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A ragged cry escaped her, part surrender, part despair.
She’d never win this bet.
“Just let go,” Jak advised, transferring her wrists into one hand, holding them pinned, cupping her mound with the other. “Yield to me. I’ve got you.”
She groaned at the contact with her already slick and swollen sex, her legs parting for him out of intimate familiarity and escalating need. He caressed her with delicate teasing—knowing exactly what she liked best, how to titillate her beyond reason—and nipped at her breasts, alternately shocking her with flashes of sweet pain, then soothing them with hot and lavish licks. All the time, he flooded her senses with overwhelming desire, images of her convulsing in climax drenching her mind, love and passion obscuring all other thoughts.
He was playing dirty, using her sensitivities against her. But surely his time was almost up. She could still win this. Rolling her head, she looked at the hourglass on the table, groaning at the sight of all that sand still in the top portion.
“Let go. You know you want to,” Jak crooned, taking her earlobe in his teeth, slipping a fingertip inside her, stroking the exact spot that drove her wild and made her desperate for more. She dragged her hips away through sheer force of will, trying to escape his determined onslaught, and he tsked at her. “No breaking the rules; no resisting. Or you forfeit.”
She collapsed with despairing moan and he renewed the maddeningly teasing strokes, driving the building tension.
“Good girl,” he murmured, oozing triumph, adding another finger to curl inside her, the intensity of it unbearable. She sobbed with pleasure, straining to withhold the orgasm, and he shifted his grip, lifting her onto the table and setting her beside the stubbornly still-full hourglass. Spreading her thighs wide, he sank to his knees and grinned at her. “So you can time your defeat.” And put his mouth on her.
~ 3 ~
Stella held outlonger than Jak had expected. Not long enough, however, to win the bet. Never bet against a professional gambler, particularly one so skilled at his game. Not to mention, one invested in winning.
Not because of the prize—though an unnamed favor to be claimed from his broody sorceress later held immense possibilities—but because of how thoroughly the battle and her inevitable submission had worked to distract her. Even the sheer pleasure of winning faded in the face of the joy of bringing a woman to screaming climax, particularly this woman, who he loved more than life itself, and very particularly Stella, who had a way of distancing herself from him even as she sat across a table from him or walked beside him with her hand on his arm.
Sometimes he thought he could almost map Stella’s gradual, relentless withdrawal from him, like tracking the movement of one of the wandering stars that sailors followed at their peril. Stella was the star of his universe, no doubt about it, the brightest star in his sky—but she was not a fixed star. No, Stella followed her own path, now bright and close, now so distant that she may as well have disappeared.
Stella’s quietly stormy, intensely brooding nature had always attracted him, made him long to plumb her shadows. It still did—but her habit of withdrawing and closing him out also drove him mad. If he tried to navigate by her, he’d end up off the edge of the world. Which might not be a terrible thing, all in all—and he’d absolutely take that over not having her at all.
But at least he could drive her mad in return, which provided its own level of gratification. When he finally carried her to the bed, she curled trustingly against him. Naked, sweat-streaked, limp with spent passion, her hair streaming over his arm nearly to the floor, Stella melted into him with the perfect trust of exhausted sexual passion, because, of course, he hadn’t stopped with that first, bet-losing orgasm. He’d poured everything he had into draining her of the last drop of tension and anxiety.
It rankled, however, that Stella only seemed to trust him to this extgent in these moments of utter lassitude, allowing him to take care of her in a way she didn’t at any other time. He tried hard, he really did, not to let that infuriate him so much. Laying her boneless body on the bed, he went around to her side to turn down the covers, then went to retrieve her to tuck her in. He’d expected her to be passed out, as she hadn’t made a whisper of movement, but her eyes were open, smoldering smoky gray, luminous in her delicate face. “Jak,” she murmured, voice hoarse from her cries of passion, “what about you? You haven’t—”
He shushed her with a smile. “Sleep, my star, is what you need.” His own pleasure was the last thing on his mind at the moment. Even though she was so alarmingly desirable, so languid and replete with spent desire that he ached to have her, he wanted much more for her to relax and rest, to restore her frayed senses. This wedding, her mother, the looming prospects of Dasnarian guests causing political and familial rifts—which was his fault, even though he hadn’t originated the problem—all of it was wearing on her. Not to mention the pressure of all the minds and heightened emotions in the castle.
