Page 22 of The Healer and the Warlord

She shook her head, even as her chest heaved with shuddery breaths. “You promised next time you’d claim me so thoroughly that I would never belong to anybody else.”

The reminder of my words made my cock twitch. But still I hesitated. I had meant to bring her to soft, gasping pleasure in my arms this morning. To wake her gently with kisses and promises that I might not be able to keep.

She rolled her hips against mine, and those rational thoughts left my brain as a primal instinct screamed at me to bury myself as deep inside her as possible.

“Remember, I’m tougher than I look, and you have the bite mark to prove it,” she murmured, her voice already cracked with pleasure.

She was right. I had admired the mark in my reflection in the oasis pool the night before.

“If you’re sure,” I said, the bite on my neck throbbing happily as I parted her legs further, giving me more access to drive into her.

“Make me yours,” she insisted.

And I couldn’t deny her anything. My hips snapped forward. A sharp gasp of pleasure escaped her as I kept her in place with my hand at her throat. I didn’t squeeze, but my fingers around her neck kept her face tipped back where I could devour her mouth as I drove into her.

Her pale lashes fluttered as I thrust again and again, gaining speed. She clenched and shuddered around me, but I wanted more. I wanted everything.

Even my magic tried to burrow in her even more deeply. My storm twisted with the tendrils of light that spilled from her until they seemed to meld together. They had never fully untangled since our joining last night, but now they melded until I did not know where my power ended and hers began. Perhaps they weren’t even different at all.

I hooked her top leg around my hip, leaving her thighs spread obscenely wide and freeing my hand to explore her as I pleased. It drifted to where I entered her, tracing the way her folds stretched around my length as I drove into her with increasing force.

As my fingers slid to her sensitive bud once more, she tightened around me, and I grunted through the frisson of pleasure it sent up my spine.

“Sands Alyx,” I growled. “I can’t wait to feel you come apart.”

She whimpered in response. I thrust harder and faster, trying to draw even more noises from her as I timed the circles of my fingers over her flesh with my movements. She obliged, louder and more desperate sounds ripping from her as I pounded into her exquisite heat.

She began to tremble, and I tightened my hand around her throat, not enough to restrict her air flow, but enough to pin her in place as I made her come apart.

Alyx shattered with a sharp cry, and her vice grip on my cock tightened so far that my vision whited out. Still, I did not relent, burying myself in her again and again and continuing to stroke her sensitized flesh. As her pleasure faded, she squirmed and whimpered, both trying to get closer and escape the onslaught of sensations.

“Be good and come for me one more time,” I insisted. My voice barely sounded like my own, coming out in an otherworldly growl, unintentionally laced with magic and rumbling like storm clouds on the horizon.

Alyx gasped, and her eyes, which had been screwed shut in pleasure, snapped open. Her head craned back so she could meet my gaze, and it transfixed me. I was helpless to do anything but bury myself in her welcoming flesh, desperate to drag her pleasure from her again. It was as if I could feel her ecstasy barreling down on her, or maybe that was just my own.

The fire crackling in my veins roared to life with the strength of an inferno, rushing up my spine and out my mouth as I roared my own release. Alyx matched me with a scream of her own, coming apart around me, and I could barely separate my pleasure from hers as we shook and shuddered.

As my breath slowed, and the trembling in my limbs slowly abated, I lowered my head to nuzzle in the junction between her neck and shoulder. My hand at her neck drifted down to her chest, pressing flat over her breastbone. Her heart hammered under my fingers, synchronized with my own.

Her breath hitched, and I felt it too. Even as my cock slipped from inside her, as I repositioned to hold her to me more comfortably, our magic did not pull apart. It was now knotted together so thoroughly that I wasn’t sure I could disentangle it without hurting one or both of us—I wasn’t sure I even desired to tease it apart.

If the way Alyx turned in my arms to burrow herself into my chest was any indication, she was not inclined to either. As she nuzzled into my sternum, I had the fleeting thought that she hadn’t just stolen my heart… she was my heart.

Alyx stood by Dileas, the unsure way she stroked the mare’s flank echoing my own hesitance. With all of us healed, there was no reason to forestall our journey, but the destination that had been so clear before now seemed clouded.

The simple transaction I had once imagined when arriving back at Clan Katal’s encampment now made bile rise in my throat. Alyx was not a simple prisoner I would allow Lord Deryn to ransom back to her father where she would live under his suffocating shelter.

An uncomfortable twisting in the strange magical tether that now existed between us told me that Alyx feared this eventuality as well. I strode over to her, covering her hand with mine where it wound in Dileas’s mane.

“I will not hand you over to Lord Deryn,” I promised without preamble.

She looked up at me, her expression equal parts hopeful and sad. “And what will you do instead? Defying your Lord could cost you everything.”

I swallowed around the feeling of glass in my throat. I had come from nothing to be the most powerful Warlord in the Ballan Desert, and I had always avoided wanting more for fear of losing what I had. But Alyx—she was worth risking all of it. I would gamble existence itself for her.

“I have served my Lord loyally and without question for many years,” I insisted. “He will allow me this one thing.”

“And if he does not?”