The Wedding Night (25 page)

"Oh, yes, Jack. Memorizing everything you say. And everywhere you say it. Please,
please
, go on." And on! "Oh!"

He was parting her with his fingers, seeking something from her, finding the telling hot dampness that had been gathering like a summer storm. Fueling the fire that burned in her belly.

"Once upon a time, my sweet, my tasty Mairey"—he kissed her tenderly, altogether chastely where his fingers played—"there was a fusty, old dragon."

"An irresistible dragon," she said. Another of his intimate kisses, deeper yet, probing. An unladylike gasp came whistling out of her chest.

"The creature was melancholy, my love."

"Oh,
Jaaack
!"
That
was the tip of his tongue! His
tongue!
A hot, slick bolt of lightning that wedged itself inside her cleft and then retreated. But just like lightning, its blazing blue artifacts stayed to flare and lick its way into the core of her. She reached blindly for the hand that was kneading her hip, wanting something of him to hold onto, something to keep her from soaring away.

"Yes, madam?" He caught up her hand, kissed her fingers and then the inside of her knee, then led his ravishing tongue along a trail toward still another of his intimacies.

"I doubt this dragon was melancholy, Jack."

"Why is that?" Another kiss.

"Oh, Jack! Because… Dear God!" His tongue was everywhere, and his fingers, too; sliding and slipping, nuzzling her as though he were kissing her. "Because dragons are
usuaily
fierce, yes! Yes, oh, my, yes!"

"Are they, love?" He sounded grandly amused by all her squirming. But she couldn't help herself.

"And they're relentless!" She grabbed the astonishing man by his hair, bringing him closer, and pinned her heels against his shoulders to beg relief from his enchantment, to beg for more of it. "Oh! And big, Jack! Dragons are
enorrrrrmous
! Oh, Jack!"

He tugged and teased until she was bucking and grinding, ready to explode.

"But still and all this dragon was sorrowful, my dear—"

Her throat was sore from all her groaning. "Was his name
Balforge
? It must have been."

"If you'd like it to be."

"Oh, I would!"
Balforge
was her dragon. The one who had coiled himself around her heart, the one whose tongue was laying her as though she were dessert, the one who called her his love.

He nuzzled her once more,
then
left that place of startling wonder, left her aching and twisting and unfulfilled, and carried her further onto the bed and against the pillows.

"You see, Mairey my love, this
Balforge
lived and worked all alone in a drafty old cavern."

She clung to his neck, to his mouth. "Did he have wings?"

"Unfortunately, no." Jack stretched out above her, kneeling between her thighs, braced on his elbows, looking even
more hungry
than before he'd sampled her, his stalk dazzlingly large and inviting. "Because if he had, he wouldn't have spent so much time on the train, traveling between his … other
caverns,
and he wouldn't have been so ill-tempered"

She fit her arms around his broad back and kissed him, thoroughly bewitched by her storyteller and his irresistible theatrics. "A very modern sort."

She was about to prompt him for more when he snuggled his penis against the nest he'd so attentively feathered for it, and Mairey nearly fainted with pure pleasure.

"There's more, my love."

"Oh, yes, a
lot
more, Jack!" She raised her hips to collect the thrilling length of him, to slide it here and there. "You are wickedly large, my lord. Hot, too."

"And you are willful, madam." He shook himself like a waterdog,
then
gulped in a huge breath of air before he focused his eyes on her again with a half-grin. "I meant, my sweet, that my story has a princess."

"I was hoping so." His hips were wonderfully planed, his backside carved in shifting marble and just as hard.

"She was beautiful, intelligent, enchanting." He practiced his sorcery with every word, moving his hips and his flesh, pressing her into the mattress as though he couldn't get enough of her.

"And he was wonderful." She caught his mouth and kissed him thoroughly, memorizing the taste of him, dancing her tongue with his.

"Ah, but, Mairey, the princess was his downfall."

