Paladin (Graven Gods 1) (7 page)

BOOK: Paladin (Graven Gods 1)
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Paladin supported my weight as if I weighed no more than dandelion fluff. If I’d had any doubts about his strength, he put them to rest when he shifted the grip of one hand under my rump and slid the other up the curve of my body, tracing hip and ribs in a ticklish brush. His palms carried the arousing rasp of calluses earned wielding spear and axe. I shuddered in reaction.

He was a warrior, and felt like a warrior, his body as hard as the bronze of his torc. I moaned as I kissed him, savoring the taste of mead and man, the lingering battle scent.

We kissed lazily again, tongues coiling, lips pressing. The curling hair over his chest teased my nipples, the sensation seductive. Maddening. As darkly intoxicating as Paladin’s kiss. I shook in his arms with the force of my desire.

Until he let me go. With an instinctive yelp, I tightened the grip of my arms and thighs. “Let go,” he murmured. “I shall not drop you.” His lids lowered until his eyes were but glowing slits. “I shall never fail you, my love.”

So I released him, and his magic lifted me. Coils of power wrapped around my arms and legs, pulling them wide until I was spread like a starfish.

I writhed. It did me no good. Paladin’s magic might as well have been hammered bronze, for I could not break it. I caught my breath in escalating arousal at the delicious sense of helplessness.

He can do anything to me. Anything at all

Paladin watched me struggle, lust leaping high in his eyes. His burning blue gaze traced the curves of my breasts, the stiff points of my nipples, then downward over my belly and between my straining thighs.

His lips curved into a very male smile of satisfaction. He flicked a finger. The magic of my bonds began to lick at me, dancing around my torso to caress my breasts and foam between my thighs. Every swirling stroke drew heat and pleasure to the surface.

The power abruptly snapped over my nipples, twin arousing bites. I yelped and twisted. But despite my cry of pain, my hips rolled, strained. I lifted my head, locking my desperate gaze on his long, thrusting cock.

Paladin’s eyes darkened. “You like that, don’t you?”

I could only moan. The magic between my legs lapped the delicate skin there, tasting and probing like a skillful man’s tongue. The pleasure of it burned with piercing sweetness.

He stepped close, and his hand gripped my chin hard. His eyes burned in the mind, fierce and blue. “I asked you a question.”

“Yes,” I gasped. “Yes, I like it.” Loved it, though I refused to say as much. He’d savor it more if he had to work for my submission.

Paladin grinned, dark and male. “Good.” Leaning down, he kissed me, a slow, seductive claiming. “My beautiful goddess,” he murmured against my lips. “How many times I’ve lain on my pallet, jerking my cock as I dreamed of seeing you like this. Bound for my pleasure. Ready for me.”

His tongue stroked the seam of my lips, coaxing them to open. I whimpered, kissing him back hard, shivering with the maddening delight he triggered with mouth and magic.

“I’ve wanted you as I have wanted no other woman.” Paladin looked down, gazing at my breasts in absorbed wonder. “‘Tis so strange. The god remembers taking you. I see his memories from when he was the dead God King. I know just how you like to be touched as if we’ve made love many times.” He ran the bare tips of his fingers over my breasts, a dancing tickle. I squirmed, but my magical bonds held me fast. Panting, I ground my hips in yearning. “But it didn’t feel like this,” he added softly. “Your skin is even softer than I remember. So delicate.”


Ahhhhh, Paaaaladiiiin
…”


Yes
?” He bent to my breasts and I caught my breath. His tongue lapped the tips, tasting me until my head fall back as I moaned to the stars. His tongue trapped my nipple against his teeth, which closed in an exquisitely careful bite. The swirl of pleasure made me shudder.

Panting, I watched him suckle me. His gaze flashed up to mine, blue and glowing, as his hand cupped my breast. Sweet. It felt so sweet, a rush of luscious sensuality pouring through my body, making me swell and tighten.

Around us, the tribe groaned and whimpered and shouted as they coupled, the magic we had worked driving them to frenzied lust. Yet I cared not, my mind caught in the magic Paladin spun with his clever hands and skilled mouth.

With an effort, I managed to speak. “I… I have watched you too. I watched you… with the men of the tribe… training for battle. Watched the sun shine on the sweat of your shoulders and… longed for you. Dreamed of you, your hands on my skin. This is ssso much sweeter… than those dreams.”

