The Cherished One (12 page)

“Better than men by a long shot, buddy.”

“Don’t delude yourself, Fawna.  But that’s an argument for another day.  You’ve pickled yourself to the point that you’re almost ready to drop.”  His voice lowered several octaves as he whispered in her mental ear, “Don’t stay away too long, bebe.  I miss you.”

Fawna allowed herself to physically preen at that last compliment. Well, perhaps “allow” wasn’t the right word, because she was too far gone to have prevented it.  Her smile was as broad as her entire face, and her whole body glowed, and Max felt every bit of it, just before he withdrew. 

She stretched completely, from stem to stern, then hugged herself tight, as he would, if he were there.

To which “he” she was referring, she had to admit, she wasn’t at all sure.

***

As it turned out, Fawna stayed three more days.  Max did not visit her again, on any level, but she would have sworn she could feel his impatience growing each day that she didn’t return home.  It was a tickle, in the back of her mind.  An itch, of sorts, as if he was trying to coax her out of her lair.

And when she did decide to leave, of course she couldn’t go back to the apartment she’d shared with Dag, she just couldn’t, so, she went to the palace her Mother and brother shared, knowing she’d be welcomed home with open arms, even if it was just for a transitional period until she could get another apartment for herself.

Her mother greeted her as if she’d come back from the dead, not only looking her over as if she was a piece of horseflesh she was contemplating buying, but physically running her hands over her daughter and even moving her hair back away from her neck and inspecting the bites on her neck, trying to decide if she’d been bitten again.  “Did he hurt you, baby?  Did that awful vampire hurt you in any way?”

Too many ways to count, Momma, too many ways to count, Fawna thought, but kept it to herself. And to which vampire was it that you were referring, exactly, she thought, but definitely didn’t say.  She had forgotten to take into account that Max was on the receiving end of both of these thoughts.

Momma had liked Dag, as much as any faerie of her era could like a vampire.  She had said it often enough - at least Fawna had waited until after her father had died to become involved with a bloodsucker.

“I’m fine, Momma, really.”  She knew she’d be doing some sort of karmic penance for the lie, but that was okay with her if it soothed her mother’s conscience.  The older woman worried entirely too much, and the past couple of weeks had been very hard on her.  Fawna dropped her bag onto the table in the Italian marble foyer.  “Did Max tell you that I was all right?”

Lilliana rolled her eyes in disgust.  “Oh, him!  He did, but I take everything that .  .  . man .  .  . says with a big grain of salt.  I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him.  He’s already hurt you once, hasn’t he?”  That was the end of it for her Mother.  The bite marks on her neck would forever damn Max, even if he saved the lives of a busload full of cancer ridden, handicapped nuns by selflessly throwing himself on a terrorist bomb, he’d still have two strikes against him, as far as she was concerned, because he’d hurt her baby girl.

As much as she didn’t necessarily want to find herself defending him, she had done a lot of thinking about him during her time alone, and she’d come to some conclusions about Max.  “I think he’s trying to change, Momma.”  There.  She’d said it out loud, and not just thought it to herself.  That made it real.  She’d been thinking about it for a while, since he’d left, and it was the only thing that made sense.

“Yeah, your brother told me some balderdash story about how he wrestled your Daddy’s sword away from him in the woods …”

Fawna sank into the only chair available, her face white with shock.  “What happened?”

Dain strode into the room at that point and finished the tale himself.  “He took it from me fair and square, the bastard.  Had it right up against my chin.  Could have run me through at any second.  Chopped my head clean off without a thought.  Hell, he could have bled me dry as soon as look at me. But he didn’t.  He turned the hilt to me and bowed, as if I was going to knight him or something.  He said he was doing it in your honor.  And then, it was the strangest thing, a few minutes later, before we’d made it out of the woods, he got this huge grin on his face.  And it looked so out of place because that man isn’t the type to go around smiling.  But he said it was because he knew somehow that you liked him.”

Fawna, if it was at all possible, turned paler than she had been before.  That must’ve been the moment when she realized she’d missed him.  Damn him and his invasion of her mind!

