Highlander's Desire: Winter Solestice (Against All Odds Series 2) Page 9

  To her utter amazement, in a few minutes she was down the side of the plateau, her soft and elegant royal gown dirtied and torn from her journey, her hands dirty and her arms streaked with soil. But she still had a firm grasp on the healer’s bag and she was in the clear. Puffing all the harder, she ran, not daring to look back. She simply ran, her gasps filling her ears as much as the sound of the klaxon in the distance. Before her stretched an alien world in which she was now alone. Above her, the color of sky was just starting to deepen into darkness. She thought that once she got a bit farther away, she could use the last light to search the healer’s bag for some sort of communication device with which to send out a distress call. Of course, any such call might well be picked up by the palace guards, leading them to her all the more efficiently.

  Gwen was in mid-thought and mid-stride when the ground shook under her feet. She came to a stop, casting her eyes back and forth, eyeing the ground. The soil beneath her was part sand and part dried and cracked mud, and all of it was trembling hard. With the shaking of the ground came a low rumbling that turned louder until it drowned out the distant noise from the Palace. Then Gwendolyn staggered and stumbled at a dreadful upheaval right in front of her. The ground pushed itself upward and outward—no, something pushed at it, something large, perhaps twice the size of a man. The shape rose up out of the dirt and unfolded legs from the sundered soil onto the ground. It had a long body with a segmented exoskeleton, resembling a sand-colored lobster. It had four massive, multi-jointed legs, two on either side, and from the front of the body, under the eyes, two long tentacles writhed, each one tipped with a scorpion-like stinger the size of a man’s fist.

  Gwen’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open, but she was too terrified even to scream at what she recognized from zoological surveys of Sarma as a shambleclaw, one of the planet’s native predators. They lived underground and came up to hunt at dusk and through the night. She knew there were dangerous things in the wilderness of Sarma and had opted to take her chances with them, but she had forgotten about the shambleclaws. Now she had blundered right into the path of one. The creature raised its stingers at her. She was defenseless and could hope only for the end to be quick.

  Paralyzed with terror, Gwendolyn closed her eyes and heard a slicing sound in the air, which she took to be one of the beast’s tendrils lunging at her. But she pried her eyes open again at the sound of a high-pitched squeal that was not her own. The creature reared up before her, glaring not at Gwendolyn but at something above and behind her. She made herself turn halfway around to look, and only now did she notice the whine of an engine. A landfloater had come swooping in from the rear. A muscular Sarmian male manned the controls while standing up behind him, wielding a Sarmian power bow, was Dantar.

  Startled, Gwen reeled at the sight of him, almost falling over. Dantar commanded his pilot, “Hold altitude steady and move in closer!” The pilot maneuvered as commanded and the floater came nearer to the shambleclaw, which had a spear buried in its side and now flailed its tendrils at the craft. Dantar aimed again and fired another spear. This one struck home in the beast’s other side. The animal shrieked and wailed, lashing out with both tendrils, reaching for its foe and wanting nothing more than to sink a massive stinger into Dantar’s flesh. “Come about!” shouted Dantar, and the pilot steered the craft in an arc, keeping the shambleclaw’s attention on himself and the king—and diverting the predator from Gwen.

  The shambleclaw spun around to follow the floater, closing a little more of the distance between itself and the craft, giving Dantar a new opening—but also giving one to itself. It pressed its sudden opportunity and swung a tentacle forward, out, and around—and just the tip of the skin-searing stinger ripped the surface of the king’s bare shoulder. Dantar threw back his head and winced in sudden agony, and Gwen finally let out the scream she could not find a moment before. The pilot, unbidden, pulled the floater back out of range of the tendrils even as Dantar, staggering from the pain and from what must surely have been a partial dose of the creature’s venom, steadied his shaking arms enough to aim the power bow one more time. The spear flew free and sank itself into the spot exactly between the shambleclaw’s head and thorax, burying itself deeply in a soft spot between the plates of its body armor. The shambleclaw emitted a sickening noise like a scream cut off by something wet inside of it. It reared back, flailing and thrashing its tentacles wildly in the air, and finally fell over, becoming a twitching mass of legs and tentacles that would not rise again.

