In the Flesh (21 page)

“Wulf…” She released the linens and reached for him, needing to feel him over her, against her. Her palms pressed flat to his perspiration-slick back, her head lifting to connect her hot forehead to his shoulder.

“Inside me,” she panted. “I need you inside me.”

His forearm propped his weight while his fingers continued to stroke through her spasms.

“This is for you, Katie.” His voice was dark and hoarse. “Not for me.”

Tilting her head, she pressed her lips to his. Her nipples, so hard and sensitive, puckered tighter as they brushed across the hair on his chest. Her pussy rippled with the resonating delight, her entire body enamored with his. “Do it for me, then,” she urged.

He loosened his grip on her hair and mounted
her. She bit back a sound of protest as his fingers left her empty and greedy. She waited, breath held, as he moved against her, the thick crest of his cock gliding through their commingled fluids.

Poised and aching for the feel of him throbbing inside her, Sapphire was painfully aware of her vulnerability. The drugs made her crave sex. But her craving for Wulf came from inside her, independent of anything she could control. Nothing would be the same in the morning, while at the same time nothing would have changed. She couldn’t keep him.

Wulf reached down and cupped the back of her thigh, dragging it over his own, opening her more fully. His hips rolled, pushing the barest inch inside her. When she put her other heel to the mattress and lifted for more, he made a chastising noise and caught that leg, too.

“Slow and easy,” he purred, rising to his knees. Draping her thighs over his, he kept her angled upward, her pussy splayed wide and desperate to be filled. Stretched.

Her nails raked across the sheet. “Hard and deep.”

His large hands moved to her breasts, the heated palms kneading the swollen flesh. “You’ll get sore. We have hours ahead of us.”

“I need you.”

“Trust me.” He thrust gently, working another wide inch into her. “I’ve got you.”

She moaned, grateful for his care and attention, loving how he knew what she wanted and needed before she did but hating that he was right to be cautious. The desire was agonizing, goading her to writhe beneath him, to beg and plead, to cry and
curse as he rocked his way into her with painstaking leisure.

“You’re so damn hot,” he bit out, sweat dripping from the long, dark strands of his hair. “I love fucking you. I love the look on your face when you come. Whenever I see you, I ache to see that look.”

“I ache to show it to you.” She locked her ankles at the small of his back and tugged, hissing in pleasure as he hilted.

Then the ride began. The sweet, slow glide. The push and pull. The exquisite feel of the furled underside of his cockhead as it stroked deliciously over hypersensitive nerves. She could swear she felt every pulsing vein, every gush of pre-come, every frantic beat of his heart.

Instinctive, needy cries spilled from her lips. Primitive sounds of surrender and hunger that stirred the dominant male in him. She saw it in his eyes, in the clenching of his jaw, in the way his chest heaved with effort despite his rigidly timed pace.

“Deeper,” she begged. “Harder.”

Wulf resisted the latter while indulging the former, moving her legs to his shoulders and coming over her. Her hips tilted higher, his dropped straight down, pumping his cock into her farthest depths. He bottomed out on every plunge, pulled out to the tip on every withdrawal. The feel of that long, thick penis pumping its full length into her brought her to orgasm swiftly and kept her churning in the climax like a sandstorm.

His arms wrapped beneath her shoulders and held her pinned as he worked, his breath gusting across her ear. Sapphire felt the growl before she
heard it, sensed the tension that gripped him in the moments before orgasm. He kept to the tempo that had to be killing him, but his fervor grew. The slap of his tight sac against her buttocks grew sharper, spurring her pleasure.

Her fingertips clung to his straining back and she breathed, “Come in me. Fill me with you.”

“Katie,” he snarled.

He grew thicker, harder. She climaxed again at the stretching of her inner muscles and he exploded with a hoarse shout of her name, his large frame straining against her in the way she loved. The way that told her he was as helpless as she to the force of their need.

Wulf held himself still at the deepest point of her, grinding into her, emptying his lust in fierce, fiery bursts.

With his temple pressed to hers, he gasped, “I love you. God, I love you.”

