Page 41 of Bound and Tide

Red straddled his hips, her hands digging into his stomach as she arched backward and took him fully. His cock had forgotten what it felt like to be inside someone, or perhaps it never really knew, the strange, wonderful feeling expanding and overtaking him as he gripped onto her hips and thrust.

Xander cursed, and Red laughed, both sounds lost in the crashing waves out in the sea. She rode him hard and fast, and every pump felt like freedom and safety all at once. Behind her, the black sky of the Everdarque went on forever, but all he could see was the Empyrea on her face and how he knew then he would do anything to keep her like that, to please her endlessly, to make her crave him and only him for as long as she breathed.

“Stop,” she commanded, muscles clenching around him as she splayed fingers out on his chest, nails biting in.

“Fuck,” he grunted, but quelled his next thrust, teeth grit as he teetered on the edge.

Doubled over, she caught her breath and then blinked up, curls that had fallen free from her knot tickling his face. She leveled out her breathing with the ebb and flow of the water, and Xander let his fall to match, his cock throbbing inside her with his pounding heart. Red’s eyes scanned the beach, and she snatched up something from the shore beside his head.

“Was it the truth when you said you liked to bleed?” She lifted up a shell that had been snapped in two, one side dagger sharp. She ran her finger along the edge and pulled back quickly from the sting.

He swallowed. “What do you think?”

“You’ve a penchant for lying.” She was grinning wickedly, but then that dropped off as she pouted down at his chest. Her hesitation lasted only a moment until she swept aside his vial of blood so that it fell away from his neck. Then she set the tip of the shell against his chest, dragging it downward but splitting no skin. That smile of hers returned.

Still embraced inside her, his cock pulsed eagerly at the promise of pain, but she held him flush to the sand with the weight of her hips.

“Shall we find out the truth together?”

Xander breathed out through his nose and nodded because he couldn’t quite manage to beg her to tear him to shreds without instantly coming undone.

The shell cut into his flesh, and Xander sucked in the sharpest breath. He’d been stabbed and struck and sliced so many times that this should have been nothing new, but he rarely lay under an attack unmoving. Now it was only a rare occasion that fighting back wasn’t to his advantage—sometimes one had to take a wound to deal something much greater—but there too were all those times long ago when he remained still under a beating because fighting back wasn’t allowed, not when he deserved every slash and bruise.

But this pain was different from the bleakness of those memories, the sharpened edge barely sinking in. Red’s fingers held the shell as delicately as she did a reed, lifting it and touching back down as she made her marks, each one a pinch followed by a deeper pang.

As the tide lapped at his skin, blood beaded in the shell’s wake in a purposeful design, but he couldn’t pay much mind, watching her instead. She was focused intently on her carving, but she hadn’t forgot either of their pleasure, sliding forward with a painful slowness right to his tip and then shifting backward to sink him deep inside over and over. The grip he had on her hips would surely leave his own bruises, yet her hand never faltered until finally she sat back to admire her work.

Red’s lips curled in that way when he pleased her, and warmth spread under the briny sting of the marks. He didn’t dare move his hips, every muscle clenched, but he did carefully glance downward. Letters, they looked like, though from his angle they were upside down, and his mind was too deliciously foggy to read anyway. “Is this some curse you’ve laid on me?” he asked with a smirk.

She shook her head, running a finger beneath the cuts and leaving a tender ache. “It’s a word in Elvish,” she said quietly. “Red isn’t a name in that language, but it will do, I think.”

Whatever breath Xander had left abandoned his lungs. She’d carved her name into him—the name he’d given her—as if marking him as her own. He remained still, steeping in what that could mean as fully as he soaked in the ocean’s waters and as deeply as he was immersed inside her.

It’s not possible, he said into his mind, though his voice sounded very little like him. She wouldn’t, and I couldn’t.

His breath came back, and he narrowed eyes on her. “You’ll be sorry to know I’ll heal from that shortly.” He would be sorry too.

“It’s already disappearing,” she said, and if he didn’t know better, he would have thought there was a tinge of grief to her voice. She dropped her lips to the cuts in a painless caress and came away with crimson coating her mouth. “But at least I’ll know it was there once.”

Xander grabbed her face and pulled her reddened lips to his, devouring the taste of blood and salt and arcana as he drove himself inside her. She cried out against his mouth, digging claws into his shoulders and thrusting back, meeting his wild rhythm until they peaked together and fell into gasping stillness on the shore.

Chapter 19

GOOD BOYS GET TREATS

Fucking on an abandoned shore of the Everdarque turned out to be a short reprieve from the chores Red had planned for Xander that day. When they returned to her shop, she’d had him juice the verglasberries—a messy task. And then he was to dry out their husks over the fire, watching closely so that none caught and burned the whole place down. And then he had to grind the husks into a fine dust that made his nose itch and his eyes water, careful not to waste a single speck.

Red was a relentless and cruel taskmaster, and he told her so repeatedly.

But she worked alongside him dissecting that disgusting nest into more useful parts. She also cast some elementary enchantments over the parchment-like bark he’d harvested to split the pieces into transparent sheets meant for open wounds. Xander offered her a superior spell to produce twice as much product, and she took to it like she’d been born for arcana.

When the work was finally finished, she invited him up to her private chamber, lighting the smaller hearth there and insisting he sit on her bed while she served him dinner that was not delicious but thankfully not river-based, so he didn’t complain. The tea was exceptional, however, so he did offer his compliments to the brewer.

Once he was plied with food and wrapped in one of her warmest blankets, she asked about Maia and Costa again, and he relented a few more vague details as evening turned to night. His brother was talented yet meek and insecure, and his sister was spirited yet impulsive and mouthy, but they were still young, he said, and somehow that made the worst of them easy to forgive—endearing even, at times, if he really had to admit.

Red’s eyes went glassy, catching the flickering flames, and then she busied herself clearing away their bowls. When she sat beside him again, she reached into the neck of his tunic, and her fingers caught on the cord around his neck. “Do you ever take this off?”

“No. I’m not supposed to.”

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