Chapter 27: New Beginnings
The air in Elspeth’s quarters was still thick with the heat of them, a musk of sex and sweat layered over the softer scents of lavender and old velvet. Kerr lay sprawled on his back across her bed, a mountain of spent muscle, one arm flung over his eyes. The dusk light through the single small window caught the sheen on his chest, the slow rise and fall of his ribs. He was quiet in a way he hadn’t been before the duel, a silence that had followed him from the tourney grounds into her room, broken only by the frantic, wordless coupling that had just concluded.
Elspeth propped herself on an elbow beside him, her body a map of fine lines and softened edges against his hardened bulk. She watched him, tracing the scar on his lip with her eyes. Her hand moved of its own accord, settling on the thatch of dark hair on his belly, then lower, her fingers curling gently around the softening weight of him.
“It’ll have to slow,” she said, her voice a low rasp in the quiet room.
He didn’t move his arm from his eyes. “What will?”
“This.” She gave him a gentle, knowing squeeze. His flesh twitched under her palm, a faint, reflexive pulse. “They’ll be presenting you soon enough. A proper match. A teyrn’s son doesn’t stay a bachelor forever, not when his brother’s got an heir still in leading strings.”
Finally, he lowered his arm. His eyes, that usually mischievous grey, were flat, looking at the dark silk canopy above. “So?”
“So,” she said, her thumb stroking a slow, slick path along his length, feeling him begin to stir again already, a testament to his youth and his strange, pent-up energy. “So we be smart about it. No more stealing you away from feasts. Fewer risks.” Her touch grew firmer, purposeful. “Nothing changes what this has been. Not a damn thing.”
He turned his head to look at her then. Really look at her. The emptiness from the field was still there, but it was cracking at the edges, letting something raw and bewildered peek through. “El.”
“Shush,” she murmured, shifting to slide down the bed, her cheek coming to rest against his thigh. She nuzzled him, her breath warm on his skin. “Just listen.”
Her hand continued its work, and as she spoke, her words poured out, low and fervent, a confession woven into the act of touching him.
“You have no idea,” she began, her voice hushed, “no idea what it’s been. To have all this… this force of a man between my legs. To be split open and filled so completely I forget my own name.” She leaned in, her lips brushing his heated skin. “You’ve scrambled my brains more times than I can count. Left me shaking on this very bed like a leaf in a storm, my thoughts just… gone. Just a wet, happy ruin.”
He was fully hard now in her hand, thick and pulsing. She lifted her gaze to meet his, her eyes glistening.
“I’ve taken so much of your seed, Kerr. In me, on me…” She licked her lips. “The taste of it… sharp and clean and yours. It left me hungry for more the second I’d swallowed. Every time.” Her voice caught. “You brought out more of the woman in me than I ever knew was there. You gave me something so sweet, so damned precious, I’d given up hoping for it. A young man’s fire. A champion’s heart. In my bed.”
He reached for her, his hand cupping the back of her head. “Elspeth, I’m not—“
His protest was cut off as she took him into her mouth, sucking him down with a furious, desperate hunger. She hollowed her cheeks, her tongue working the rigid length of him, one hand cradling his balls, gently rolling their heavy weight. She drank him down, the rhythmic pull of her mouth an answer to all the unspoken things. She could feel the tension coiling in his hips, the telltale hardening before the fall.
With a groan that seemed ripped from his core, he came. The warm sweetness burst against the back of her throat. She swallowed convulsively, expertly, taking every drop without spill, a final, devoted consumption. She stayed there until he was soft again, until his breathing slowed from ragged gasps to deep, tired sighs.
She pulled away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and crawled back up to lie beside him. He lay there with his eyes closed, his face a mask of spent confusion, a little unsure of what to make of the situation, of her words, of the violent tenderness of it all.
A long minute passed, filled only by the distant sound of a dog barking in the yard.
“Very well,” he said finally, his eyes still shut. His voice was quiet, resigned. “But one condition.”
She waited, her heart a tight drum in her chest.
“I’ll only stop,” he said, opening his eyes and turning his head to pin her with a look that was both weary and fiercely certain, “when you tell me to.”
She stared at him, emotions too vast and tangled clogging her throat—pride, a sorrowful joy, a devastating fondness. A tear escaped, tracing a path through the fine lines by her eye. “Oh, you dear, sweet, young man,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “I couldn’t do that if I were facing the gallo—“
Before she could finish the word ‘gallows,’ his already-hard cock was sliding into her opening. He’d rolled atop her, his weight settling with a certainty that stole her breath. There was no hurry this time, no frenzy. He sheathed himself fully inside her with one slow, inexorable push, and then he simply… stopped. Buried to the hilt.