He came apart in her arms. She held him through the torrent that raged through them both.

Wulf held his torso aloft to look down at her. “Tell me what happened to you today.”

She inhaled deeply. Her dark eyes were luminous and beautiful. “I don’t want to talk. I just want to hold you.”

He nuzzled the fragrant valley between her breasts. “We have a lot to talk about. Plans for our fut—”

“No. For the next few hours you are not a prince, you are simply my lover. There is no tomorrow or any other day after that. There is only tonight and
this bed.” Her pussy clutched at his cock, stroking it until he began to stir inside her.

“Duncan told me what he said to you. None of it is true.”

“I know.”

He took her mouth, his tongue sweeping inside and caressing hers, gratitude for her trust a deep ache in his chest. When she arched impatiently against him, Wulf rolled onto his back, tucking one arm behind his head. “Ride off those drugs.”

“You are my fantasy.” She smiled and everything knotted up inside him. “Did you know that?”

Straddling his hips eagerly, Katie took him to the root, whimpering with pleasure as she seated fully onto him. He held her gaze, his chest tightening at the sight of her outlined by the faint moonlight entering through the small window behind her.

“Never leave me again.” His voice turned thick and unsteady. “I’ll chase you to the end of the universe if I have to. I’ll never let you go.”

As she began to move over him, she bent at the waist and claimed his mouth with her own. She rode him slowly, tenderly. He savored the press of her body atop his—the feel of her breasts brushing against his chest, the velvet moistness of her body gliding up and down his cock, the gentle brushes of her hair across his shoulder.

Except for the soothing caress of his palm on her thigh, Wulf forced himself to remain still. His jaw clenched and he gripped the pillows as he felt her endless string of orgasms clench around him. Her lush body was tortured, tormented, wracked with artificially heightened sensations, and this was the only
thing he could do to help her. To allow her to use his body to ease her pain. He wished he could do more.

She gasped, her body shuddering over and around him. The touch of her hands upon his skin was reverent. She made him feel special and important. She told him every day in countless ways how much he pleased her. The way she looked at him, kissed him, talked to him—all of it made him
feel
. He had never felt so much as when he was with her.

His eyes slid closed, and he held on to her with the thought that he would never let her go, never allow her to be farther away from him than he could touch.

Katie rode his body for hours, but finally sweat and activity burned the drugs from her body. Their final coupling was slow and tender. Just the two of them, alone in the world. Her body spread beneath his, her head tossing restlessly while he loved her leisurely and deliberately.

He took her with gentle desire, keeping her pinned and helpless beneath his lazy, rhythmic thrusts. He whispered endearments against her sweat-slick skin, praising her beauty, her passion.

How different it was to make love to her with his heart. He had never experienced sex like it before, a joining of more than mere bodies.

As the sun began its measured rise, he tasted a tinge of melancholy in the flavor of her kiss, but exhaustion prevented him from investigating further. His eyelids weighed heavily and he sank into sleep with Katie held tight in his arms.

It was midmorning when Wulf’s carefully cultivated warrior’s senses told him they were no longer alone in the room.

He moved instinctively to shield Katie with his body and was astonished at the speed with which a dark hand snaked through the drapes to slap a neurosignature badge against the skin of her upper arm. His body instantly dropped to the mattress.

Katie had been transferred right out from under him.

With a howl of rage, he rolled from the bed, slipping under the voluminous curtains and reaching for the glaive that rested atop his discarded trousers. He engaged the blade a scant moment before his aggressor’s first offensive move nearly cut him in half.

Deflecting the blow and kicking out with his legs, he bought himself time enough to spring off the floor and land on his feet. He froze for an instant in surprised recognition then swiftly parried the next attack.

“General Erikson,” he acknowledged tersely, relieved that Katie was in loving hands. Then he steeled himself to deal with her father’s obvious wrath.

“Prince Wulfric.”

Grave Erikson faced him with a glaive in each hand, the two glowing white blades spinning in opposite directions, creating an impenetrable shield for his body.

“Naked as the day you were born,” the general growled, kicking aside an intrusive chair. “Fitting that you should end your life the way you began it.”

