Free Merry Gentry 05 - Mistral's Kiss by Laurell K. Hamilton

the lonely cell of her rules, her jealousy, her sadism.
    Would it be worse to have had this moment and then be denied again?
    Would it cause him pain to watch me with my men, and not be a part of it?
    It wasn’t that I was so special to him, or to them. It was simply that I was the only woman with whom the guards could break their long celibacy.
    I raised myself off the ground and kissed him. “I am yours.”
    He kissed me, gently at first, then harder. His tongue thrust between my lips. I opened my mouth and let him explore my mouth. He thrust deep inside, then backed off a little, enough so that it was just a good deep kiss.
    The feel of his mouth drew my mouth closer to his, made my body rise up to press tighter against him, sent my arms across his back, pressed my breasts firm against his chest.
    He made a small sound low in his throat, and the wind suddenly felt cool against my skin. He drew his mouth from mine, and the expression in his eyes was wild. Storm clouds rode in his eyes, but they had slowed, so that it was no longer dizzying. If I hadn’t known what I was looking at, I might simply have thought his eyes were the grey of rain clouds.
    He laid his face in the curve of my neck. He didn’t so much kiss me as lay his lips against my skin. His breath went out in a heavy sigh that spread warmth across my skin. It made me shiver, and that was it. He set his teeth in the side of my neck, and bit me. It made me cry out and tense my fingers along his back, to trail an edge of nail across his skin.
    He bit my shoulder, quick and hard. I cried out for him, and he moved again.
    I don’t think he trusted himself to hold my flesh in his mouth for very long. I knew he wanted to bite down harder, and I could feel the effort required to fight that urge in his lips, his hands, his entire body. He was enjoying himself, but he was struggling to keep his impulses in check.
    He put his mouth into the side of the breast he had not marked and barely laid teeth. I grabbed the side of his face, not hard, but it stopped him. He lifted his gaze to mine, his mouth half opened, and I watched his expression fall. I think he expected me to tell him to stop. Even if that had been what I meant to do, I wouldn’t have had the heart to say it. But regardless, it hadn’t.
    “Harder,” I said instead.
    He gave me a wolfish grin, and again I got that glimpse of something in him that would have made me hesitate to be alone with him. But I was no longer certain if that was truly Mistral’s nature, or whether centuries of denial had made him wild with need.
    He set his teeth into my side and bit down hard, hard enough that I writhed under him. He moved just a little farther down my side, to my waist, and this time when I felt him begin to let go, I said, “Harder.”
    He bit me deeper this time, bit me until I felt his teeth almost meet in my skin. I cried out and said, “Enough, enough.”
    He lifted his face as if to stop completely. I smiled at him. “I didn’t say stop, I just meant that was hard enough.”
    He moved to the other side of my body and bit me again without urging, hard enough that I had to tell him, almost immediately, not to go farther. He looked up at me, and whatever he saw on my face satisfied him, because he bit next to my belly button, setting his teeth so hard and fast that I had to tell him to stop.
    He’d left a press of red teeth marks on my stomach. There were red marks here and there on my body, but nothing as perfect as that. A perfect set of his teeth marks in the white flesh of my body. Looking at it made me shiver.
    “You like it,” he whispered.
    “Yes,” I said.
    The wind held an edge of dampness as it trailed across my skin. He licked low on my stomach, and the wind seemed to blow across that wet line, almost as if the wind had a mouth, too, and could blow where it wished.
    Mistral pressed his mouth where he had licked, and bit me. Hard and sharp, enough to make me startle, and raise my upper body