“Good.” Growling, he suckled my peak into his mouth, swirling his tongue around and over it, maddening and delicious.

His magic began to tease me in earnest. First with a brush of rabbit fur against my back, then in a ticklish ripple down the length of my thighs. Then in little bites, here and there on breast and belly, a rake of teeth across the left nipple, just shy of pain. As if that did not madden me enough, sharp little impacts began to strike my backside, landing on my cheeks like swats. I bucked, gasping, and he laughed against my skin. His eyes rolled up at me, a wicked flash of blue.

When he dropped to his knees, I cried out.

Paladin spread the lips of my pussy and breathed in, inhaling deeply as a wolf might drink the scent of prey. “You are wet. But then, I’d be insulted if you weren’t.”

“That…” I panted, “Was never even a possibility!”

“Good.” He leaned in. I sucked in a breath of anticipation. Paladin gave my pussy a single slow lick.

Elder gods, the sensation! The exquisite pleasure of it tore a ragged whimper from my mouth. He licked again, tracing wet folds, discovering sensitive nooks.

As he ate at me, more magical swats landed, the blows driving me forward onto his tongue. Pain and pleasure clashed, blended, built each other. My moans became sharp cries of arousal, the sounds blending with the rough voices of the tribe fucking all around us.

Still licking me, he reached up the length of my body, cupped my breast in his hand. Thumb and forefinger closed on my nipple and began to milk pleasure from it. Each lap of his tongue and twist of his fingers added tinder to my lust.

The swats of magic became strokes of furred fingers, mixed with sharp little pinches. Sensation piled on sensation, until with a rough growl, he jerked away from me and shot to his feet. One hand clamped my hip as the other took his cock in hand. He found my slick opening and drove deep, his ruthlessness ripping a yowl from my mouth.

Big
! His cock felt so thick, so merciless, but I was very wet, and he drove to the balls.

The magic released me, dropping me into Paladin’s rough warrior’s hands. “Ah, you feel incredible!” he gritted against my ear before drawing back. His eyes met mine, fierce, demanding, and I found I could not look away. The god blue of his eyes burned into me as he began to thrust, shafting that thick cock in and out. Each pump seemed to stuff me full with jolting stabs of pleasure.

All the while, his magic played, sucking my clit like a hot mouth, licking my nipples, the sensations intense and impossible.

It was too much, pumping my skull full of ecstasy. I could only cling to Paladin, my cries of delight building to a scream.


Paladiiiiinnnn
!” I came, convulsing in his arms.


Yes
!” he bellowed, rough and male, and shoved as deep as he could go, coming, spilling himself inside me as I clung to him, writhing around his impaling length.

I looked up at him through a haze of helpless pleasure, watching the great muscles of his shoulders and powerful arms as he strained for his pleasure. Riding the hot pulses of delight spilling through me, blinding and intense.

At last it was over. I hung limp in Paladin’s arms, his cock still buried inside me, his hands gripping my thighs. “Elder gods,” he moaned, and his knees gave way.

I yipped in alarm, but his magic caught us as we fell. Arms wrapped around each other, we floated above the ground, suspended in dancing sparks.

Drifting
.

Chapter Four

 

I woke panting raggedly from the erotic dream. My body seemed to reverberate from the echoes of my climax. I could feel how wet I still was. No surprise. I’d had a love of bondage from the time I’d found some of the kinkier romances in my aunt’s bookstore. Then I’d gone to college and discovered BDSM novels. Paladin’s palm was soon pounding my ass in D-battery powered fantasies.

There was something about the idea of being draped over his knee that lit up my libido. Which was just wrong. Good little post-feminists weren’t supposed to have a submissive streak.

For a moment I floated in the delicious memory of being tied up while Paladin fucked my brains out.

Yet something was a little off, disturbing my pleasant fantasies -- light. Far brighter light than the fairy lights in the canopy, blazing beyond my closed eyes with a golden glow like firelight. I peeled my eyelids up and blinked, focusing on the bed a foot or so from my face as I lay on my belly. No. Not on my belly.

On nothing at all.

I hung in midair, tangled in the canopy, supported only by a swirl of sparks that flowed around me. I jerked in surprise with a startled squawk. And dropped, hitting the mattress hard enough to bounce.