With that ominous statement, he lunged, one blade thrusting, the other parrying.

Distantly, Wulf’s mind registered the sounds of his guardsmen trying to enter the room. Altering his position, he faced the doorway and saw that Erikson had attached a disrupter to the controls. Wulf was relieved. If his men entered the room, the possibility that Katie’s father could be injured would be greatly increased.

Sweat stung Wulf’s eyes as he fought defensively; refusing to risk injury to the father of the woman he loved. It took all his skill to keep Erikson’s blades from penetrating his defenses. The fury that goaded the general’s actions seemed endless. And deadly.

“Fight back, damn you!” Erikson yelled.

“I can’t. Katie would never forgive me if I hurt you.”

Suddenly, decisively, the general stepped back and disengaged his blades. Wulf cautiously did the same. Darkness descended upon the room as the laser light retracted and disappeared.

“You’ve improved much, Your Highness, since the last time we sparred,” Erikson said, with just a hint of breathlessness. “And you were damn good then.”

Wulf tilted his head in acknowledgment, his eyes wary, his stance tense with expectation. “Where are your men?”

“I came alone. Bringing men with me would have been a military incursion. I am here as a father.”

“I need her back, General.”

“You have no claim to her.”

“I love her.”

“Don’t speak of love to me!” Erikson snapped.
“Do you know how I located my daughter? Her abuse in the town square yesterday is today’s gossip. If you can’t protect her, you don’t deserve her.”

Wulf’s face heated. “I would protect her with my very life.”

“You
stole
her!” The general stepped forward, the fists holding his glaive-hilts white-knuckled with tension. “You took her from a place where she is revered and brought her to a place where she is reviled. Endangered from every side. A target for anyone who has a grudge against Sari.”

Wulf straightened, shrouding his nakedness with regal dignity. “I’ve made many mistakes regarding your daughter, General, but I’m prepared to rectify them. Katie is precious to me.”

“She is nothing to you. Forget she exists.”

“Not a chance,” Wulf vowed.

Erikson’s gaze narrowed. “You’ll have to get through me to get to her. It would be far less painful to find a new D’Ashierian concubine.”

Wulf stepped forward.

The belt on the general’s waist beeped an alarm. “Time’s up, Your Highness.”

Executing a quick bow, Erikson transferred out.

Stunned by the sudden end to the conversation and the loss of Katie after she’d been so recently found, Wulf stood frozen.

Katie was gone without knowing he wished to make her his consort.

She’d left him yesterday and he had promised her nothing since then that would change her mind. Would his profession of love be enough to bind her to him? She’d refused to talk about tomorrow or the
future, as if they had none. Her last bittersweet kiss still lingered on his lips. Despair ripped through him like the lash of a whip.

She wasn’t coming back. He knew it, felt it in his bones.

Chapter 15

“I know he loves me, Daddy, but it’s not enough.”

Sapphire paced the length of her father’s study, her chest plagued with a dull and throbbing ache.

“Do you love him?” her father asked gently from his seat on the damask-covered sofa.

She heaved out her breath and tossed him a self-deprecating smile. “Hopelessly.”

Being apart from Wulf felt as if she was missing a part of herself. She missed his arrogant demands for her undivided attention and the way he could focus all of his on her. She missed his laughter and the sound of his voice, which could soothe or arouse depending on his mood. She missed the smell of his skin and the weight of his body over hers. She was addicted to him, sometimes wanting him so badly that she shook with it.

As she moved around restlessly, Grave’s gaze stayed on her. “Do you want to stay here with your mom and me? Do you want to go back to your home?”

Home. Was it really only weeks ago that she’d been ecstatic over the gift of her freedom? It seemed
as if a lifetime had passed. “It’s not home, Daddy. It comes with conditions I’m not willing to meet.”

“I understand. Perhaps a vacation, then?” His dark eyes were filled with concern. “An off-world trip? Sometimes, getting away is the best medicine.”

She stilled, then broke into a wide smile. “That’s a wonderful idea. I’m going to track down the merc responsible for the attack against Wulf.”

“What?”