  At once the pilot landed the floater and Dantar sank into the passenger’s seat, grasping at the open wound on his shoulder. It was a thing of inflamed, exposed layers of inner flesh, surrounded by a noisome purple-redness of skin. Without hesitation, Gwen rushed to the landed craft, holding up the healer’s bag to the pilot. “Here!” she cried. “I took this from where I was. Please help him!”

  The pilot took the pouch from Gwen and treated the wound with a frothy substance and a skin-like sealant. Dantar locked eyes on Gwen. His gaze was even blearier than hers had been when she awoke in the royal bedchamber. “You should not have run,” he groaned.

  As the king shut his eyes and slipped off into a stupor Gwen watched him, the pain on her face mirroring the pain he must surely have felt before he blacked out. Feelings churned up inside her, more feelings than she could name. She had only wanted to get away. She did not want this.

  Gwen was so fixated on Dantar and his fate that the import of what she was doing did not register with her when she willingly climbed into the floater with the pilot and the half-conscious Dantar. She only marveled at the way he passed into and out of lucidity with a strength that would be the pride of any warrior. She only half heard the pilot explain that the shambleclaws could not pass through the solid rock strata of the plateau, which was why the king had ordered this palace built atop it. She listened to Dantar as he ordered the pilot, with unwavering command in spite of his condition, that he was to be taken to the same bedchamber from which his consort had fled and that he was to be treated and spend the night there.

  After all that had occurred—her refusal to accept his suit, her escape attempt, his taking a shambleclaw’s stinger for her—he actually still wanted to share a bed with her, and actually trusted her to remain by his side and make no reprisal against his attempt to coerce her submission. What kind of man was this, after all?

  Back in the Royal bedchamber, the healer treated Dantar in Gwendolyn’s presence as if Gwen had done nothing against her, as if her bashing the healer in the head to make her escape had never happened. If anything, she was still deferential to Gwendolyn as her future queen. Without so much as a word of acknowledgement of anything that Gwen had done, the healer excused herself after further ministering to Dantar’s wound, putting a fresh protein strip on it, and feeding him some sort of antivenin that would see him through the night and ensure a full recovery.

  Gwen noticed guards posted outside the portal before it slid shut with the healer on the other side of it. The intended of the king would be going nowhere tonight. She would stay in this chamber with him as he lay sleeping off the venom of the shambleclaw in the bed where he had meant to spend this night mounting her and binding them as one. And so Gwen watched him sleep, and marveled all the more at her temptation to climb between the covers with him and just lie at his side. She opted to sleep on one of the divans instead, and chose one that faced the bed. She sat up, watching him by starlight in the darkened bedchamber, watching the plates of his pecs rise and fall with his sleeping breaths, and played over and over in her mind the memory of him coming to her rescue. She had rejected him. She had all but hated him. And he had saved her.

  He had saved her.

  Sometime during the night, after spending who knows how much time watching Dantar sleep, Gwen passed off into a slumber of her own. She awoke with a start the next morning, the memory of where she was and what had happened flashing into her mind. She gasped, bolted up on the divan, and looked
over to the bed. There he was, sitting up against the headboard, a breathtaking sight in the first rays of the day—silently watching her. His lips slowly spread into a smile.

  “Good morning, Gwendolyn,” he said, with some sleep lingering in his voice.

  “Dantar,” she said, blinking. “Are you… are you all right?”

  “I am better,” he replied. “And all the better for knowing that you are unhurt.”

  She blinked again, incredulously. “I’m unhurt? You’re actually concerned about me? Dantar, I ran away. I was ready to risk my life out there to get away from you. I wanted nothing to do with you. And all you can think about is that I’m unhurt?”

  “You are my chosen queen, my intended bride. Even more important to me than my kingdom is the well-being of my lady.”