Dain squatted in front of her, looking up at her.  “So, what’s the story with him, honey?  Is he on the up and up?  Has he turned over a new leaf for love of you?”

Fawna snorted.  “Hardly.  Well... I don’t think so.  He may have turned over a new leaf, but I highly doubt it’s for love of me.  He’s the one who’s trying to off me, remember?”

“Well, he must’ve had ample opportunity while you were cooped up together, and here you are...”

“Yeah.”  The truth was that Fawna really didn’t know what to make of Max’s behavior any more than Dain did.  She’d tried to sort it out – both his behavior and her own.  She knew she didn’t want him hurt, but beyond that, she really wasn’t sure.  The only thing she did know for sure was that she was damned sick and tired of thinking about all of it – every last bit of it.  Dag and Max and Dain and herself – the whole lot of them. “I don’t really want to talk about it right now.”

Dain stood immediately.  “Is there something I need to know about, Fawna?  ‘Cause I’ll go kick his ass if he hurt you.  You just say the word.”

“That’s the problem, Dain.  There’s just too many people that are too eager to go kicking each other’s ass, and killing each other’s women.  It’s just weak, Dain.  It’s weak.  And I mean that in the real sense of the word, not the slang.  Think before you act.  You’re a king.  You have lives depending on you.  Think.  Vengeance is not pretty.  Don’t be so eager to go down that road.  It’s a waste of life on every level.”  With that, she picked up her bag and headed towards her room.

***

Fawna was surprised at the restraint Max showed.  She knew that he must’ve sensed that she was no longer at the haven in the woods, but he didn’t invade her thoughts again at all, at least that she was able to detect... at least not while she was conscious.

Now, while she was sleeping was apparently an entirely different matter.  He seemed to have absolutely no compunction about invading her dreams.  She wondered at the fact he’d kept his mind pretty much to himself once he’d left the forest, but when she got home, he’d decided to amend his hands off approach and had taken to coming to her in her dreams.

And oh, what dreams they were!

Fawna had always had a very active dream life.  She could remember a lot of them, even from as far back as her childhood.  She had had a lot of nightmares as a child, but grew out of them and rarely had them as an adult.  Most of her dreams were pleasant, some even funny.  Most were task oriented; there was something she, or a group of people within the dream, needed to accomplish, usually.  Sometimes it was as trivial as a shopping expedition – usually for shoes - sometimes it was saving a town from the Nazis.

For someone who was, admittedly, a relatively sexual person, she didn’t have sex dreams very often, even during those times when she found herself without a lover.

Until now.

Max brought sex into her dreams with a vengeance, and with them, discipline.  Starring himself, of course.  He was very thoughtful, though, and didn’t occupy her whole night, but she could count on the fact, at least once a night, she was going to have a dream about him.  Only it really didn’t feel like a dream at the time.  It felt like it was really happening, and, at times she began to really question whether it actually did happen, and towards the end of the week, that was beginning to make her question her own sanity.

The first night that she was home, it was a very sweet dream, almost a welcome home.  He brought her to a place she didn’t recognize, but that she had a hunch might be his house.  The demeanor of it fit him, but she wished it didn’t.  It was a large grey mansion, isolated and dour and, frankly, unwelcoming.  She didn’t get to see much of it, because the only room he brought her to was a bedroom, but it wasn’t even his bedroom.  Fawna had the idea that he had it created and decorated just for her.  She didn’t think it was a room that he actually used.  It didn’t fit what she thought the décor of the rest of the house was – it fit what she thought he thought she would probably like and be comfortable with.

It was filled with lavender and pink roses, and the room was decorated in those colors also. It did, perhaps, have small touches of himself here and there in the warmth and quality of the mahogany furnishings.  It almost seemed like it had elements of an eighteenth century drawing room.  There was a roaring fire in the fireplace, and a big comfy overstuffed wing backed chair in front of it, as well as a very large, lace canopied bed that they never even got to that first night.

She found herself naked – she never seemed to have any clothes on in these dreams with him - in his arms in the chair in front of the fire, and all he did was stare at her and hold her, as if he couldn’t get enough of just the sight of her.

He, of course, was in his usual black shirt and black pants.  Somehow, being naked while he was clothed made her shiver in his arms, and the sound of his chuckle reverberated in her ear.

