Kaemon & Egraen
Egraen was splitting firewood in front of her mother’s tiny cabin when Kaemon rode in. She’d felt his approach for the last hour as she worked to replenish the store of firewood in the derelict little hut, and found herself torn between laughter and weary curses. True solitude was a rare thing for a Kurgan — the reason she’d chosen to spend her leave out here in the middle of nowhere — and his presence encroaching on the verges of her awareness was like the blaze of a torch in the blackness of the half-world. She smiled wryly, swinging her axe. Even in his consciousness, Kaemon possessed no indoor voice. His every thought was a shout.
And she knew what he was thinking. He’d been thinking it for the last year as she served with him in the same hand, third to his second. She’d felt his gaze on her night after night, felt the residue of his arousal as he fell upon what other women he could find, or stroked himself to release in the dark. She knew whose image floated behind his eyelids as he found his pleasure. And each time she refused him, his desire and determination to have her only grew.
She’d served with him for a year. She knew what kind of man he was. He was not a man who considered failure an option. Self-denial was a concept entirely alien to him. He was an irresistible force who could not conceive of the existence of an immovable object. And they were entirely alone here. Even if they weren’t, Egraen had her doubts whether anyone would be gallant or stupid enough to come between Kaemon and the thing he wanted.
Too soon he rode up on his hideous, fat brute of a horse. Pulling up hard, he threw a leg over the horse’s neck and dropped heavily to the ground. Resolve radiated off him like waves of heat.
She didn’t look up from her work. He didn’t need that kind of encouragement.
“What do you want?” she asked, raising her axe. Swinging, she clove an ash round cleanly through the middle and she jerked the blade free of the block.
“I have danced your dance for almost a year, Egraen. My feet grow weary.”
Egraen found herself fighting a smile. How do you deal with someone so detached from reality, that the only cause he could fathom for a woman to refuse him was that she wished to drive him mad with desire? To him, the word “no” meant “try again in ten minutes”. Still, she had to admire his persistence.
“You can stop dancing any time.”
He chuckled with deceptive mildness. “I can see you, Egraen. You look at me with a woman’s eyes, yet you resist your own nature.”
She reached down to the pile of rounds and hefted another up onto the block. There was no point denying what he said. He’d only been here for a few moments, and she was already fighting her body’s reaction to him. “It is my own nature to resist or not, as I will. This is my first real leave in over four years, Kaemon. Stop wasting my time and go away.”
He huffed like a bear testing the wind for a scent of prey. “So cold, Egraen. This constant rejection is beginning to hurt my feelings.”
She swung overhand, but her palms were slick with sweat and her mind was no longer on her task. The axe-blade struck a knot and glanced to the side. Right. She straightened, rolling her shoulders to loosen them, and finally met his eye. “You have no concept of self-restraint, do you? Like an infant, you heedlessly grab at all you want. Well, your feelings are none of my concern. Go away.”
He stood before her like a pillar of granite, head and shoulders taller than her, and nearly three times her weight. He lifted his wedge of a chin in exaggerated dignity. As she watched, his hands went to the hem of his tunic. He pulled it off over his head in one clean motion.
She licked her lips and tried to control her breathing.
Everything about him was like stone — his face, his body, even his voice. “I did not come all the way out here to be ordered away like a child. I mean to have you. Now. You will either allow it, or you will stop me.”
Her eyes dropped to his chest, as broad across as the length of her arm, overlaid with muscle and traced with scars. He had earned no sunbursts, he didn’t have the self-discipline for that level of training, but had adorned his torso with decorative tattoos — geometric designs, and oddly, a black lizard crawling across his belly. As she looked lower, she could see a bulge in his trousers he did not bother to hide. His lust hung in the air between them, coloring everything.
An unwanted heaviness settled between her legs as her sex filled with heat. Her breath was coming faster than it should.
“Come here, Egraen.”
Her cheeks grew hot. She met his gaze and swallowed hard. Took a step closer, then another. His chest was heaving like a forge bellows, his nostrils flared. At his sides, his hands opened and closed, over and over. He was as impatient and excited as a child opening a long-expected present, but amid his eagerness she could detect a subtle thread of self-satisfaction.
Smug son of a bitch.
He waited until she was standing right in front of him, just stood there and waited with the arrogance of a god. She reached out and trailed her fingers down his chest and across his belly, let herself enjoy the feel of him, the heat that poured off of his skin, the way his muscles flexed under her touch. She could feel an echo of his pleasure, a phantom sensation along her own torso. Her belly was coiling with desire, her cunt turning liquid. Her eyes never left his.
The flat of her axe slammed against the side of his head, taking him completely unawares. His eyes widened then glazed over, and he went down like a felled tree. Egraen flung the axe behind her, heard the satisfying thunk as the blade sank deep into the chopping block. His limbs wobbly, Kaemon rolled onto his side and tried to get his hands under him so he could rise. His head lolled, blood already soaking into the matted brown ropes of his hair.
