Steel Dominance (17 page)

Now why was he thinking that? Marriage was for the birds. That was almost his motto. Her other words ran past him. Her slipup that she’d meant to conceal. He wrapped a curl of her hair around his finger and tugged. “So, what then is the second big secret?”

Her blush would have rivaled the redness of her ass.

“Nothing.” The bubbles on the water apparently fascinated her.

“Sofia.” He tugged on the curl again.

“No.”

“No?” Her head shaking might cause her head to topple if it kept up, so he tightened his grip until she ceased, then made her look up. “I wonder how long it will take me to drag this secret from you?” Her look of horror made him laugh.

“I’m not ever
ever
going to tell you. Now, enough about me. What about you. Your past?”

A chunk of pastry plopped into the bath water, and she fished about looking for it.

So determined not to tell him? Perhaps he could make her, perhaps not. This seemed more a personal embarrassment than a state secret. He grimaced at the memory of Claire’s secret. That had been an entirely other class of secret—a disaster label would have suited it.

No, his little Sofia was just appalled. He’d wait. Pry it out of her slowly, carefully, if he had to. Some secrets hurt coming out, like a splinter wedged deep in your foot. “Eat some dessert, and I’ll start talking.”

When she put a piece of the pastry in her mouth, he let go of her hair. Her nipple peeked through the bubbles. Tempting. He teased it with finger and thumb, and she hummed in appreciation. “Don’t stop eating, Sofia, or I’ll make you talk about that secret.”

“Hmph!” But she took another bite and a sip of wine. Under the water, her ass rested against the side of his thigh, and her legs, with knees bent, went over the top of his other leg.

While he talked, he played with her nipple some more.

“I think I told you that I have been protecting or under the command of Theo Kevonis since soon after I arrived in London about fifteen years ago?”

“Yes.” She drove her finger around the surface bubbles, popping them. “It was that simple?”

“Indeed. When I met him, I knew he was a man I wanted in my life.” Time hiccuped as his mind presented him front and center with a matching thought.
Just as you are the woman for me.

He sat back until he bumped the porcelain of the bath.
Hell and damnation. Can this be true? I need to think about this more—later, though
. He inhaled deeply and reassembled his purpose. “I was honored when he accepted me into his command.”

Sofia eyed her nipple and his fingers toying with it. She touched her lip with her tongue tip and squirmed. “Umm…before that? Did you say you came across the mountains?”

“Have some more wine.”

“You’re making me all bothered, doing that.”

“Good.” He raised a brow. “Move your legs apart, and I’ll keep talking.”

The indignant huff made
not
smiling difficult. He managed. When the water rippled from her legs moving, he submerged his hand and found the apex of her legs, then curled his fingers into her cleft.

Eyes half-closed, lips parting, she squeezed his hand with her thighs. “I have to sit still for this? To get you to tell me your past? Seems unequal.”

This time the smile spread too fast for him to stop it. “If you’re too tired, say, and I’ll stop.” While she decided, he stroked up and down her slit. The different, slipperier moisture of her pussy met his fingertip.

“Uh.” She wriggled. “Keep going. I’ll survive.”

“I thought so.” He found her clit and slowly circled it. Under the water, he felt it stand up harder every second.

“God.” Her head relaxed back, and she slid down into the water a few inches as her back arched. “That is
good
. Your childhood, then.”

Even with him playing down there she asked him? He gave in and filled her in on events in Greater Asia before the monarchy took control. The food riots, the starvation, the dead in the streets. His parents had been interned for being in the wrong subnational ethnic variety. He’d escaped over the mountains with a group of other young people of similar mind. His parents had died a year later, before he could figure how to get them out.

“Oh.” Sofia tensed and frowned, and then he felt her hand rub up and down the back of his arm. “I’m sorry.”

He paused, hand still in her crotch, but the urge to bring her to orgasm was fading. “It was a long time ago. I’m over it. I haven’t forgotten, but I no longer let it bother me.”

“Ah.” She nodded, screwed up her mouth. “You said not all of you made it over the mountains?”

Ah
. She’d hit unerringly, the one place that still hurt.

“Yes. Some good friends died. That, I still try not to remember.”