Rolling off the bed, I backed away, clawing my peacock-tipped hair out of my face. “What the fuck?”

I’d been levitating. Like in the first Ghostbusters movie, the one with Bill Murray’s line about Sigourney Weaver sleeping four feet above her covers.

Holy shit
.

My first instinct was to believe this was yet another sleepwalking incident, but it hadn’t felt like that. It had seemed real. Impossibly real, river of sparks notwithstanding. And yet it couldn’t be.


Am I going nuts
?” I’d lost count of how many times I’d wondered about that tonight. Not a good sign.

Paladin, for once, kept his mouth shut.

I tossed and turned for what was left of the night, unable to get back to sleep. My mind ground away at all the weird shit tonight. The inexplicable fight with the Dimwit Posse, the damage I’d done, how close I’d come to dying…

If I hadn’t broken the knife guy’s arm -- however I’d done it -- if Asshat hadn’t missed…

Did Asshat miss
? I’d seen the blue flash as sparks danced around my fingertips…

Say it with me: “
There’s no such thing as magic
.”


Right
?”

I looked out my bedroom window and realized it was barely dawn. Oh hell. It was hours before I needed to get to work, but I was damned if I’d spend the time slowly driving myself crazy thinking about everything I couldn’t explain.

I desperately needed to go work out.

After my mom’s death, my aunt took me to a psychiatrist for the amnesia. He told me once that exercise is often better than drugs when it came to treating stress and depression. I didn’t want the drugs, so I made a habit of hitting the gym. Turned out he’d been right. I’d worked out ever since.

Besides, my job was more than a little sedentary. The gym was the only way to control the acreage of my ass.

Luckily, the gym I belonged to was one of those 24/7 operations for those with a need to pump iron at three in the morning. It was 7 AM by the time I got there, but there were a surprising number of gym rats trying to get in a workout before heading to their jobs.

Tony’s Gym was an enormous space, with rows of treadmills, Stair Masters, and stationary bikes, many with people already huffing away on them. Across the room from the cardio equipment stood the weight machines, with their stacked metal plates and complicated arrangements of belts and counterweights. Huge mirrors covered the walls, interspaced with posters of various fitness gods with biceps bigger than bowling balls.

I exchanged a wave with my personal trainer, Jeff Mathers, who was busy with one of his other clients. The amateur bodybuilder groaned as he did arm curls with every plate on the machine.

I straddled one of the recumbent bikes and started to pedal as if trying to win the Tour de France. The bike faced one of the mirrors, and I barely resisted the urge to stick my tongue out at it. Sometimes my inner twelve-year-old makes a break for it.

As I pedaled, I realized I was being stared at by a man who’d just walked in. I didn’t recognize him, but I wished I had. He was a big, dark haired guy, with the build you’d expect from someone who hits the gym at seven in the morning. His T-shirt stretched lovingly across powerful shoulders and the kind of biceps I’d written odes to when describing Paladin. Not muscle-bound, but lean enough to assume any position a girl had in mind. And I could think of several.

I heard Paladin growl.


You are a figment of my imagination
,” I reminded Paladin.


I’ll show you a figment
.” The growl became a snarl. “
I’ll figment his ass into the middle of next week
.”

The hunk sauntered over and swung one of those long, brawny legs over the stationary bike beside mine. His face was as lust-inspiring as his body, with prominent cheekbones, a broad angular jaw, and a wide, sensual mouth with a certain cruelty about its curve.


Quit leering at the man, Summer
,” Paladin ordered. And yep, he did sound jealous as hell. Which made me ridiculously happy.

At least the guy next to me was real, damn it.

So I turned my head to give my fellow spinner a big smile, and realized he was staring back. Unfortunately, his expression was more Jeffrey Dahmer than Chris Hemsworth. He looked as if he was wondering how my liver would taste with a nice chianti. I looked away in a hurry.

He didn’t.

I could feel him staring at me with a cold, reptilian focus. Jesus, why did every male I encounter lately want to kill me? What happened to dinner and a movie? Was it my toothpaste? Had someone switched my perfume for Eau d’ Psycho?

I ignored him some more. He kept visibly fantasizing about me and basements.

BOOK: Paladin (Graven Gods 1)
11.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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