Phoenix Unbound
Page 68

Azarion’s eyes gleamed in the shadows, a dichotomy of bright and dark that obscured any emotion revealed there, but she heard it in his voice. “Agna blessed you with more than fire. I’ve never beheld a more beautiful woman.”
The way he looked at her now only validated that assertion, for Gilene of Beroe was neither beautiful nor ugly, only an ordinary woman with an extraordinary power that had been her bane since the day it manifested. Azarion gazed at her as if she were the sun.
If anyone was Agna-blessed with physical beauty, it was him. Even when she thought of him as her enemy and wished down a gruesome fate on his head, a small part of her still recognized his allure even if her hatred of him made her immune to it.
She opened her arms. “I’m cold.”
He moved with startling speed, wrapping her in his arms and tumbling them both to the pallet. Gilene laughed and kissed him. In no time he was as naked as she, huddled under the blankets, skin to skin. She touched him everywhere she could reach, stroking every plane and angle, bulge of muscle, and the stiff length of his cock where it pressed the inside of her thigh. He thrust into her hand, her name a drawn-out groan on his lips.
He, in turn, coaxed out gentle gasps and pleas for more of his touch as he caressed her breasts, suckled their tips into his mouth, and tracked a path with his lips that followed his hands from her throat and across her belly, pausing at every sensitive spot that made her shiver in his arms. He lingered at her thighs, and Gilene held her breath, both curious and apprehensive at this unfamiliar manner of lovemaking.
Azarion raised his head to meet her eyes. “Are you afraid? I’ll stop.”
She was anxious, but only because no lover had done this to her before. She wasn’t afraid, not of this man’s attentions or the exquisite way he played her body until every nerve thrummed and sizzled under her skin.
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Just unversed in this.”
He smiled, his irises as dark as his pupils. “What I’m about to do doesn’t require your skill, Gilene, only mine. This is for you to enjoy and for me to enjoy with you.”
With that, he set to proving his words, his mouth and tongue a sweet torture that had Gilene lifting her hips and gripping Azarion’s head as she panted his name on shallow breaths while she begged him to stop and then begged him to continue. The knot of pleasure fanning hot and bright in her belly spooled out with each caress like a thread from a ball of string, growing ever more taut until it snapped. Gilene’s back arched under the force of her climax, and the guttural noises she made didn’t sound human in her ears. Her knees clapped hard against Azarion’s shoulders as she rode him through a tide of sensation that turned the stars blurry.
Azarion rose above her, a long, broad shadow that blocked out the sky. “Gilene.”
Her name, only that, uttered in the tones of a temple worshipper. Gilene curved her legs over his back and twined her arms around his neck. “You are mine,” she said in a ragged voice. “I am yours.”
He sank into her with a sigh, his thrust deep. She gasped at the feel of him slowly filling her, his body heavy as hers stretched to accommodate his girth. Every muscle, inside and out, clenched against his partial withdrawal, and he shuddered in her arms.
Gilene didn’t count the number of thrusts this time or turn her mind away from the moment. Instead, she reveled in it and willingly gave up her body and her heart to the man who made love to her under the open sky of the Stara Dragana.
He came inside her with a harsh moan and a shiver that racked him from head to foot. Gilene held him close, savoring the heat of his orgasm, the way his muscles flexed and his back went rigid before he settled on her, skin slippery with sweat, breath hard and uneven in her ear.
They lay entwined, with the blankets twisted around them, binding them close. Azarion hooked an arm under Gilene’s hip and rolled them both to their sides. His mouth looked lush in the moonlight, swollen from her enthusiastic kisses and his pleasuring of her body. Satisfaction warred with anticipation in his gaze. “Unless you say otherwise, there’ll be no sleep for either of us tonight,” he said.
She grinned and traced a meandering line across his collarbones, stopping for a moment to paint an invisible swirl in the hollow of his throat. “Is that a promise or a threat?” she teased.
“What do you want it to be?”
Gilene pretended to consider the options for a moment. “You always keep your promises, so a promise then.”
A shadow passed through the depths of his eyes. “There are promises I wish I’d never made.” His voice was as grim as his expression had suddenly grown.
She knew to what he alluded. He had promised he’d return her to Beroe, and her belief in him, slow to grow, didn’t waver now. Her own sense of loyalty, however, did, and that scared her. He had offered his heart to her, and Gilene knew Azarion well enough by now to understand he didn’t make such a momentous declaration as a platitude. It was a gift beyond price, one she would hold close when she returned to the capital in the spring. One that tested her resolve to return at all.
His cheek was warm under her hand, the unwelcome tears heavy in her throat. “I can’t say it,” she said. “No matter that I want to. If I do, I will falter, and I can’t falter.”
He captured her hand to plant a quick kiss on her palm and pressed his own hand to her chest. “It’s all right, Gilene. You say it here.”
Grateful that he didn’t try to further persuade her from her chosen course, Gilene hugged him, allowing a few tears to trickle down her face before she blinked the rest away. In little time, her sadness was forgotten as Azarion made good on his promise and showed her that not all Pit gladiators were simply butchers or rutting beasts.
He made love to her through the remainder of the night, pausing for short stretches of time to rest but never sleep. They talked or simply caressed each other in silence while the moon above them made its slow descent. When the sun crested the horizon in a blade of fiery light, and the sky slowly lightened from black to indigo to lavender, Gilene sighed and gazed at Azarion’s peaceful features, hoping to memorize each line.
“Do you trust Masad to accompany me home to Beroe?” It was a question she’d considered when Azarion had first outlined his plan for returning her to her village.
He nodded. “Yes. He might not agree with a decision or a plan, but he serves the ataman faithfully. He’ll do as I instruct, even if it means taking an agacin away from the Sky Below.”
Azarion had surprised her with the details. Masad would cross the steppe and Nunari territory at its narrowest passage to deliver her to Beroe. Once Azarion and his subchiefs completed negotiations with Clan Eagle, he’d return home to the Clan Kestrel encampment. His trusted captain, however, would sneak away in the small hours with the outlander agacin and guide her back to Kraelian lands. She spun a lock of his hair around her finger. “Part of me wishes it were you who will take me back to Beroe. The other part is glad it won’t be.”
The rising sun gilded the lower half of his body, turning the blankets and pelts that covered him a deep shade of gold. In that moment, he seemed both man and statue. He sighed, a hollow sound. “It’s better that Masad deliver you instead of me. I might well break my promise. He won’t.”
It was one of the many things Gilene respected about Azarion, the self-awareness of his nature and his willingness to accept it and act according to those traits both weak and strong. She watched the sunlight creep up the blankets, a relentless timekeeper that showed no mercy to those who tried to capture moments and hold them still. “We have to meet with Erakes soon, don’t we?”