Free Ensnared by the Dream Lord (Dark Lords) by Jaide Fox Page A

with longing, muscles screaming in protest.  Every move was agony, ever touch mind-numbing. 
     
    When she could take no more, she cried out, “Please, no more!”
     
    He said something, but she couldn’t hear him.  Every sense focused on her loins.  When he finally allowed her release, it came in a painful gush.  Her muscles tensed to the point that they seized on his fingers.  She jerked against his mouth, gasping, crying as he wrung her pleasure out, leaving her emotionally and physically drained.  Exhaustion claimed her in a faint.
     
    When she awoke, it was with dismay that she realized he’d taken her back to bed.  There was no satiating his hunger, and she was just as ravenous.  He made love to her again, fast, rough, heedless to anything but the pleasure they found in each other.
     
    Adriana felt that she’d fallen into a dream world, a reality where pleasure reigned in a dizzying whirl of ecstasy.
     
    * * * *
     
     
    No matter how often he plundered her body, satisfaction eluded him.  As sated as he was from making love to Adriana a vague, unnamable emptiness still plagued him.  Restless, he rolled to the edge of the bed and dressed.  After staring down at her peacefully sleeping face for several moments, he leaned toward her and waved a hand over her.  “Sleep.”
     
    Assured that he need have no concern that she would wake while he was gone and use the opportunity to leave, he left her and strode quickly from his castle, whistling for Despair.  Frowning when the night-mare did not appear at once, he whistled again.  With obvious reluctance, the mare answered his summons, galloping up to him in a rush that spattered his boots in a shower of pebbles and dirt and clods of grass.
     
    Gritting his teeth, Morpheus grasped the night-mare’s fiery mane and flung himself onto the horse’s back, clouting the steed on the side of the head for her impertinence.  “Even the bloody mare defies me,” Morpheus muttered, giving the horse its head. 
     
    Rearing, snorting with anger, Despair leapt skyward and raced across the heavens at a breakneck pace.  Morpheus paid little heed.  His mind was wrapped in the puzzle of his dissatisfaction, but turn it though he might he could not quite grasp the thing that teased at him. 
     
    Dawn was approaching when at last he turned Despair homeward once more.  As the first rays of morning pinkened the horizon, he strode into the castle once more, climbed the stairs and sought the solitude of his own chamber.  It was there, in his dream world that the answer at last came to him.
     
    She did not lift her eyes to him in desire as she had.  She did not smile in welcome, offering herself to him.  She desired him still.  He could wring cries of delight from her body, but she withheld a part of herself.  Each time he came to her, she fought the need for him.  She did not yield willingly and when she looked at him, there was sadness in her eyes.
     
    He knew it was the answer to the emptiness that he had not understood, but he was baffled still, for he could not understand why such a thing would matter to him.  In truth, it only mattered that it did disturb him, though, that it left him feeling vaguely unsettled, disappointed, but he could not figure out a way to change it.
     
    He pondered that problem for a time when he awoke, pacing the parapets of his castle and in time he found the answer to the riddle. 
     
    She was mortal.  He had forgotten that mortal women liked to be wooed.  They wanted a tender lover.
     
    He frowned at that thought, wondering if he could do such a thing.  He was not accustomed to tenderness.  In truth, he had not even enjoyed the passions of the flesh in so long that he had difficulty controlling himself at all when the fever came upon him.
     
    She had not seemed to mind before.
     
    That thought produced an uncomfortable one.  If he readily admitted that he had almost no control when he possessed her, how much might a