Page 41 of Rogue Familiar

He looked serious, even grave, his expression set into intense lines and those black, black eyes staring into hers. Positioning himself at her entrance, he pressed slowly in, pausing at the resistance, assessing her expression, a question in his eyes.

“It’s been a very long time,” she explained, aware of how very tight she must feel. “Don’t stop.”

He breathed a ragged laugh. “Good, because stopping right now might kill me. Oh, Seliah…” Flexing his hips, he pushed in deeper, filling her, both of them sighing at the intimate connection of skin.

Their bodies joined to the hilt, Jadren began moving inside her, slowly at first, then increasing the pace as they found the right rhythm for them, a song shared by only the two of them. He leaned to the side, half turning her, so her right leg came over his hip and his face lay close beside hers on the pillow, dark eyes half closed in utter sensuality. She clutched at his shoulders, buffeted by the waves of intimate, erotic connection, needing to hold onto him. He wrapped an arm around her waist, anchoring her as the impending climax tossed her on tumultuous waves. Convulsing, she cried out throwing her head back. Jadren’s face contorted and he increased pace, breathing hard, then crying out also, his body pounding into hers with devastating results, prolonging her climax and unraveling her so she felt her edges blur and the world dissolve.

There was only him, inside and around her, his face softening, black eyes deep as luminous pools. She lay there, gazing at him, catching her breath as he did the same. He looked softer, sweeter, more vulnerable than she’d ever seen him, and he smiled slightly, a bare twitch of his lips, a hint of wistfulness, of some other emotion she couldn’t quite identify and thought likely he couldn’t either. “That was intense,” he said softly, stroking light fingers down her arm.

“Yes,” she answered quietly. Intense, yes, and intensely moving. The sheer bliss of being with him was one thing, but the devoted focus he gave to her, of seeing to her pleasure before his own, of how he stayed present, immersed in their bodies and how they moved together—it all rocked her, physically and beyond. She never wanted to lose him and, in that moment, if she could have wrapped him up and kept him from ever knowing that their bond could be severed, she would have.

It would be unfair to him, selfish and wrong, to keep the knowledge from him, but Jadren would seize on the severing to separate himself from her, and she couldn’t let him do that to either of them. They were alike in so many ways, connecting on a level she didn’t quite understand. Yes, the bond was there, her magic flowing into him in a slow trickle that felt like her love for him, her desire to nurture him, to care for him, to make him happy. Was this her familiar’s inclination toward the care and feeding of her wizard?

Or was it love? It felt like love, and she nearly said the words to him again. They crowded against her lips, wanting to fly to him, but she was too afraid of ruining the moment.

He pulled her close, snuggling her against him, their legs tangling together as he placed a soft kiss on her forehead. She sighed in utter bliss, wanting this, only this, to be with him, intimately entwined. The truth resonated in the depths of her being. Apart, they suffered. Together, they had this.

And she wanted exactly this, always.

~13~

Jadren was rattled.

Of course, the interior of his head wasn’t the most stable of places to begin with, and the recent sequence of events hadn’t done anything to improve his relative sanity. Nothing like having your brains literally scrambled to destroy any hope of rationality.

That unfortunate scrambling had to explain how he’d ended up in bed with Seliah. Well, that and walking in the door of that rustic shack and seeing her alive and well, standing there in all her glory, wearing only that devastatingly sexy lingerie, illuminated by the morning light through the windows so her dusky skin seemed to glow golden against the dramatic cloak of her newly restored long and flowing hair.

As if that hadn’t been enough to rivet him in place, the delighted shine in her amber eyes, the glad cry that escaped her, and that radiant smile—all for him, when no one in his entire life had ever been happy to see him—had nearly put him through the floor.

He’d tried to resist her allure, he really had. The way he’d planned it in his admittedly fragmented head, he would have convinced her to walk away, to seize a chance for happiness that being stuck with him would never provide. But no. Not Seliah. Somehow she’d not only sucked him back into her magnetic field, but she’d seduced him into bed with her.