Lips pressed together, Egraen kicked him in the ribs — kept kicking until he collapsed again. It wasn’t as good as fucking him would be, but it was better than nothing. He lay on his back, his breath a gale, but not from desire anymore. He wasn’t entirely conscious, but he had enough sense left to hear her words.
“Take no for an answer, Kaemon. Go away. Before one of us really gets hurt.”
Then turning, she went into the cabin, slammed the door and threw the bar across it.
It was only then that she realized her hands were shaking. Leaning back against the heavy oak door, she let out a long breath. Her heart was pounding, her skin hot and damp. Her breasts still tingled, though she knew there would be no memory of her caress left in Kaemon’s flesh. Her hands wanted to stray to her nipples and the apex of her thighs. Not a good idea — at least, not until he was a good ten miles away. Biting her lip, she stood and tried to talk her body out of its arousal, and waited for him to leave.
But he wasn’t leaving, he was —
She threw herself away from the door and grabbed the far wall as the whole cabin shook. Spinning, she just caught a glimpse of metal peeking through the heavy oak of the door before Kaemon pulled the axe-blade free and swung again. This time, the blade bit right through the door and into the bar that held it shut. A third stroke smashed one of the heavy iron hinges into scrap.
Shit. Oh, shit, shit, shit, shit. In her arousal, she’d made an unforgivable blunder, and left her axe outside. If their commander ever heard about it, she’d never live it down.
She could feel wetness pooling between her legs as her body betrayed her. Gods, why did it have to be him? Why did it have to be a seven-foot-tall maniac with the libido of a bull in rut and all the subtlety of a board with a nail through it? There were any number of men who would jump at the chance to warm her blankets, and this lunatic was the one her body craved?
Egraen backed up until her shoulders pressed against the opposite wall, one hand at her throat. Roars as bestial as those of an angered bear resounded outside as her door was violently, shudderingly dismantled. When the two remaining hinges were sufficiently mangled, Kaemon came at the job with his bare hands. She saw his fingers curl around the splintered wood and with a final bellow of fury and exertion he tore the door, hinges and all, from its frame, taking a portion of the cabin wall with it where the bar would not pull free of its braces. Limned in the light of afternoon, he held the door aloft, threw back his head and shouted his triumph at the sky. Then he heaved its splintered remains to the ground.
She stood and stared, her stomach twisting.
He was unbelievable. He was insane.
He was magnificent.
She shook her head, bemused. “That was my door.”
In answer, he came at her, the entire side of his head covered in drying blood, his body soaked with sweat and strewn with wood splinters. She felt a moment of fear when he took her throat in one hand and pushed her head back against the wall. Then his mouth came down on hers and her fear transformed itself.
There was no preamble. No foreplay. What they’d been doing for the last year was foreplay enough for him. His tongue pushed into her mouth, plunging deep, his lips crushing hers until she tasted blood. By the time he moved on, she was having a hard time breathing. Or standing. Or seeing. Her entire body now seemed to consist only of those parts in contact with his.
He half-tore half-dragged her tunic from her, his mouth devouring each inch of skin he uncovered. He paused briefly at her breasts, sucking one nipple into his mouth, drawing hard on it, nipping it with his teeth, while he tugged and twisted the other between his fingers. Then he kissed her again, shoving his groin against her mound, the length of his cock pressing against her engorged clit through too many — gods, too many — layers of fabric.
Laughing, she reached up and grabbed one of the low rafters and hung there as he pulled her feet off the floor. There was no tenderness, no teasing as he yanked off her trousers and boots and hurled them in one tangled bundle into a corner of the room. His hands at her waist, he dropped to his knees and lifted her, pressing her back against the wall and burying his face between her legs.
His tongue slipped into her furrow, stabbing at her swollen clitoris. There was nothing tentative in his exploration, no cautious reconnaissance. He was Kaemon sur-Telamon. In the space of one breath, his tongue was pushing deep into her cunt.
Gods! Her own breath became ragged and her legs wrapped around his head, holding his mouth tight to her. That she had resisted this for almost a year! His thumb rubbed her clit as he fucked her with his tongue, lapping at the upper wall of her channel, where the nerves of her clitoris were rooted, working the same bundle of sensation from within and without at the same time. His stubbled cheeks abraded her inner thighs as his mouth worked magic on her cunt.
When she thought she couldn’t stand it any longer, he surged to his feet and claimed her mouth once more, his lips slick with her wetness. The scent of her own musk filled her nostrils and she could taste herself on his mouth. As his tongue chased hers, his fingers toyed with her clit, flicking it gently back and forth, then slid through her furrow and briefly dipped between her buttocks. The bare tip of one finger stole into her anus for a mere second, before it returned to its previous, delicious pastime.