  Gwen stood up from the divan, wanting to pace the floor, not knowing what to say to him. All the feelings that had churned up inside her when he rescued her from that creature came churning back again. “Dantar,” she said, “I wish you wouldn’t call me that. I wish you wouldn’t act as if we’re more to each other than we are. We haven’t even known each other a whole day and you’re talking as if we have a life together ahead of us.”

  “We do have a life before us, Gwendolyn, if you would but let it be so. I offer you the love of a king. No one on my planet or yours can offer you more than I. No man of your world or mine can love you better than I. You have but to take my hand and join me in our bed, and it shall be done. All that I have shall be yours—my body, my heart, my zazansa, my world and realm. Can it be so unpleasant a thing?”

  “But Dantar,” Gwen protested, feeling her protests growing weak in a way that troubled her, “it’s like I said before. You can’t just command love to happen.”

  “Why? Does it not require merely a mutual, shared act of will; a mutual opening of hearts and a mutual desire of bodies? Empires have thus been built, Gwendolyn. I look upon you now and I see a woman in relief that I have come to no harm, a woman who would have grieved more than she thought she could had I perished in the act of saving her. It is in your eyes, Gwendolyn. It is not gratitude; it is more. Why do you deny it? Why do you deny what could transpire in this bed even now? Would your heart not be even more gladdened and joyous in my sex than it is in the mere knowledge that I shall live?”

  Before Gwen could respond, Dantar pulled the bedsheets from him in a single, sweeping motion. He then stripped away the silken leggings from his lower body and cast them to the floor by the bed. Gwen forgot to breathe at the sight of his mighty musculature fully exposed to her. Between the tremendous trunks of his legs, under a wreath of pubic hair, was his royal scepter, wondrously long and wondrously thick, veins twisting along its length, an ample and delicious foreskin surrounding a blunt mushroom head. It was such a heavy bludgeon of flesh that it could not stand straight up; it curved forward, throbbing its erect readiness.

  Gwen felt her resistance start to crumble like the palace walls before an oncoming storm.

  Dantar held out a hand to her and said, “I do not wish to conquer you and make you someone that you are not. I ask only to make the two of us together more than we are apart. As King and Queen, I wish us to grow our lives together and make all that I am a part of all that you are. Is that not all that any marriage should be? What matter that we have known one another for so short a time? Come to bed with me and we shall make a short time forever.”

  There was not a trace of logic in anything that he said. As a woman of reason and intellect, Gwendolyn Rush knew that she should dismiss his every word, reject it all out of hand. This was no basis for a life, not any kind of life that she could understand. And yet…as a scientist she routinely faced a universe filled with things she did not understand. That was the nature of science—the embracing of the unknown without fear.

  The next thing she knew she was climbing onto the bed, her eyes riveted on the majestic thing rising and curving between Dantar’s thighs. She brought her eyes up to meet his, and he moved at once. With the same hand he had held out to her, he took her by the arm and pulled her to him. All at once, Gwen was encircled by the awesome, sweetly crushing arms of the King of Sarma and received his lips and tongue in a kiss more luxurious than all the furnishings of the royal bedchamber.

  Gwen’s resistance was gone as if blown away by the very sandstorm from which she had been taken. One kiss became another, and another and another, and somewhere amid the kisses his hands slid the gown from her body and made her nearly naked, with only her halter and underthings remaining. His warm hands caressed and explored the full, round curves of her thighs and buttocks; roamed the large and plump contours below her waist without inhibition or restraint. He parted their kiss long enough to ask, “Why do you speak of your body as though it is not a thing of desire? Do the men of Earth not compete to enter and be inside a woman such as you?”

  Feeling more shy and vulnerable than she had yet felt in all her time here, Gwen softly replied, “A lot of men don’t. A lot of them would rather do it to…another kind of woman. One who’s built a little…smaller than I am.”