Her family pretended to accommodate Stella’s peculiar fragility, but they also thought themselves exempt from it. The eight younger siblings, with the possible exception of thenewborn—who was demanding in his own way—lovedhaving Stella home and competed relentlessly for her attention.
And that didn’t begin to touch how much of Stella’s limited energy reserves her mother demanded. Tonight hadn’t been a final straw—if that unhappy event arrived, Jak would likely make good on his threat to toss Stella over his shoulder, fight his way out of Windroven if necessary, and sail her around at open sea until her sensitive mind recovered from all the battering—but the argument over dinner had certainly pushed him to trysomething, anything, to get Stella to relax and stop fretting.
And now he’d ruined it, failing to keep his own turbulent emotions contained. A familiar line formed between her winged brows, the clear gray of her eyes clouding like summer thunderstorms. She rolled onto her side, studying him with more than her sorcerous gaze. “Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong? I can feel that you’re upset.”
Fuck me,he thought wearily. So much for all that effort he’d put into controlling what she sensed from him. Edging himself onto the side of the bed, he stroked her with a long, gentling caress, savoring the narrow pinch of her waist, the subtle flare of her hip, the long, exquisite line of her thigh. “Nothing is wrong,” he told her, willing himself to project breezy confidence. “I was simply feeling smug, congratulating myself that, with my startling sexual prowess, I’d worn you out. Since you’d fainted from pleasure, I was going to let you rest and recover.” He added a charming grin. “That’s me being a gentleman, which is why you didn’t recognize the behavior.”
She lifted one dubious brow, pillowing her cheek on the hands she pressed together on the pillow. “Jak.”
He raked a hand through his short hair, kicking himself. This was going the opposite direction of what he’d planned. Stella, yanking his ship off course, as she so easily did. “I’m only worried about you,” he answered, pouring all the honestemotion he could into the connection between them. “But we can talk about it in the morning,” he added, when she opened her mouth. “Rest now.”
She sat up, eyes sparkling to alertness, magic shimmering around her like the dark hair that settled into a shifting cloak about her slim, naked body. “You don’t need to be always worrying about me, Jak.”
“I’m not,” he countered. Only when she was scraping herself hollow trying to be all things to everyone. Which, to be fair, was most of the time.
Now she raised both brows. “You know I can sense it when you’re lying to me. Do me a favor, Jak: either tell me the truth or don’t talk to me at all.”
Oh, right, as the brooding and not talking thing washerprovenance. Gritting his teeth, he plunged in, trapped into having this conversation at the worst possible time and seemingly unable to steer out of this horizon-encompassing storm. “I just think this wedding is getting to be too much.”
“Too much,” she echoed in a dangerously soft voice.
“It was already a lot with inviting everyone in the Thirteen Kingdoms and us being at Castle Windroven all summer planning it,” he continued almost desperately, keenly aware of the perilous path he trod. “Now we have months still to go, even more people arriving, not to mention royal politics on top of familial ones.”
“I see,” she said slowly, no longer meeting his gaze, but lookingthroughhim in that peculiar way of hers that meant she was seeing something not in the room. A distant event, perhaps, or a future one.
For the first time, it occurred to him to ask what she’d glimpsed of the future, oftheirfuture. Stella’s ability to see the future—however fractured and branching the paths to it might be—had been a daily consideration on their adventures. She’dprovided key insights that helped them make decisions and ultimately defeat the intelligence poised to destroy their world. Once they’d triumphed, their group had returned home weary in heart and soul from the horrors they’d experienced, but also eager to savor the peace and happiness they’d scorned as boring before.