In a swiftly vanishing corner of her mind, Egraen wondered how someone so quintessentially self-centered could know how to inflict such pleasure. Then she couldn’t think at all, because he had taken her beneath the arms and thrown her, like a bundle of rags, onto the mattress of straw and feathers that lay on the floor at the other end of the room.
Warrior’s instinct saved her. She ducked her head and curled her shoulders to absorb the impact, then rolled onto her back to stare up at him. He loomed like a mountain, his head almost brushing the ceiling. One at a time, he kicked off his boots. His hands were at his waist, tugging at the laces of his leggings, but he’d gone strangely calm. His eyes were like coals, no longer ablaze, but smoldering hot. She watched him push his leggings down past his huge, rigid cock and smiled. Looking him in the eye, she very deliberately bent her knees up and spread her legs wide, offering him a full view of her sex. He stared at it as if all that interested him in the universe was contained within its wet folds.
He growled deep in his throat and dropped down between her legs. Grabbing her by the hips, he lifted her up and pressed his mouth against her, his tongue sliding inside. Then he wrapped his lips around her clit and sucked hard, holding her hips still as she started to buck. Her eyes drifted shut on a wave of pleasure and need. She wanted him closer, wanted to crawl inside of his skin, wanted his cock inside her and his tongue on her clit at the same time, even knowing it wasn’t possible. The walls of her cunt were swollen and clenching, as if grasping for the thing she desired. Then he knelt between her knees and gave it to her, impaled her on his cock, and she forgot everything but the feel of him beside her and in her and all around her.
His hips thrust in sync with her own inner rhythm, his cock plunging in and out of her welcoming flesh. One of his hands skimmed up to tease her breasts, plucking at her nipples until she thought she’d scream from the pleasure of it. The other slipped down to the point where they were joined together, his thumb pressing hard on her engorged clitoris.
Fevered and desperate, she shoved his teasing hand away from her, let her own fingers stroke her clit just the way she liked, while her other hand grabbed him behind his head and pulled him down for a kiss. Her tongue shoved into his mouth, coiling with his, then moved to his neck, stroking and lapping at his earlobe. Her nostrils were filled with the smells of sweat and blood and musk, her skin was hot and tingling. As she felt her climax building, her teeth bit down onto his soft, fleshy earlobe and she was rewarded with a groan.
His own orgasm was approaching, and he just kept pounding into her, his pubic bone slamming against her clit over and over. Throwing back her head, she let out a thin cry as she convulsed, each muscle and nerve ending in her body centered on her cunt, and his cock inside it. She could feel him swelling inside her clenching tunnel, heard his long, low growl right next to her ear. He came with her, snarling, shuddering, and her inner muscles lapped at his shaft, drawing his seed from him and pulling it deep inside her.
Exhausted, his head throbbing so hard even she could feel it, Kaemon collapsed beside her on the mattress and fell almost immediately asleep. With a sigh of satisfaction and resignation, Egraen laid her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes.
*
Some hours later he shifted uncomfortably, his shoulder where her head rested nudging her awake. “What is it?” she asked him, aware that he had not slept much, though he must be as exhausted as she.
“It’s nothing,” he lied.
She slid a hand up his belly and bent her head back to look at him. “Something’s obviously bothering you. What is it?”
He sighed hard enough to fill the canvas of a trireme. “I am thinking perhaps it was not such a good idea, letting you talk me into this.”
For a second, she couldn’t believe her ears. Then all she could hear was a rush of blood as her vision became a red tunnel with him at the center of it. She sat up, thinking of all the different ways she could kill him while he lay there oblivious.
“What,” she said very calmly, “are you talking about?”
He regarded her somberly. “I am not sure if you are aware,” he said, “that I have something of a reputation with the ladies.”
Her anger evaporated and she sat there, willing herself not to smile. The man spoke with equal fluency in two languages: hyperbole and understatement.
“I am…how do I put this?” he mused, frowning. “I am like the little butterfly.”
Egraen scrutinized him — from his matted ropes of hair stained red and festooned with wood chips, to his scarred, bulging barrel of a torso, to his thighs, each nearly as thick as her whole body — and determinedly bit the inside of her cheek. Bit until she could taste blood. Butterfly?
“I flutter from one flower to the next, drinking deeply of the sweet nectar,” he clarified, “but I never linger long at one bloom.”
Clearly he was serious. Insane, but serious. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“You’re young, Egraen,” he growled at her, scratching absently at the crusted blood on his ear. “Not even eighty.”
“Kaemon—”
“I’m nearly two hundred and thirty, Egraen. Two hundred and thirty. Do you have any idea how many women I have had in my life?”
“I’m guessing it’s a lot,” she ventured wryly.
He glared up at her, his face like a block of granite. “Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. Now ask me how many times I have ever felt…this. Ask me if I have ever wanted one woman enough to deny myself all the others.”
