deep, then sucked on him as she drew him back out again, eliciting a moan from him. She repeated this, frequently, and got more of the same as her reward. It was nothing bad and everything good. Between his shallowly thrusting hips and her eagerly working mouth, she had him invoking Mordu’s name with greater and greater intensity.
“Oh, sweet Sarielle, you’re going to be the death of me,” he said through clenched teeth.
She hoped so. She worked for it. Worked to taste that sweetly salty fluid she could coax from his body. She touched him along the insides of his thighs, molded the malleable sac, combed through the coarse hair. She touched him every way she could think of as she drew on him with lips, mouth, and tongue.
“Stop, stop, stop,” he hissed. “Fira, as good as this is, I want to make love to you too,” he said.
She pulled away just long enough to say “No.”
Then she doubled her efforts, employed everything she had ever learned about how to make him feel good. She remembered the first time he had coaxed her to do this, explaining to her that it was an ultimate pleasure, just as his mouth on her was an ultimate pleasure. She had been addicted ever since.
But Garreth was not a man to be gainsaid. He grabbed for her, his hands on her hip and thigh jerking her around and across him until she was kneeling on either side of his shoulders, all the while her mouth never leaving him. He spread her thighs wide until she was brought down against his mouth and his tongue was darting out and touching her on her sensitive little nub. His hands curved up her thighs and over her backside, pulling her down tighter. Now he was sucking against her and she was the one moaning, in spite of still having her mouth around him. As his tongue darted and danced, she began to squirm and pull harder on him. Pleasure spiraled through her, in lapping tides that matched the lapping of his tongue.
She couldn’t focus on two things at once, she found herself thinking frantically. His mouth was so much magic that she wanted to simply lie back and get lost in the feelings. But then he would win and he would make her stop. She refused to. She wanted to give him this. More than anything. So she redoubled her efforts, wrapping her hand around him and pumping him in time with the sucking of her mouth. His fingers began to dig into her backside and he ground out fierce sounds of pleasure against her.
“Fira! Fira!” he cried against her just as his hips lunged upward and he exploded against her tongue. She tasted the heat and seed of him against her tongue, and she swallowed it down with joy and pleasure. She had done it. Made him unravel before he’d had the chance to do the same to her.
But before she had an instant to enjoy her victory, he was throwing her over in the bed so she was flat on her back and resettling himself between her legs. He thrust two fingers inside her and latched his mouth onto her. She cried out from the overpowering sensation of it, finally able to relax back and let herself tumble into it. She burrowed her hands into his hair, gripping and holding him to herself, not that he needed the encouragement. For all she was expecting it, her first orgasm blindsided her, making her weak and free flying. She had only ever known such exhilaration when riding on Koro’s neck, and now here, in this bed, with Garreth.
He did not stop. Not even after a second orgasm ripped thro
ugh her. It was only after the third, when she was begging him, that he finally let her go. Then he flipped her over once more, jerked her up onto her knees, and set the fronts of his thighs against the backs of hers. With a lunging thrust, he put himself deep inside her, proving himself to be just as hard as he had been before she had brought him to pleasure.
Then he pounded himself into her, forcing her to press the heels of her palms into the mattress to keep herself from sliding away from him. He pummeled her hips with his until she was spinning and reeling with pleasure the way Koro reeled and turned in the sky. She came so hard she saw bright lights behind her tightly squeezed eyelids. And then she heard him coming as well, the sound of it so guttural and harsh that it almost sounded like pain.
When he was done, he braced himself against her body, gasping for his every breath, his big body shuddering in fine tremors. She was no different, her whole body shaking from her pleasure.
She felt him fall away from her, rolling onto his back beside her, still dragging for breath. He turned his head and looked at her, a sloppy grin on his mouth.
“It’s a good thing I’m immortal,” he said. “It’s going to take some time before I ever get tired of that.”
The words had made her soar. It had been the closest she had ever come to getting him to say he wanted to be with her for longer than just a winter. Oh, she knew it might be a foolish sort of hope to have, but she had not been able to help herself.
“Sarielle! Did you see the new dolls Garreth bought us from the bazaar?” Jona asked, showing her the doll she had gotten. Isaelle showed her hers too.
Sarielle smiled at the girls, but a wave of inexplicable tears came over her. She hastily blinked them away, but they did not go unnoticed by her keen sisters.
“Sarielle, why are you crying?” Isaelle asked. She was the quieter, more introspective of the twins, while Jona was the social butterfly, animated and a little wild.
“Oh, it is nothing, my little love,” she said with a smile that did not reach her eyes. If she thought she was fooling the girls, she was sorely misguided.