  “They are fools,” Dantar said. “They are not worthy of you. I shall ever be worthy and I shall ever be true.” And he took her mouth in another torrid kiss to erase all doubt. At the slow parting of their lips, he drilled his eyes into hers and asked, “Will you do me the honor of going to my zazansa and tasting of me?”

  Understanding what he wanted, Gwen nodded yes and moved herself down to his parted thighs where his erect bludgeon awaited her. She breathed in, catching a whiff of his musky man scent, before parting her lips and putting the foreskin-encircled head in her mouth. Dantar leaned his head back against his pillow, shut his eyes, and let out a long “Mmmmm…” of pleasure, the first intimate pleasure of the royal bed. Responding to his delight, Gwen opened wide and slid further down his veined and pulsing shaft, filling her mouth with him. He tasted marvelous. Consuming his piece, Gwen felt herself slowly becoming a denizen of another world.

  All thoughts of resistance were gone. All protests and inhibitions, all reasons for not accepting his desire or her own were now null and void. Gwen had not known as many men in her life as she would have liked, and she poured years of too much wanting and too little having into the way she sucked Dantar’s tool. Dantar flexed the plates of his chest and ab muscles and, at the satisfaction of his man-meat being hungrily devoured by his chosen mate, emitted grunts and groans that were more like the utterances of an animal than the sounds that a king would make. His leg muscles twitched and his toes curled in response to the way she pulled at his length and let it slide along her tongue. He took pride at the portion of his erection she could slip into her mouth, and found utter delight in the way she let it slip out only to move her tongue to the base and swirl it around the circumference. He knew instinctively that Gwen must have practiced oral sex in her mind thousands of times, anticipating and hoping for a moment such as this. He resolved that there would be many such moments, not only this morning but each day for the rest of their lives, and that they would be the preamble to still greater joys.

  Gwen continued making a meal of the bounty between Dantar’s legs, taking his piece in long and sumptuous sucks, and sending her tongue down behind the root of his maleness to lick at the generous roundness of the man-fruits that lay so ripe in his sac. She feasted on him and sent wave after wave of delight rolling through the fantasy of muscles that was his body, savoring the succulent taste of him, feeling as though she would never get enough—until at last he looked down his torso at her, stroked the dark thickness of her hair, and said, “Come back up now and take me inside your gliarra.”

  Once again context told Gwen his meaning. Her gliarra could be only one thing, and hearing that he was ready for it, she was all at once aware of how wet and engorged it had become from the way she had sucked his zazansa. Wearing a Mona Lisa smile and exhaling in anticipation, she climbed back up onto the bed beside Dantar and lay on her back with knees bent and
thighs parted. He moved with all the speed, surety, and skill that he had shown rescuing her outside, whisking away her halter and undergarments and making her naked. With the same decisiveness he climbed atop her and lowered himself into the valley between her legs, bringing his bludgeon, wet from her sucking, into play. Gwen wrapped her arms around his shoulders and moaned long and joyously at the first passage of Dantar’s tool between her slippery folds and deep into her passage.

  Dantar took her with all the pent-up fire and passion of having wanted to be inside her since the day before. All of his unrelieved wanting went into every deep, hard, swift stroke of his long and beautiful tool inside Gwen’s wet and quivering gliarra. While pumping fast and furiously in and out of her, he lowered his face to hers and kissed and licked her lips. “At last I am in you,” he moaned softly into her mouth. “I am in you and you are so good. I wish never to take myself out of you. I wish I could keep it in you forever.” And he beat on and on, throwing the full force of his muscles against her, slamming ecstatically against Gwen’s mound and driving his hard weapon of flesh into her tightening wetness.

  Gwen made incoherent and rapturous sounds of bliss under Dantar, accepting his every thrust, receiving and welcoming his every stroke, and feeling herself becoming someone new with the way he penetrated and possessed her. She felt her flesh and her being joining his, yielding to him and merging with him. She felt his awesome erection making her a part of him as it claimed the moist and slick depths of her sex. She could only imagine that he was reaching all the way to her womb, and that when his moment arrived he would pour himself into her as a raging river.