Page 178 of Swordheart
“No, it’s all right,” she said, surprising him, and then she was off on a complicated tangent about being tied up in a room with Zale and telling Alver she was pregnant and how Zale had worked out that if he just went back in the sword afterward…
He tried to follow this, but his mind got stuck on the bit where Alver had tied her up. He would kill the clammy-handed louse. He’d use his bare hands so as not to waste good steel on him.
“Oh dear,” said Halla. Apparently he’d said that out loud. “I stabbed him, you see, and… oh, not very well!” She held up her hands, as if apologizing. “In the arm. He screeched like a chicken laying a particularly large egg, and then I know I was probably supposed to stab him again, but there didn’t seem to be much point.”
Rage at Alver had dampened his libido somewhat, but Halla’s cheerful expression, and the mimed stabbing, woke it again. Great god, but he loved her. She was so absurd and so dear, and also it seemed she was capable of stabbing kidnappers and then being matter-of-fact about it.
Also, he could apparently make love to her without fear.
Sarkis picked her up in his arms—she squeaked—and carried her to the bed. “Yes?” he said, searching her face again.
She reached up and pulled him down beside her. “Yes,” she whispered in his ear.
He knew that he should go slowly, that it had been a very long time for her, but he couldn’t. He tugged at her clothes, slid his hands across her breasts, and then he was lost to a kind of frenzy. Her warmth and her softness filled his senses. He needed her desperately, needed to take her and be taken until all the fear and horror of the last few weeks was a faded, distant memory.
It was not until he had entered her on one hard thrust that he fought clear of the haze. “Halla.” He pressed his forehead against hers. “Am I hurting you? Is this…?”
“No, it’s fine,” she said, sounding a bit faint. “Truly. Err… are you done?”
He resisted the urge to beat his skull against the headboard. “No. I’m not done. It goes on for a while yet, unless you don’t want it to.”
“That’s fine.” She wiggled under him, adjusting her position, in a way that tested his self-control enormously. Just the feel of her breasts against his chest was probably going to kill him.
At this rate, it may not go on for much longer at all. Although if it goes on for more than two minutes, I’m already ahead of the game.
Besides, I’d like to see how any other man would manage, after a few hundred years of celibacy…
In the end, he did not last nearly as long as he’d like. When she gasped in his ear, he came completely undone.
When he could manage coherent thought again, he propped himself up on his elbows. “I could have managed that better,” he said.
“I’m just glad you’re here,” she said.
“So am I, but it was not my intent to… ah… manhandle you.”
“As long as you don’t intend to throw me into a ditch.” She chuckled, which did interesting things to various muscles and focused Sarkis’s attention immediately.
“No ditches,” he said. He slid his hand down between their bodies and began to touch her in ways that did even more interesting things. “But it would be unforgivably rude to take without giving back.”
“If you say—so!” The last word came out as a squeak, and Sarkis set out to make sure that both of them were well pleased.
It was the middle of the night. The fire had burned down and the bird had woken in its sleep to shout loudly about death and the worm, then gone back to sleep. Halla was half-asleep against his chest, and Sarkis stared down at the fine lines etched across her eyelids and the corners of her eyes.
Great god, he’d almost lost her. No, hehadlost her. It was by Halla and Zale’s doing, not his, that she was here in his arms. He had failed her. How could he keep from doing so again?
She opened her eyes and frowned. “You’re upset.”
“How can you tell?”
“You’re scowling. The sad scowl, not one of the others.”
He filed the notion that he had different types of scowl away for later.
“Forgive me,” he said. He freed one hand and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “I’ve failed you. I didn’t protect you, and I didn’t tell you all the truth. I don’t deserve… this. I don’t deserveyou.”
“You didn’t deserve to be stuck in a sword for five hundred years, either,” she said tartly.
“Well, perhaps not.” He flopped back down on his back, staring at the ceiling. “So… err… now what?”
