Page 100 of Feathers so Vicious

“Not nearly enough,” he growled. “Not yet.”

His hand slipped from my throat to my neck faster than I could register before he pushed my face back into the furs. Weight pressed down between my burning shoulder blades, colliding with the cold of the surrounding shadows, letting a chill spread across my entire body.

Malyr’s cock slammed into me, ruthlessly hammering in and out with such force, each thrust shoved my cheek across the furs as he groaned and grunted. His other hand dug into my hip like a vise, bracing me against the violent power of his body.

“Fucking hard, choking you, biting you, bleeding you,hurtingyou. I cannot help it, little dove; it is what I like,” Malyr grunted behind me as ice-cold tendrils spread from my arms down along the sway of my ribs. “You cannot imagine how many women I had beneath me, forcing their cries into sad, pathetic moans. Lorn was the exception, if for the wrong reasons. But you…?” His hips stalled. His hand fisted my hair, yanking me up by it. “How can the man who made me like this have a daughter who takes all of me so perfectly, hmm? You nearly made me come again.” Another whack at my clit. And gods, it sent a heat into my belly that made my cunt twitch with need. “Apologize.”

I rolled my hips, hating how he wasn’t moving. “I’m sorry.”

“I am not,” he whispered against my mouth, peppering my lips with gentle kisses here and there. “See, little dove, the only way I can possibly reconcile how much I want you, long for you, find myself annoyingly drawn to you like to no woman before in my life…a Brisden, no less,” fingernails dug into the scar tissue on my chest, straining the puckered skin until it ached, “is by hurting you just a little bit more.”

My face fell into the cushions right in time for me to moan my pleasure into the fibers as I arched my back. I wanted the hurt and the pain, wanted the sense of love it brought even more!

Malyr fucked into me hard, rolling his hips at each thrust. Shadows wandered along my belly and between my legs from there, slithering through my folds, whipping at my clit, playing around my asshole, working me toward the glistening height of bliss.

“Look at me.” Shifting his hips behind me, Malyr gripped my throat tightly, forcing me to look at his pitch-black eyes and the shadows that flickered behind him, around him, seemingly rising from the veins beneath his skin in smoke-like plumes. “Eyes on me, Galantia. Don’t you dare fucking move those hazel eyes from mine when I make you come on my cock while my shadows feast on your cunt.”

They tangled around my clit with the same force Malyr choked my throat, letting pressure build behind the organ as my vision speckled. It grew dark, darker still. Until, with a deep inhale and a rush of air, the intensity of it all made me burst. For the fraction of a second, my skin no longer fit me, and my entire body went up in flames.

Malyr grunted as he released my throat and grabbed my hip instead, just as my arms plopped down by my sides. With a final thrust, he buried his cock deep inside me, hips jerking uncontrollably with every twitch of his body. Spurt after spurt, his hard shaft throbbed against my clenched muscles as he filled me with his seed.

When the bliss and the shadows ebbed away, so did Malyr. He withdrew from me and rose, padding over to his tub, leaving me behind in cold silence.

ChapterThirty-Five

Galantia

Present Day, Deepmarsh Castle, Malyr’s rooms

Isat up in Malyr’s nest of blankets, quickly grabbing my shift from where it had slipped between pillows, and held it against me as if it could ward-off the sudden drop in temperature. This situation was so strange, so unlike any before with no Sebian to take care of me. Should I leave now? Wait until Malyr sent me away? Which one?

From the hearth beside the tub, Malyr grabbed an iron pincer, poking through the ashes in search of the hot stones buried there. One after another, he lifted them and dropped them into the tub, letting them drown with a hiss so they may reheat the water. As if nothing had happened. Merely a little interruption that had delayed his bath.

Looking around and feeling lost, I rolled my aching shoulders. Perhaps this was where this love ended, in the collision of painful passion and deranged desires, only to slowly trickle back into Malyr’s honor-bound hate.

But the moment I got up and turned toward the door, the deep rumble of Malyr’s voice stopped my feet. “No.”

I clasped my shift tighter to my chest and looked over at him. “No?”

Pincer returned to the hearth and, with his eyes fixed on the tub, he gestured me over. “Get in the hot water or your muscles will be sore tomorrow.”

I stared at him, flabbergasted. He was… concerned about me waking stiff and sore? The gods fetch him, this man never failed to confuse me by being a walking, breathing conundrum.

I dropped my shift and walked over, where I took his outreached hand for stability as I lifted my leg over the edge of the tub. My toes sank into the steaming water, ripping a moan from me at the pleasant warmth and the scent of herbs rising from the surface.

Malyr arched a brow at me. “Too hot?”

“Should it bother you if it was?” I croaked, my voice hoarse, and lifted my other leg over the edge before I sank into the water’s soothing embrace. “Or is burning me one of the many other ways you will not kill me?”

A twitch hushed across his lips, so distorted by the shadows that I couldn’t say if my comment annoyed or bemused him. “Apparently, I cannot be bothered to kill you at all. Did I not say as much only moments ago?”

Words spoken during passion that only slowly returned to me, now that I had full command of my lungs back, each confession more shocking than the one before. What if they were all true?

Malyr turned his naked self away from the tub and toward the hearth, presenting me a backside shaped to masculine perfection as he reached for firewood, which he tossed into the flames. For the first time in my life, I drank in the sight of his broad shoulders, his firm buttocks, the way the flames reflected on the plains of muscles on his sweat-glistening stomach as he turned. Valleys of deep shadows furrowed between them, interrupted only by the lines of scars that marked his entire body to about mid-thigh.

It robbed nothing of his beauty, and only accentuated the power of a man in his prime, the virility he exuded. That was something he shared with Sebian. Both of them about the same significant height, but where the pathfinder always carried a hint of aloofness in his posture, Malyr’s was straight and proud, at times even stiff. All attests to his royal upbringing, though he possessed none of the visible arrogance that often came with it.

His knot of hair bobbed at the top of his head as he rounded the tub to stand behind me, where he gave a pat on my shoulder, gesturing me to scoot forward. The moment I did, he climbed in, letting the water’s surface rise higher along my breasts the deeper he sank. His long legs framed mine. His arm came around my middle, pulling me back against him, and not letting up until my head rested against his chest.

---