“I like it when you shiver,” Max whispered into that tiny shell of an ear, which only made her do it again.

When he kissed her for the first time in her dreams, it almost woke her up, it was so shocking, every part of her body contracted and arched almost uncomfortably.  That was partly because he did it powerfully, taking her in hand and not allowing he to avoid the kiss at all, holding her head still, claiming her mouth as his, not quite roughly, but in a manner that brooked no possible defiance.

It was a dream, and she felt free to melt against him, which she did without hesitation, looping her arms around his head, losing her fingers in that mane of black hair as he ravaged her mouth and then went on to plunder her breasts.

Dear God, she could barely breath with his lips and tongue constantly flicking and drawing out those eager buds till they ached with pleasure, only to nip strongly at them, as if to dampen her pleasure just slightly, to tamp it down just a bit and not allow her to run headlong towards a fulfillment that he intended to control entirely, a thought which he broadcast to her quite deliberately, betting that it would add to her desire, however much she might protest that it wouldn’t possibly, in polite company.

And, of course, it did.  It had her positively mewling, and he reveled in that sound.  He’d found his match.  He adored controlling her, and she adored being controlled.  A match made... well, definitely not in Heaven, considering what his existence had been like for the past several millennia, but somewhere really good.

It had been too long since she’d been in his arms.  Despite the fact this was new, and it hadn’t been more than a few days, really, but as far as he was concerned, any time without her was too long, and he didn’t want to wait any longer.  He’d been without a woman for centuries, and he found himself much less willing to wait than he had been in the past.

Still, he didn’t undress.  He liked how blatantly she’d responded to being nude while he was clothed, so he merely made some small adjustments and freed himself, then arranged her so that she was sitting astride him, but he kept himself away from her, for the time being, smiling at the way her lower lip protruded in a pout. 

Before he brought them together, Max ran his hand over her as she sat there before him, proudly nude, breasts tip tilted and heaving, blushing a gorgeous frosted rose hue all over her body which he followed with his fingertips from her collar bone, down over each of those beautiful mounds to each swollen, well loved tip, then carefully not forgetting the underside of each breast which he found was a generally forgotten area but also very sensitive.

Fawna’s head fell back at the sensations he was causing, making her body arch dramatically, presenting itself to him just that much more so.   Those insistent tips had been traveling right to that spot between her legs that was probably dripping down onto him right now, and she wanted to close her legs in embarrassment, but of course she couldn’t, and that only made her blush just that much worse.

Then his fingers began to move again, and she groaned aloud, knowing she was doing it alone in the night, in her bedroom, that she was literally writhing in her bed as she was writhing on top of him in her dream.

Those fingertips – callused, she noticed, and wondered fleetingly from what a vampire got calluses – trailed down her tummy slowly, excruciatingly slow and stopped, just above the area where she desperately wanted them to venture boldly forth.

“Fawna, look at me.”

Even in her dreams, she was embarrassed and reluctant to do so.  She’d never lost her virginal modesties, and this was one of them, but her desires overrode her shyness, and her eyes made their way to his.

When their eyes finally met, two of his fingers delved into her cleft, and she couldn’t help but grab for the stability of his broad shoulders as her knees literally went weak.  He was gratified to find that she was again, dripping with tribute, with which he bathed his fingers and then her clit, rubbing it relentlessly, and thoroughly enjoying the way she moaned and writhed, trying to ride his hand to a completion that he wasn’t about to allow just yet.

When he withdrew his hand, she made a grab for it with a growl, earning herself a flurry of crisp smacks to her bottom.  “Who decides when you climax, Fawna?”

He heard her quickly indrawn breath, and knew he’d hit another mother load of desire.  “You do,” she whispered.

“Damn right.  Next time you reach for my hand like that, I’ll spank you here,” he clutched her privates, “instead of here,” he squeezed a reddened bottom cheek.  For a moment, he thought of spanking her and fondling her at the same time, driving her to an orgasm that was part pleasure, part pain, but then he decided that that was better left for another time, and he began stroking her again, distracting her from the fire he’d just set in her rear.