Page 14 of The Naiad's Lover

I couldn’t think about it for long without growing angry.

He hummed quietly against my neck. Every now and then he opened his mouth and licked at my skin.

“You taste perfect,” he said, and humped against my stomach in a slow, thorough drag. “Like youandmy lake.”

I wasn’t all that thrilled to have the lake water dry on me, but Sayan had expressed his enjoyment of it on more than one occasion.

I was stroking him firmly now, up and down, up and down. I let my fingertips tickle the skin behind his bollocks, and when I dragged them back up, I stopped over his hole and held there.

He parted his lips and set his teeth to the long tendon at the side of my neck.

I began a gentle, circling massage.

Sayan moaned and went limp, his heavy body pressing suddenly down onto me and pushing the air from my lungs in a short wheeze.

He arched up into my hand demandingly.

“Yes?” I said, surprised at how gravelly and low my voice was. My heart pounded and my face stung with aroused heat.

He hummed again.

It wasn’t quite enough. I stilled.

“Yes, yes.” He sucked hard at my neck, and pinched the skin between his teeth. “Yes.”

I wouldn’t go much farther today. He was about to come—I knew it by the frantic little pulses of his hips, by the way his voice shook.

I returned to the gentle, slow circling of my fingertips, regular and relentless. He fell into the rhythm, flexing his hips at the same speed, chasing my touch.

“Look at me, Sayan,” I said.

He tried. He raised his head and attempted to focus on me. His cheeks were flushed a deep rose, his lips were bitten red and damp, and his eyes were dazed.

None of this was a mystery to him. None of it was a surprise. Sayan had prepared many, many partners for his possession in exactly the way I was now preparing him.

And yet, from the way he was responding, from the look on his face, you’d think he’d never even imagined such a thing.

It reminded me of the first time I’d taken him into my mouth. Astonishingly, I’d been the first ever to do that, too.

I loved him so, so very much.

Digging my free hand into the solid lower curve of his buttock, I reached for his mouth and said against his parted, puffy lips, “Come for me,” as I breached him slowly.

He did.

3

The next morning, it was raining.

I sat on the comfortable bench on my porch, where I was protected from the ghastly weather by a wide overhang, and sipped my second coffee of the day. Rain pounded on the roof with steady, percussive thuds. The strong wind tossing it about in great gusts was so bitterly cold, I was amazed that it wasn’t hailing, or even sleeting.

Water spilled over the edge of the roof as the downpipe gurgled, struggling to discharge the overflow from the gutters.

Sayan stood before me, frowning. He’d been awake early again, although instead of teasing me out from under the covers, he’d been content to lie curled around me until I got up.

He’d even waited—more or less patiently—as I made my first coffee and toasted thick slices of bread cut from a three-day-old loaf, but while I was in the middle of eating, he’d abruptly whisked himself outside, letting the door slam behind him as he always did.

When I followed him out, bundled up in a warm coat and holding a steaming earthenware mug between my hands, he must have known that we weren’t going swimming.

---