Yes, fine, he’d carried her there, and had done most of the actual, physical seducing, but those were details. He’d done it entirely because she had manipulated him into it. And because she needed only exist to be seductive. And then she’d taken over, with her sensitive, sensual mouth, and unraveled him entirely. Being inside her, the bond shifting and shimmering between them… Well, he’d once sneered at the people who insisted on calling sex “making love,” but now he understood on a visceral level. There was a distinction and he wouldn’t be the same again.

Seliah lay cuddled in his arms, a drowsy weight, all sweet curves and silken heated skin, impossibly long and lovely legs tangled with his, and he felt like he was bleeding inside. Not like an injury, but a kind of slow-seeping that tenderized the parts of him he’d thought forever toughened with scar tissue, callused over and jade-hard from knowing far too much about the world. He’d realized a while back that he was in love with Seliah—stupidly, head over heels, against all kinds of good sense and good judgment in love—and also that love had made him a fool in the end, an irony that hadn’t escaped him.

He seemed doomed to be smart enough to recognize the worst mistakes he could make—and foolish enough to fling himself into making them anyway.

He had become a fool as great as any in House Phel. And now, these feelings for Seliah, for his bonded familiar of all people, threatened to make him weak as a babe. He actually wanted to stay in that bed with her, to spend his days and nights exactly like this, safe and cocooned, feeling… loved? Was that what this odd feeling was? No wonder he didn’t recognize the enervating sensation.

You should run, his internal voice advised. Run now and run fast.

Oh right. I’m sure Seliah won’t follow this time.

He still couldn’t believe she’d come after him, that she’d managed to rescue him from that cursed boneyard of impaling death. And again later, from the ensuing entanglements. “How did you get away from the hunters and the Hanneil wizards?” he asked as the thought hit him, realizing the abrupt question probably wasn’t appropriate for the mood. Oh well, she should know better than to expect romance from him. If she didn’t, she’d do better to learn fast.

She tipped back her head to look at him, and he couldn’t resist brushing the long locks of tenebrous hair from her face. “It was easier than you’d think,” she answered, speaking the completely absurd words in a very serious tone as only she could. “The wizards—House Hanneil is psychic magic, right? Things make more sense now, knowing that—tried to control the hunters with their mind magic and went into disarray when it didn’t work. I think they also hadn’t battled hunters before because, by the time they started fighting with physical weapons, they were at a major disadvantage. The hunters killed them all.” She chewed her lower lip a moment, clearly remembering something more, but didn’t give it voice.

Too tempted to resist and not really wanting to, Jadren sucked that full lower lip between his, moving it into a kiss as she stirred against him, the sexual connection between them heating rapidly, as if they hadn’t just sated themselves. “And how did you deal with the hunters?” he prompted, though he also traced the enticing curve of her perfect bottom, tempted to smack it a little, just to hear her squeal. Time enough to discover the edges of those boundaries with her. Probably. He hoped so, he suddenly realized. He wanted years to explore every way of having her and being had by her, from the heady lovemaking to the sharp-spiced games of pleasure and pain.

“I would’ve gotten them all cleanly,” she was saying, and he realized—upon speedy mental review—that she’d been telling him about shooting the hunters from a tree with enchanted moon-magic-tipped arrows. “Well, if you can call melting them into that disgusting stew ‘clean,’ except the arrows didn’t work on the leader.”

Jadren came alert, all thoughts of alluring sex-games with Seliah fleeing from his mind. “You definitely pierced the leader’s flesh with the silver? Correctly enchanted moon-silver? You’re sure?”

Huffing in exasperation, she rolled her eyes. “Of course I’m sure. You think I didn’t try multiple weapons? Once I decided I couldn’t stay in the tree and committed to the hand-to-hand fight, I used a blade that had worked fine to melt other hunters. I tell you, this hunter was different. And it wasn’t surprised that it was different. It knew.”

This development didn’t bode well at all. It implied that whichever wizard—or house of wizards—created that lead hunter had both known about Phel’s enchantment and its effect on the hunters and had come up with a counter-spell. It worried Jadren greatly that his own darling maman just happened to be one of the few outside of House Phel who knew about the enchanted artifacts. She’d had that first blade of Gabriel’s in her possession long enough to use her wizardry to analyze its properties. He figured she already knew all there was to know about how it worked, so he’d gone ahead and fed her the information confirming it, by way of assuring her he was being a good little spy. “Who sent the hunters?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

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