Page 55 of Ravished By the Revenant

“There,” he breathes when he’s seated as deep as I can take, the rest of him pressed against me. “There’s my Clara. Full of me.” He rolls his hips, and the ladder of piercings drags across my inner walls. “Look at you. The lady of the keep, spread out in the herbs, gripping my cock like the world is ending.”

“Less… narrating.” I hook my heel behind his thigh and pull. “More⁠—”

He gives me more, and I lose my breath.

Aldric sets a pace that’s slow and deep and merciless, each stroke grinding against my clit at the end, each withdrawal raking the piercings over the exact spot that makes me boneless. The garden fills with sounds no vegetable should hear. His voice pours into my ear, an endless filthy litany—how tight I am, how wet, how he thought about this all day, my mouth, my thighs, the way I scream.

I can feel myself climbing that peak, and I’m eager to jump off the edge.

“Harder,” I demand, and he obeys, and I go off like a flare, arching up into his chest, shouting his name at the sky as the orgasm sets every nerve ending in my body on fire.

He fucks me through it, shifts my knee up over his elbow and finds a deeper angle, and the second orgasm builds before I finish shaking from the first.

“Whatever upset you in town,” he growls against my throat, thrusting deep, “I am fucking it out of you. Do you feel it leaving?”

He knows. He knows something’s wrong, and he’s decided this is his job right now, and the tenderness combined with the filth is what tips me over the second time. I clench around him hard enough that he curses in extinct German.

“Clara.” His rhythm falters. “Clara, I⁠—”

“Yes.” I drag his face down to mine. “Come on. Give it to me. All of it.”

He slams as deep as he can and roars into my mouth, flooding me in hot pulses. His cock kicks inside my pussy, triggering small aftershocks each time.

We end up in a heap in the crushed grass, my cheek on his glowing chest, his hand tracing lazy lines up my spine.

“Now,” Aldric says quietly, his lips against my hair. “Tell me what happened in town.”

I close my eyes. The sun is warm, his skin is cool, and Marco is out there somewhere, frowning at his phone.

“Tomorrow,” I whisper. “Today, just hold me.”

His arms tighten. He doesn’t push. But I know my revenant. He’s already preparing for battle.

29

ALDRIC

The rooster announces the dawn, and Clara announces her intention to murder the rooster.

“One day,” she mumbles into my shoulder. “One day I’m going to introduce him to your frying pan, and there won’t be a jury in Germany that convicts me.”

“He has served this keep faithfully for two years,” I intone solemnly.

“He screams at the sun, Aldric. That’s not service. That’s a personality disorder.”

She burrows deeper against my side, her leg thrown over mine, her silver hair spilling across my chest, and I stroke her spine and wait. Because she’s been awake for twenty minutes, and she has not yet said a single word about yesterday. About the town. About whatever chased the color from her face and sent her into my garden hunting oblivion.

Schmetterling occupies her legs like a furred paperweight, purring at a volume that suggests he intends to be part of any conversation held in this bed.

“Question,” Clara says.

“Mm.”

“Do you dream? Like, actual dreams, or is it more of a screensaver situation?”

Deflection. I know the tactic well—I have used cavalry the same way. “I do not know what a screensaver is, but I dream. Rarely. Mostly of things that no longer exist.”

“Huh.” Her finger traces the wolf on my ribs. “Question. What’s the worst meal you ever ate?”