Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

That it repelled him? Both were true.
    “I have never seen anything like it,” he said honestly. “The selkie do not alter or adorn their skin. It is pretty,” he added.
    “Gee, thanks.”
    He traced a line from the piercing at her navel to the soft thatch below. “This,” he said, “is beyond gold to me.”
    Her breath caught, a tiny betrayal. Her eyes were fathoms deep and dark. Outside the tower, the wind murmured and moaned.
    He moved in, gliding his lips along her throat, feeling the beat of panic and desire, down her beaded breasts and the fragrant hollow between, down, down, following the line of his finger to the place where she was wet and waiting for him. She made a choked exclamation in her throat and fisted her hands in his hair, swaying closer, jerking away. Sweet. Hot. Her response maddened his blood.
    The wind rattled the glass in the windows, sending shadows chasing across the floor. He was drunk on her. Her need became his need, her pleasure his desire. He eased her back on the bed, coaxed her to lie on his pelt. Her hair spilled over his sealskin, blond on black. Kneeling on the floor, his head between her long, smooth thighs, he harrowed her with lips, teeth, and tongue, feeling her response, feeding on it, until she undulated against his mouth and her breath came in sobs. Her beauty almost drowned him.
    He dragged her up and held her hard against him as he reversed their positions, as he sat with her on his lap. Rain lashed the glass. The storm drummed in his ears, raged in his blood. Seizing her hips, he pulled her to straddle him there on the edge of the bed. Her knees pressed his flanks. Her breasts brushed his chest. Her gaze locked with his.
    Shock held them both still.
    They were touching but not joined, his body poised and probing, hers open and wet.
    “Take it,” he said, his voice thick, and the words meant something different now. A benediction. A plea.

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    “Take what you need.”
    He watched her slim throat move as she swallowed. His neck was corded with strain. The room grew dark. She braced her hands on his shoulders and slowly, slowly, sank onto him, taking him into the heat and the wet. His teeth clenched. His breath hissed. He stretched out his legs as she wiggled to take him deeper, feeling her muscles flex and relax, feeling her body clench and release, a fierce internal milking of his shaft. Her eyes were bright and blind as she moved in awkward rhythm, her fingers digging into his shoulders, her body tight around his.
    Lightning shattered the shadows as she gathered the storm, owned it, rode it. Rode him. Power pulsed inside and out. She shuddered. He groaned. He felt the crackle and surge as she closed around him, rising and falling like the sea.
    His heart contracted. “ I am yours, ” he had told her.
    But he had not believed it until now.
    When the wave came, the swell took them both.

13
    PALE YELLOW LIGHT FLOODED THE WESTERN wall of the inner bailey. The short turf dissolved in a tumble of rock and weed like a green wave breaking on shore.
    Lucy lifted her face to the sun’s caress, incandescent with happiness. Every moment of the past three days that Conn had not been with the wardens, he had spent with her—most of them in bed. There was nothing he wouldn’t do and little they hadn’t tried. She felt exquisitely sensitive, achingly alive, her skin burnished by his constant attentions. She glowed, inside and out.
    “Stones, it’s hot,” said Roth from the bench.
    Lucy started, her attention jerked back to their lesson. The temperature in the courtyard eased a degree or ten.
    Griff rubbed his jaw with one large hand. “Aye. Too hot to concentrate anymore today. Go enjoy yourselves.”
    Three males looked at Lucy, their eyes dark with animal awareness. They knew, she realized. Even the boys.
    She felt plunged in boiling water, scalded pink. “It does seem warm for October,” she offered.
    Roth choked.
    Iestyn dropped his gaze.
    “It’s the current,” Griff said kindly. “Coming from the south. The island never gets so very cold.”
    “Or so warm,” Roth said. “Usually.”
    Iestyn kicked his ankle.
    Lucy cleared her throat. “Good growing climate.”
    “Good for oats and apples,” Griff said.
    “Wild onion, too,” said Iestyn. “Under the orchard trees. And mint.”
    Lucy’s gaze wandered back to the strip beneath the sun-drenched wall. Not that it was