WindBeliever (29 page)

“So Paegan said.” He nudged Sajin with his foot. “Why haven’t you courted her if she’s so pretty.”

“She’s too young. I’m old enough to be her father.”

“So you think this Guil will give us some competition, huh?” Conar asked, wanting to take the heavy scowl from the Kensetti’s face.

“Yes, but we’ll have to watch that snake in the grass, Rasheed, while the other of us is jousting with the man.”

“You expect cheating from the man?”

“I both expect it and anticipate it,” Sajin snarled. “He’s a fair enough fighter, but when he feels he’s losing, he doesn’t let something like honor and chivalry stand in his way.”

“I take it you’ve fought him before,” Conar quipped.

“Yes, and it was only by the luck of the Prophetess that I didn’t have my head struck from my body.” He narrowed his eyes. “Hasdus are a vicious breed of desert rat.”

Conar nodded. “I know from experience that they are.” A memory stirred, surfaced, and he put a hand out to grip Sajin’s arm. “Do you know of a man named Jaleel Jaborn?”

Sajin turned, his face showing his curiosity. “Where have you heard of him?”

“Do you know of him?” Conar asked. He wasn’t at that moment prepared to explain how he knew of the man.

“He’s a Rysalian from the middle province of Dahrenia. Why?”

“Do you think he will come?” Conar’s eyes bored into the other man.

“No. He already has more wives than he knows what to do with.” Sajin grinned. “As a matter of fact, he stays gone from his fortress at Abbadon as much as his uncle, the Sheik Ali Jaborn, will allow. I am told he travels outside our own part of the world whenever the mood strikes him and has women from nearly every country in his harem.”

Conar scowled. “That’s a lot of women.”

Sajin laughed. “He thinks he can handle them.”

“What’s he like?”

“Jaleel? As close to a scorpion as any man can come. They say he murdered his own father and talked his mother’s sister into murdering her husband.”

“Using Maiden’s Briar,” Conar mumbled.

“You’ve heard the tale?” Sajin shivered. “A horrible way to die having a woman you trust slather poison on your cock, I’d think.”

“Do you know why he would have done that?”

Sajin glanced up as a hawk spiraled toward the flapping pennants of the Steffensberg family and then arched away, cawing out its greeting to him.

“It is rumored Jaleel was engaged to marry a Venturian Princess, his first cousin, actually, but before the contracts could be signed between them, her father contracted her to another, more powerful man. I understand her mother was furious and Jaleel was at his uncle’s feet begging Rysalia to declare war on Ventura.” Sajin shrugged. “Which the Sheik was more than willing to do. The two provinces have been at war ever since.”

Conar tightened his grip on Sajin’s arm. “Who was the woman he wanted to marry?”

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Sajin shook his head. “I don’t remember much of it, but I can find out.” He looked closely at his companion. “Why is it so important to you?”

Conar let go of Sajin’s arm. “Let’s just say I have my reasons.”

“I’ll see what I can find out.”

The Serenian prince stared blindly down at the dwindling parade of tourney warriors.

He wished with his entire being Jaleel Jaborn was among them.

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His tongue flicked lightly over her nipple and then spiraled around the dusky tip. He laughed deep in his throat when her hands tightened in his hair and pushed his questing lips closer to her breast. Drawing back his lips, he caught the erection of her nipple between his teeth and gently worked it, smiling to himself as she writhed beneath him, her back arching slightly from the mattress. Her fingers tugged at his hair, her nails grazing his scalp and his bite increased just enough to still her hands. He pulled his head up and looked at her.

“Don’t stop,” she gasped, dragging an excited breath into her heaving lungs. “Please, don’t stop!”

He shifted atop her, settling himself closer against the apex of her legs, his manhood stiff and probing at the core of her. Her groan brought another low chuckle and he swooped down to claim the pulsing flesh at the base of her neck with his mouth.

“Ah ...” he heard her groan as she ground herself against him. He could almost feel the moisture invading her vagina as he wriggled his hips against her.

Once more her hands threaded their strength through his lush mane and pulled.

“You were told not to do that,” he warned her as he sank his teeth none-too gently into the column of her throat.

