Free The Champion by Morgan Karpiel

heart spurred to a panicked rhythm, warmth flooding under his fingertips. He kissed her again, holding her close as the sensation grew intense, her hips writhing in his lap, his thumb circling a tiny pearl of need.
    It felt too good. The grip of it drew her up for more, calling her to reach for whatever blissful trophy it offered. She broke the kiss with a gasp, her head thrown back over his arm, her legs spreading wider for the touch of his hand.
    “I am yours,” he said, his voice tight, his heartbeat so close to her ear. Nadira shook her head, unable to answer. She felt him flatten his hand, rubbing her with his palm as he slid two fingers inside her. Her body arched, responding from instinct, from need. He rubbed along the snug passage, his fingers slick with her.
    “Jacob,” he whispered. “I want to hear it on your lips.”
    It could have been anything, any word, any name in the world, and she would gladly have said it. “Jacob.”
    “Louder.”
    His fingers were stretching, then sliding out of her, strumming excitedly over the hot skin, rubbing a point so blinding it stole her breath.
    “Jacob,” she cried, feeling it overtake her.
    He groaned in response, holding her as she stretched in climax, a rush of joy as bright as the sky, as free as the horizon. She shuddered as he lay her down on their clothes, her body flushed and languid.
    He caught her hips and settled himself between them. She looked up through half-closed lids, watching his expression change as he guided the head of his cock to her pleasured sex. He rubbed its swollen head into the folds, slicking himself with her. Then he filled her, sinking deep, stroking the lingering orgasm until it warmed every part of her.
    Nadira wrapped her legs around his waist, feeling him thrust deeper, her body moving under his, her heart lost to the bright current of need between them. He gathered her in his arms, whispering against her hair, kissing her as he caressed the hard length of himself inside her.
    She grasped onto the muscle of his shoulders. Her fingers dug into his skin as the pleasure returned with greater force, wringing a second release from the battering slide of his cock, the hard merging of two souls.
    His climax followed hers, his last thrusts brutal and halting, his body strained in its grasp. He bowed his head as it eased, pressing his forehead gently against hers, breathing through his teeth, his lips crooked in a tender smile. She stroked her hands over his jaw, tracing the lines at the corners of his eyes, finding him all the younger for the lack of a grimace or frown.
    He kissed her hand. “You are, without a doubt, the bravest, most foolhardy, most beautiful, woman I’ve ever met.”
    She wet her lips. “ Jacob ?”
    His expression sobered a little, his gaze sliding away from her. “It is the name I prefer.”
    “You wish me to always call you ‘Jacob’”?
    “Yes.”
    “Not Robert?”
    “Never Robert.”
    She shook her head, unconcerned as long as continued to hold her so. “I know so little about you, it seems.”
    “I will tell you everything, as soon as I am free to do so.”
    “How can you not be free?”
    He shook his head, seeming to resist the mood a genuine reply might place him in. “Ask me anything but that.”
    “Have you ever had a wife?”
    “No.”
    “Have you ever wanted to marry?”
    “Years ago, perhaps, but the lady did not want to marry me.”
    “Foolish.” She slid her hands down his shoulders, the length of his arms, watching his gaze warm to the touch. “And these…why do you wear these thread bracelets? Two on the right, and one on the left?”
    “Ah.” He kissed her, drawing back to extricate their bodies, then pulling her snug against him as he lay beside her. “My sister made them for all of us, for each of her four younger brothers, before we went to war. Two of us were killed and I wear their bands on the right. One is missing, presumed dead, but never found, so there is just mine, on