“Laying it on a little thick, aren’t we?” she murmured, but her smile was slipping.
He put his hands over his face as if in despair. She could sense his bleakness as the full import of what they’d done finally sank into him. “You have ruined me, Egraen. You might as well geld me as you would a horse. I would leave your bed this instant,” he said very quietly, “if I thought there was a chance I might ever again find pleasure outside of it.”
She wanted to laugh, but he clearly believed what he was saying. She laid her hand along his cheek, stroking her thumb across his lips, feeling her eyes begin to sting. “Keep talking like that,” she said with deceptive sweetness, “and you will be leaving my bed, willingly or no. Maybe permanently.”
His lips quirked up at one corner. “I can think of no better way to die than under the loving strokes of your axe, Egraen.”
“Perhaps I can think of something else to stroke you with,” she said with a grin. Her hand slid down his torso to find his cock already hard. She shook her head. No self-control at all.
He growled deep in his throat as she shimmied down his length and paused with her face poised above the tip of his shaft. His eyes burned into her. She wet her lips and he thrust upward, urging her to take him in her mouth. Her hand encircled him, stroking gently up and down, and her tongue darted out to delicately lick the tiny drop of moisture that had formed at the tip of his prick. She grinned as his entire body twitched at the contact. Her eyes locked with his as she wrapped her lips around his shaft and sucked him into her mouth.
“Ah, gods!” he hissed between his teeth, his back arching off the mattress. One huge hand buried itself in her hair, pushing her head further down, until the tip of his cock was deep in her throat. His eyes never left hers. Slowly, she drew her head back up, increasing the suction as she eased him back out of her mouth, swirling her tongue around and around his shaft. Then she enveloped him again, swallowing his length all the way down her throat. “Gods! Egraen, stop before you unman me.”
She released his cock with a loud pop and grinned over at him. He glowered at her, frustrated and impatient. With his hand still in her hair, he hauled her back up his length until her face was even with his. His other hand slipped between her legs, sliding through her wet furrow and into her dripping cunt. His thumb flicked across her clit, and her breath caught, her humor suddenly gone.
Her lips were almost touching his, her voice reduced to a breath. “Are you going to fuck me, or not?”
He grinned and took his cock, placed the head right against her opening. Held it there, just barely inside her, his eyes staring into hers. “Never leave me, Egraen,” he snarled against her lips. “Never leave me.”
She could understand why he wanted her to say it, but she couldn’t make that kind of promise. Of course she couldn’t. They were Kurgae’in. They were slaves. They went where they were told, and did what was expected of them. Love was inconvenient, and always, always temporary. He knew this as well as she did.
“Fuck me,” she whispered, licking along his parted lips with her tongue. “Make me never want to leave you.”
He thrust upward, sheathing himself to the hilt, his balls nestling against her ass. He grabbed her hips, his fingers digging into her buttocks, and slammed her down on his cock again and again. She reared up and reached between them, rubbing tight circles around her clit, her other hand squeezing and fondling her breasts while he watched. She knew he could feel everything she did to herself just as if she were doing it to him. Just as she could feel everything he did, from the slick glide of her own flesh as it enclosed him, to the texture of her skin at his fingertips. Therein lay the ultimate joy of Kurgan intimacy—this perfect sharing of emotion and sensation.
Her labia were swelling, her clit so hard she could see it jutting forward from the cradle of her mound. Both his hands gripped her ass, holding her still now as he pounded up into her. His finger stole toward her other opening, prodding gently at the tight ring of muscle. She could feel how close he was, could feel her own climax burgeoning.
Then she felt his finger sheath itself in her anus, and her synapses exploded. A scream tore from her throat, a sound she barely recognized as her own voice. As she bucked and thrashed, her head lashing back on a neck so distended she feared it might snap, he just kept pounding into her, his clever finger reaming that forbidden hole until she thought she’d die from the sensation. As one climax found its resolution, another erupted, and she rode them, one into another and another as his cock and his finger worked in perfect synchronicity. And then the tip of his shaft slammed against her womb, swelling and jerking inside her, and his come shot up into her welcoming channel. His roar was like the roar of a dragon’s fire igniting.
He slid his finger from her and his arms came around her, drawing her in, sheltering her. She sank down onto his torso and lay her head on his chest, his heart thudding in her ear through the thick wall of flesh and bone that surrounded it. Her own heart seemed to match its cadence, as if their bodies had aligned themselves to each other.
“Never leave me, Egraen,” he whispered, tightening his arms until they were like steel bands around her.
She said nothing, just reveled in the hard planes of his body pressed all along her length, his flaccid cock still nestled inside her. Held herself fully inside this place, this moment, this feeling, this tiny pocket of happiness and fulfillment.
Knowing she would leave him, soon or late.
Because they were slaves. They were Kurgae’in.