Guilty tears sprung to her eyes, hot and heart-aching and kissed away by the fine man who loved so fiercely. "I'm sorry for that, Jack."

"Oh, trust me, love—you've taught me happy endings." He slid his hand down her belly, followed afterward with his mouth, and just when she thought she'd go mad, he entered her with his finger. "And we will have one."

"Oh, Jack!" Mairey tilted her hips to meet him, gloried in the feeling of possession, in the lush flickering of his tongue, as he delved with two fingers, filling her marvelously but not nearly enough.

She wanted
him
—all of him. Wanted him to hurry with his story, to take her to his place of happily-ever-
aftering
. "What happened to the princess and her dragon?"

He was maddeningly slow, dazing her with a blinding stroke of his fingers, and then a nibble on her breast, an ardent tugging that made her feel ripe and sun-warmed, spinning his tale with silken strands that tugged her pulse in a thousand and one directions, but ever upward toward a place she couldn't quite reach.

"The uncivilized fellow imprisoned his wanton captive in one of his caverns—"

"She was wanton as well?"

"
Mmmmm
…" he hummed huskily against her belly, making her light-headed with his fondling
. "
Balforge
was a very lucky dragon, though he didn't know it and made her work for him day and night."

"His housekeeper?"

"His very own antiquarian. A beautiful collector of folktales, a finder of lost dreams."

"I like your story, Jack, love the way you tell it!" With his tongue and his mouth and—"Oh, yes, finally!" He pressed the broad tip of his penis against her—a star-splintering fit that made her wrap her legs around his hips and coerce him forward with her heels. "There, Jack."

"Not yet, my love. We've much farther to go." Mairey couldn't imagine any more of his extravagant torture. Though she opened her legs wider and begged him come, he ignored her graceless hints, though hard-rippling tremors shook him and made him struggle for air.

She wanted to confess that she loved him, that she wanted to stay and stay, but there was too much danger in that. Even here in this fairy tale where most anything could happen.

Anything.

"I want to touch you, Jack." She reached between their bodies, slid her hand down his lean-muscled trunk, across his flat belly, and closed her fingers around the most brawny shape she'd ever had the pleasure of touching.

"Mairey!—" Jack swallowed a howl and made a grab for her hand. But she was already there in the steamy hollow between them, her innocent fingers encircling his shaft in faultless, fluting links, her hands making grand forays even as he shot to his knees in pure reflex.

"You're so lovely, Jack." She was sitting up, fondling the length and breadth of him as she had those others in the drawer. "Warm and hard—and soft, too! Beautiful!" Her words of admiration broke against him, warm and moist and too close.

"Blazes, woman!" He hadn't been prepared for her adventuring; wasn't expecting delicate fingers scribing the details of his anatomy and exalting them, sheathing him thoroughly with her masterful hands, taunting him with that instinctive, pounding, pulsing rhythm and taking him too near the edge before he could stop her. He should have known that Mairey would astound him in this, too.

"A kiss, Jack?"

"Almighty God, yes!" But he caught her hands before she could bestow one and drove her back into the pillows, pinning her wrists above her head.

"Why didn't you let me kiss you as you did me?"

"Another time—" Though that promise only hardened him further, if that were possible. Their quintessential parts were heated and poised and throbbing,
Mairey's
legs clutched round him, ready to take him completely. "I'm crazed for you, Mairey. I want to plunge and thrust in you."

"Then do." She laughed and tucked him closer, expertly now, and harrowed her fingers through his hair.

"I don't want to hurt you."

"You couldn't possibly."

Jack had never in his life waited for anything with such visceral, tethered yearning; he was in her heart and in her eyes; he could see the wonder so plainly, so perfectly. He wanted to be soul-deep inside her, straining with her till the sky fell out from under them. Her exotic bouquet was in his nostrils and on his fingers, in the blending of their mouths.