He looked down at her, his expression unreadable. Then he began to move.
He fucked her slow. A deep, dragging withdrawal followed by an even slower, complete return. It was a pace that disregarded time, that made the world outside the velvet-draped bed cease to exist. Each stroke was a profound, physical claiming, a silent argument against endings. He braced himself on his elbows, his face inches from hers, his eyes holding hers captive. There was no mischievous glint in them now, only a dark, unwavering intensity.
She wrapped her legs around his waist, locking her ankles at the small of his back, meeting each deliberate thrust. This wasn’t a scrambling of brains; this was an anchoring. A deep, rhythmic healing of whatever had been shattered out on the tourney grounds. She cupped his face, her thumbs stroking his cheekbones as he moved inside her, her silent permission, her answer.
He didn’t speak. He just kept moving, his pace unchanging, his gaze never leaving hers, as if he was memorizing her, as if this specific, endless friction was the only truth left in the world. The candle guttered. The room darkened. And still, he moved, a slow, relentless tide against the shores of a coming dawn.
And still, he moved, a slow, relentless tide against the shores of a coming dawn. That deliberate, devastating pace continued until her first climax took her by surprise, a sudden sharp cresting that ripped a gasp from her throat. He didn’t speed up. He just drove into that sensitivity, deeper, anchoring her through the shuddering aftershocks until a second, softer wave followed on its heels.
Her fingers dug into the hard muscle of his back. “Kerr.”
He answered by shifting his angle, a minute adjustment that lit a new fuse somewhere deep in her core. The slow drag became an exquisite torture, each withdrawal a maddening loss, each return a piercing fulfillment. A third orgasm began to build, not as a peak but as a rising tide, tightening her thighs around him. “Oh, fuck,” she breathed, her head pushing back into the pillow.
“Look at me,” he said, his voice rough gravel.
She forced her eyes open, glazed, to meet his. He held her there, in that gaze, as the third one broke over her, a low, rolling quake that made her sob. He watched it happen, his face a study in fierce concentration, as if witnessing a complex truth being proven. The moment her body went limp, he finally shifted his hips and increased his pace.
It was no longer slow. It was purposeful, powerful, each thrust a solid impact that pushed her up the bed. He hooked an arm under her knee, opening her wider, driving deeper. The sound of skin on skin filled the quiet room, a wet, rhythmic counterpoint to her broken cries. A fourth orgasm, sharper than the rest, spliced into the fifth, blurring the edges between them into one continuous, electric current of sensation.
She was babbling, half-words, pleas, his name. He swallowed them with a kiss, his tongue claiming her mouth as completely as his cock claimed the rest of her. The world dissolved into sensation: the smell of their sweat, the taste of him, the burning stretch, the impossible fullness. A sixth release tore through her, violent and sweet, her vision spotting at the edges.
He broke the kiss, his breath hot on her cheek. “You set the condition,” he grunted, driving into her with a force that shook the bed frame.
She couldn’t answer. A seventh climax was already building, a tsunami from the depths of her, drawn up by that relentless, perfect friction. She screamed into the crook of his neck, her body arching violently off the bed. He held her down, pinned, taking everything she had and demanding more.
Eighth. Ninth. They lost distinction, becoming a single sustained state of shattering pleasure. Her screams were raw, torn from a place beyond thought. She was a vessel being filled past capacity, overflowing, coming apart at the seams. She stared past his shoulder at the cracked mirror on the wall, her vision blurring, her consciousness receding into a white, roaring void.
She lost count after ten orgasms and could not physically stop from screaming, staring half-conscious into the void from what Kerr’s cock had done to her. Her body was no longer her own, but a rippling, clenching instrument of his making. He gave a final, guttural roar, his whole body locking around her.
Kerr spilled inside her, buried to the hilt and pulsing profusely. Heat flooded her, wave after wave, a searing claim. It spilled out of her like a severed artery, a warm cascade onto the sheets beneath them. He collapsed, his full weight sinking into her, but he didn’t pull out. He stayed there, joined, his face buried in her hair.
His breath was ragged against her ear. “You made a grave error setting those conditions,” he said, his voice thick and exhausted.
She could only manage a weak, trembling inhale.
“Now every time I take you,” he whispered, the words a vow etched into her damp skin, “I will do so as if it is the last time.” He shifted slightly, still inside her. “And I will not stop until you are an overjoyed, cum-filled ruin.”
Unable to speak, her body humming, utterly ravaged and glowing, she simply nodded into the pillow. Her hand found his where it lay splayed on the mattress, and she laced her fingers through his. Outside, the first true grey light of dawn began to bleed around the edges of the window shutter.