“Don’t!” she hissed, feeling the pain. Withdrawing her hands from his scalp, she encircled his shoulders with her arms and pressed herself tighter to her lover. “Lick me,” she ordered.

He pushed himself away from her and stared down into her love-dampened face. One thick brow crooked and then he slid down her body until his face was at the triangular thatch of dark hair between her legs. Like a diving hawk, he pressed his mouth to her nether lips and swept his hot tongue over her pulsing flesh.

“Yes!” she moaned, bringing her hips up. She felt his hands slide beneath her buttocks to lift her higher and she drew in a quick breath, the tremors of passion settling like a heavy twist in her lower belly.

She tasted sweet to him and the musky, lusty scent of her filled his nostrils and he breathed deep, aroused by the smell. His tongue slid across her, into her, along the rough edges of her vaginal lips and then flicked with unerring aim at the very center of her passion.

“Oh!” she gasped as she began to lift her hips in a rhythmic upward lunge. His fingers dug into the tender flesh of her rump and she gloried in the slight pain the grip brought.

The bud of her sexual pleasure was a hard little nub of pulsing awareness to him. Even as he swathed her slit with his tongue, his teeth nibbled delicately on the stiff protrusion. He knew the feeling was driving her mad with desire for he could hear her panting, cast his eyes upward to see her gripping her pillow to either side of her head.

She groaned as he slipped one hand from beneath her and insinuated it between her thighs.

Holding her breath, expecting his next move, she nearly swooned as he deftly parted her and drove his questing fingers deep inside, pushing them so painfully tight up inside her she flinched.

When he began to move his fingers apart, twist them inside her, she brought the edges of the pillow over her head to shut out her cries of ecstasy. Between the press of his finger, the flick of his tongue and the bite of his teeth, she came in a bright burst of soul-shattering pleasure that brought her hips off the bed and her hot womanhood hard against his conquering mouth.

Deep inside her heat, he felt the contractions that signaled her release. He drove his fingers deeper, grinning as he heard her moan with the pain of it, and laughed as one final spasm ended and she dropped her hips back to the bed with a grunt of fatigue, all passion drained from her.

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Without giving her time to think, to react, to deny him, he was up on his knees and flipped her over to her belly, dragging her hips up until she was poised on her knees on the bed. Even as she cried out in denial, he rammed his fully erect and pulsing sword into her from behind and rammed home with enough force to make her strike the top of her head on the hard surface of the head board. It took him five strokes, hard and unrelenting jabs into her soft body, until the seed shot from him in a thick, pulsing stream. With one final thrust, one last arching of his hips toward her, he pulled out, laughing at her gasp of both pain and disappointment, and rolled over to his back, panting.

“You bastard,” she said.

“After all these years you know how I like my women, Sybelle,” he answered in a bored voice.

“What you do hurts me,” she grumbled.

“It is meant to.”

Sybelle turned over and pushed herself up in the bed, leaned back against the head board and turned to look at him. His face was sweaty and the vein along the side of his neck was still throbbing heavily, but other than those two tell-tale signs, the man might have just been lying there in bed resting.

“Do you not receive pleasure from the act of love making, Jaleel?” she asked him, suspecting that he did not.

Prince Jaleel Jaborn blew out a long breath to let her know her question annoyed him. “Sex relieves tension, Sybelle. I do not engage in it for any other reason except to impregnate one or more of my wives.” He yawned.

“Besides, what are you complaining about? You derive pleasure from what I do to you. I don’t ever send you from my bed wanting, do I?”

“Would you care if I were satisfied or not?” she snapped.

“No.”

“It is the control, isn’t it?” she asked, watching his eyes close as he began to drift off. “You enjoy controlling people.”

“True,” he answered looking up at her, “but you enjoy me controlling you, don’t you?”

She jerked her gaze from his handsome face. This has been going on for far too long, she thought for not the first time. From somewhere she had to gather the strength to break off her affair with the Dahrenian prince. It was a destructive affair, one whose intimate bouts such as had just happened, more often left her disgusted with herself than satisfied. Idly, she wondered what was wrong with her, what part of her had mutated in childhood that would cause her to need the abuse Jaleel heaped upon her.