Here was his miracle, making tumultuous love with him, urging him to pillage her, whispering her silky treasures to him, coiling her hips in wide undulations, taking him against her, pressing and pressing him ever deeper till he met that tender barrier he'd found with his fingers.

Virgo
intacta
. "You're very tight, love."

Her brows knitted, worried for them. "We'll fit together, Jack." She arched her hips and shoved at him with her heels. "There, do you feel the place?"

"God, yes, Mairey. Stop!" He shuddered with the effort of not plunging forward into all that exquisite heat.

"Then, please, Jack!" His wanton princess had found him again, her eager hand fitting him against the silky wetness he'd drawn from her. "Let me take you inside me. Let me hold you, Jack."

An irresistible tide shoved at him. "As deeply as you can bear, my love."

"Then all the way to my heart, Jack." Sighing against his mouth, she tilted her hips and took the tip of him as far as she could, then
kissed
him. "The rest is for you, my enormous dragon."

"Oh, my love!" Like a man possessed, he thrust fiercely, mindlessly, breaching her swiftly, the pleasure exquisite and propelling as she closed tightly around him, taking him deeper and more fully with each sharp sigh.

"
Ohhhhh
, Jack, oh, yes! Please, please, do!" Until he was buried to the shank and quaking, and his nymph was stretched languidly beneath him, her eyes streaming with tears and not quite focused, as though she were trying to recognize a beloved scent on a summer breeze.

"I hurt you, my love. I'm sorry." He kissed her eyelids and struggled not to move.

"Oh, no, Jack. I'm restored—filled with you. Happy now."

Happy. This delighted him beyond belief. "Then
I'm
happy."

She wriggled her hips, stunning him with her earthy lust. "So you are, my lord." She kissed him hungrily,
then
began to rock gently, finding the rising rhythm of his heartbeat and hers.

Jack steadied his breathing and met her deeply measuring strokes, taking leave of her and then returning only when she clutched at his hips and begged, laughing with her as they came together again in ever-ascending fury.

"Whatever happened to
Balforge
and his princess?"

Jack held his weight on his elbows, keeping her close to him and sheltered, just the two of them and their driving need to have union. "Oh, love, he lost his heart to her."

"Did he?" She gave him a willowy sigh and a fierce embrace that locked her ankles around his backside, and drove him to the brink with her rocking.

"From the first moment he saw her."

"Oh, my enchanting dragon!" She was breathless beneath him, praising his clever marauding, taking his ravenous kiss as an offering, bestowing her own at his temples and on his mouth, while the tempest rose and raged around them. Exuberance and adoration, and all the swirling forces of nature caught up in a firestorm.

"Tell me your happy ending, Jack. I can't stand the wait."

"Neither can
I
, my love." He was reeling with
restraint,
and all of it for Mairey, for her pleasure, for her love. He slipped his hand between them where she was wet and ripe for him, where they were fused together and grinding toward the same slivered sunlight, the same everlasting bliss.

A simple touch, a skiff, and then
Mairey's
throaty, "
Ohhhh
,
mmmmy
!
Jaaaack
!"

The searing force of her release shattered him, came roaring out of nowhere to overtake him in its whirlwind. But before he succumbed to the fragmenting glory, before he lost himself inside her completely, she needed to know.

"You have my heart, Mairey, my soul."

His heart!
Oh, Jack—! Mairey was still soaring from the splintering, skyrocketing pleasure that he'd brought her to, still clutching him against her and riding his thermals up and up into the brightness. The crests came and went and came
again,
catching her up like a gadabout feather, with Jack the wind and her wings.

Her marvelous dragon reared up, nostrils wide and scenting, his sinew and flesh glistening bronze with sweat. He bellowed her name, caught up her bottom into his splayed fingers and then plunged into her, far, far deeper than he had been before, hotter still, and again and again and again. Then, with a convulsive groan, he filled her with a rapturous, spilling heat; his seed, a gift she would cherish but grieve over. It would find no purchase in her womb tonight.