“Sorry.” She patted him again, leaned in and hugged him around the shoulders, then yawned. “Maybe we should just sleep?”

The past had killed his idea of seducing Sofia. Those memories never went away easily.

While he dried her with one of the big green towels, she apologized again.

“It’s okay.” He wrapped the soft towel around her, pulled her into him, and kissed her hair. “You didn’t know.”

After he got her to lie on her stomach on the bed, he examined her rear end again. Nothing to worry about there. A perfect cute bottom. He found some light oil and started a massage from her feet up—poking between her toes, kneading the muscles of her calves, her thighs, her buttocks, and then her back. Her groans of utter pleasure slowly turned into the soft breaths of the sleeping. He lay down beside her, observing the quiet rise and fall of her chest, before he rearranged a few strands of her hair, then pulled the sheet over them both.

Having to sleep beside this woman seemed a strange sort of magic. Gradually Sofia was enticing him out of his shell. He knew it, he felt it. Though it worried him, it also pleased her. He could stand a little change for this reward.

As he too fell into the land of dreams, his past swept over him. The sea of snow poured down the slope, engulfing Xiang—it never became less frightening. His palms sweated. His heart pounded. Dead and buried in seconds. The armed patrol following on their heels had left no opportunity to try digging her out, even if they could have found her body.

Of them all,
she
had meant the most. Not his lover, but close. Perhaps, in time, they would have shared a bed.

When they’d set out to escape, she’d clutched at his arm, and asked if he would protect her because she was frightened.

Yes, with my very life.

When he closed his eyes, sometimes he would hear her ask that question again, over and over. The horror of his failure had never left him and crept across his skin most nights, soaking him with sorrow and self-loathing.

Blackness rolled over his last thoughts. Would she come to him in his sleep? He turned over and tried to relax into the pillow.
Farewell, Xiang
. She would ever haunt his dreams and his nightmares.

* * * *

It had been some time since he’d woken up next to a woman and had the leisure time to appreciate it. Once he’d used his foot to gently shift the sheet down to past her ass, he spent a long while watching Sofia. With the side of her head on the pillow and sunlight from the courtyard window haloing across her hair, she looked like an angel.

When one eye peeped open, a smile curved her full lips. “Hi.”

“Hello, my lady. I like that smile.” He traced her lips with his thumb, marveling at her softness. “Women are so round and easy to look at compared to a man.”

“Oh? And you have such a lovely deep voice and”—she laid her palm on his chest, then one side of her mouth curved up even more—“squishy muscles.”

It took him a moment.
What did she just say?
Then he choked back a laugh, wound his hand in her hair, and slid her across the pillow until their noses touched. “Squishy? I think you just stepped off a cliff, my lady.”

The chortle she let out made him realize how much he loved this silly side of her. And it gave him so many good reasons to smack her ass again. In one flowing move, he rose, hopped off the bed, then grabbed her ankles. He flipped her onto her stomach despite her squeals, and dragged her closer to the edge.

After one firm wallop on her backside, he sat on her ass and tickled her under her arms and down her sides.

“Dankyo!” She wiggled and tried to get free. Her flailing arms got captured quickly and held at her back. Which made her squeal even louder.

Yes
. He grinned. “Ticklish, are we? So do I have squishy muscles?”

“You do! You do!” She gasped, and the giggles burst into half-choked cries. “No! Stop! Stop! You’re not squishy.”

He stopped.

After a last giggle, she sighed. “You’re nice and hard and muscly—just the way I like my men, all my many, many lovers.” Another giggle erupted.

He leaned in, squashing her down, covering her back with his heavy body, then took a good mouthful of the side of her neck and bit. “Bad woman. I know you are exaggerating.”

Chapter Fifteen

Sofia shuddered. After he’d bitten her neck, Dankyo had casually shifted back along her body, spread her legs, and put his cock to her entrance. She tilted her bottom up and wriggled to entice him in.

“In my own time.”

She heard the sound of a drawer opening and closing, and then a condom wrapper.

With his hands on either side of her, he slowly pushed into her.

Nerves buzzed to life inside her channel, and her clit sat up and took notice. But, too slow. Frustrated, she rubbed her groin into the bed.