“They tell me the Serenian King is here,” Jaleel remarked, drawing her immediate attention.

“Conar McGregor,” she answered. “But I am told he has abolished the monarchy in his homeland.”

A snort of derision came from the man beside her. “You may discard the crown of King, but that does not make you any the less the one meant to wear it. McGregor knows that. He may have his people call him what they will, but he intends to sit the throne as monarch just the same.”

Sybelle shook her head. “He isn’t like what we have been told, Jaleel.”

He turned to stare at her. “How is he different?”

“He’s of the Power,” she whispered.

Jaleel’s lips twisted. “I know that.” He fanned a dismissive hand. “But that power was largely WINDBELIEVER

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channeled through his late wife and with her passing, he can do minimal damage.”

“I don’t know,” Sybelle answered. “He had no problem reading my thoughts.”

“Parlor tricks,” Jaleel scoffed. “I can read your thoughts, wench.”

“He’s dangerous, Jaleel,” she warned her lover of twenty-eight years. “I would not like to make an enemy of him.”

Jaleel Jaborn laughed. “I already have!”

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Rupert Von Schlesendorf stared at the man who unseated him. He had expected as much, had known he would be no match for that man as soon as he had strutted out onto the tourney grounds, but what he had not expected was to be unseated at the very first pass.

“Are you hurt?”

Rupert shook his head and accepted the hand that was thrust toward him to help him to his feet. “My thanks, sir,” the squat little man said.

“I hear you write sonnets.”

Bright gray eyes turned even brighter in a pudgy little quiver of rosy-red cheeks and crooked white teeth.

“Indeed, I do!” Rupert answered, suspecting the man looking down at his five foot four inch frame wasn’t going to be an enemy. “I don’t suppose you partake of the art?”

“I helped write a limerick once, but that was the extent of my trying.”

Von Schlesendorf’s face lit up. “A dirty limerick, I hope!” he told the blond-haired warrior who was grinning down at him.

“My bride’s parents took especial dislike to the ditty,” Conar answered.

Rupert chuckled, setting is jowls to wobbling. “You will have to tell it to me sometime, Lord

....?”

“Conar. Conar McGregor.”

The smile slid from the squat man’s face and he swallowed hard before stammering out his question. “Ah,
the
Conar McGregor?”

“Just Conar McGregor, Rupert.” Peter Steffensberg laughed as he joined the men. “Call him anything else and he’s liable to bite your head off.”

“And he could!” Von Schlesendorf agreed. He stuck out his hand. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Prince Conar.”

“Just Conar,” the Serenian echoed as he gripped the man’s wrist.

“Oh, you will make Catherine a fine husband!” Rupert prophesied. “I had no idea the invitations had been so widely distributed beyond our own little corner of the world.” He glanced around. “Are there more of you Outlanders lurking about?”

Conar chuckled. “There’s another Serenian here, but I don’t believe he’ll be trying for Cat’s hand.”

“You’ve another opponent in fifteen minutes, Conar,” Peter reminded him. “Perhaps you’d like to watch Sajin jousting with Alexi Barishnakov?”

“Boring,” Rupert pronounced. “We know who’ll win that.” He lowered his voice. “What I want to see is the match between the famous Lord Hawk and Prince Guil of Rysalia.”

“Lord Hawk?” Conar questioned.

“You have not heard of him?” Rupert gasped, looking at Peter with astonishment. “No one has told him of our infamous Lord Hawk?”

Peter blushed. “There hadn’t been any occasion to bring it up and ....”

“My dear fellow!” Rupert exclaimed, dragging Conar’s arm to him and holding on as he began to walk toward the lists where Sajin Ben-Alkazar and the Outer Kingdom Earl were about to duel. “Let me tell you about the man!”

From across the span of the field, Prince Guil and his boyhood friend, Jaleel Jaborn, watched the fat little Outer Kingdom troll walking with their enemy.

“You have taken a great chance in coming here, Jaleel,” Guil complained, glancing up at his WINDBELIEVER

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friend whose face was shrouded behind the flap of his headpiece. Only the man’s wicked black eyes and thick eyebrows could be seen.