“Uh-uh. No.” Dankyo put both hands to her back with his thumbs on her lower spine. “Stay still.” Then he resumed his slow thrust and withdrawal.

Frowning, she slumped, face burrowed into the sheets. Couldn’t he see she needed and wanted force? At last she whispered, “Faster.”

“Faster? I think I’ll introduce you to something of Henry’s I’ve borrowed. Though first…” He withdrew from her, pulled something else from the drawer, and tied her hands at her back.

The snug feel of soft rope somehow calmed her. She waited, happy, with her head on the side on the cool sheets, until a flicker of blue flashed. Something crackled and snapped like a dying voltaic lamp.

Alarmed, she strained to look. In Dankyo’s hands, a long snub-nosed cylinder of steel and glass hummed and grumbled like a piece of machinery on the prowl. Little pieces of violet lightning snapped about inside the glass.

She tensed, drawing her neck back in an attempt to put distance between her and this
thing
. “What…is that?” she squeaked. “Is it safe?” Frantic, heart jumping, she looked from it to Dankyo and back again.

At a
click
, the lightning and noises died. “It’s safe.” A little devious smile possessed the corners of Dankyo’s mouth. “You’ll see. Eyes to the front, Sofia.”

After an unhappy grunt, she turned her head. “So this is like the ‘puzzle of the day’?”

“If it is, you’re good at those. What would you call this?”

The hardness of the device prodded coldly at her thighs for a second before the tip nuzzled her lower lips and slid in her juices to the apex of her legs until it nudged her clit. He held it there. There was a second click.

Something buzzed deep into her, engulfing her clit, widening the harmonic vibrations like the shock wave of an explosion, growling on top of her most sensitive part.

She screamed and shuddered, arching so tight her breasts lifted from the bed. She was hurtling full throttle toward an orgasm. Bliss rippled outward. Heat consumed her groin, and in seconds she was nearly
there.

Dankyo thrust himself high up inside her, and halted only when his flesh slapped into hers. Sensations cascaded—the sucking out of his cock, then the repeated slam of his body into hers. The feel of his long shaft curving up into her, tunneling in, while that
thing
ate away at her body and turned her into one humming buzzing
hot
creation…

Everything broke—thundering over her like some last huge wave roaring home. Nothing but pleasure existed. She gasped wide-mouthed, strained. Her pussy spasmed and unclenched. After a final strangled gasp, she crumpled onto the bed. The thing still buzzed at her clit. Oh God, such painful pleasure. She tried to roll to get away.

“Done. Already?” The thing landed heavily on the bed where he tossed it. “I see great possibilities for this gadget.”

Boneless and unable to move, she groaned as he drove into her again and again until he came. With his body jammed tight against her buttocks, Dankyo waited, recovering. He roved his hand up and down her side.

“So.” He sucked in a breath. “What might my lady have named this little machine?”

Face still buried in the sheet, and hazy from the after effects, she let out a small guttural noise.

Dankyo patted her. “I don’t think
nnerg
counts as a name. Perhaps later? Theo’s wife, Claire, called it a vibrator, though Henry prefers reciprocating sexual probe.”

The smug amusement in his tone made her fumble for a smart reply. But she was still tied up. Bad idea. She inhaled, then opened her eyes. “Untie me?”

“Indeed. Then breakfast. I’ll pick some clothes.”

She twisted to look at him and plead with her eyes. “Can I choose? Please?”

Slowly, face set, he shook his head. “No, while in Byzantium, you will allow me to have the pleasure of dressing you.”

Tricky man—he’d phrased that as both an order and a compliment. She couldn’t help smiling. Funny, but after all her protests at the airfield, she liked the idea of him dressing her. Except, God. What would he pick?

Chapter Sixteen

Gulls circled high among the clouds feathering the blue sky. At her back towered the stone and masonry buildings marking the river bank. Sofia waited with Dankyo a little behind the main crowd. There were hundreds here at the edge of the Bosporus—Byzantines in robes and turbans, tunics and pantaloons, and half as many foreigners in suits and dresses, with walking sticks and hats. Slaves too, and most were women. She watched them patiently attending their Masters. Soon the floating sidewalks would be done moving. The squeak of giant hinges and the rumbling of the engines powering the unfolding of the metal and timber decking drowned out all conversation.