Читать книгу Dominic - Elizabeth Amber - Страница 12

With methodical precision, Dominic removed the weapon that hung at his side and positioned it on the mantel with the same care Emma had once seen a concert violinist employ in the handling of his instrument. Would he take such care with a woman? she wondered.

The wayward thought shocked her into speech.

“As you say, it grows late, signore. Why do you linger here?” she demanded, wary now not only of him but of her reaction to him.

His voice when it came was softness threaded with iron. “It is for your husband to explain.”

Those long fingers of his found the top button on his uniform and purposefully unfastened it. She took a faltering backward step, her wide eyes riveted to that large, capable hand working at his open collar.

Her incredulous gaze shot up to tangle with his, and what she read there confirmed her shocking deduction. Finally Carlo’s full intentions in bringing him here to her sank in.

“Carlo?” she gasped weakly, still unable to believe it could be true.

“Take off that damned robe and gown and let’s get on with this.” Carlo sighed. Though his tone was weary, the resolve in it shook her.

“No!” She folded the edges of her robe one atop the other, sealing the fabric so tightly at her throat she was nearly choked. Her eyes went to the door, but Dominic was watching her too keenly, and she knew he would prevent her from dashing through it, were she to try.

“Have you listened to nothing I’ve said?” Carlo asked, his voice full of misery. “I can’t fuck you tonight. He can.”

Going to him, she latched urgently on to his arm, giving it a hard shake. “No!”

“Yes, darling wife. My illustrious comrade here has graciously agreed to service you tonight in my stead. You shouldn’t find him too onerous. His partners in Else World are said to enjoy him.”

She darted a mortified glance at Dominic. By now, all nine buttons had been released from their moorings. The vertical split in his tunic hung open to reveal a heavily muscled chest, its sculpted velvet skin crisscrossed with the long-healed scars of vicious wounds.

“Remove your nightclothes, Emma, or I’ll do it for you,” Carlo threatened. But she didn’t hear. Her attention remained fixated on that shadowy, masculine chest. On its well-defined ridges, planes, and valleys. Her skin tingled with awareness of him, a stranger standing half a room away. Her fingernails dug half moons into her husband’s skin.

When she didn’t immediately comply with his wishes, Carlo turned angry. Ripping her hands away, he raised his arm as if to backhand her.

With a curt shriek, she ducked her head.

For a giant, Dominic moved quickly. Before the blow could fall, he’d blocked it.

Clasping a trembling hand over her lips, Emma eyed the door. Her view of it was framed in the gap between the two men who stood before her, and she watched for an opportunity to bolt past them. She’d never seen her husband so out of control, not even last month.

Carlo hesitated, searching Dominic’s expression. Something he read there had him lowering his arm and coming to comfort her.

Taking both of her hands in his, he spoke earnestly. “We must take care to ensure that our child arrives into this world in good health, for I cannot sire another in you, Emma.” His face contorted with emotion. “Give me this one gift, cara. I beg you. And make it a son.”

“Have you sought medical aid outside of the military hospital?” she argued, gripping his sleeve. “Is there truly no source of help for you?”

He shook his head, hopeless. When he spoke again, his tone was leaden. “There’s nothing to be done. Enjoy Dominic’s fucking of you. It will be the last you’ll have for the rest of your days.”

For the briefest and longest of moments she stood motionless, quietly panicking as she read the immutable truth of this in his eyes. Instinct pulled her toward escape. She slid her hands from his and sidled along the foot of the bed, this time heading in the direction of the door that adjoined her room, instead of toward the one that led to the hall.

The sudden heat of Dominic’s body at her back stopped her. Realizing her mistake, she tried to evade him. But fingers of iron grasped her upper arms, imprisoning her.

Though he still wore his tunic, it hung open now. Locked close, his sleek torso scorched her spine through her nightclothes.

She reached across herself, crumpling the cuff of his sleeve with imploring fingers. “Signore. Dominic. You must help us—”

“That’s precisely why he’s here,” her husband jeered.

“On your knees, Carlo.” She felt the words rumble in the chest behind her. Heard them expelled from lips bent close to her ear. “Prepare her with your mouth. Bring her to the edge of pleasure, that she might better accept me.”

But for once, Carlo didn’t leap to obey his idol. He only watched as, despite her opposition, Dominic easily drew lace and silk over her head and tossed her clothing to the floor.

Emma yelped in alarm and slapped a palm to cover the apex of her thighs. Wrapping a concealing forearm across her breasts, she punished Dominic’s midriff with her elbow to try to force him away.

Heedless of her efforts, he snaked a viselike arm around her, securing it just below her own at her breasts. Though he manacled her to him, his embrace was that of elegant strength rather than the crude force her husband had employed.

Jerking his head to indicate the waning light at the window, Dominic again remonstrated with Carlo. “Daylight slips away! Ready your wife for me before it’s too late!”

Carlo visibly shook himself from a torpor and then obediently bent to go down on one knee.

“And bring the cream.”

At Dominic’s low-voiced command, Carlo’s face drained of color. His and Emma’s eyes flew in tandem to the jar on the night table at the far side of the bed, both gazing at it in mesmerized horror. She had earlier placed it there herself, intending it for Carlo’s use. But now it seemed another man would employ it.

A wounded snarl sprang from Emma’s throat, and she renewed her struggles. Dominic grunted whenever a sharp elbow dented his stomach, but otherwise he ignored her. She felt him shrug the tunic from his shoulders and then rip it off with his free hand.

Her mind raced down one avenue and then another, anxiously seeking a more palatable solution to their situation. But no other viable option presented itself. She needed more time to think.

Without a word, Carlo secured the jar of cream, opened it, and set it upon a side table, which he brought within Dominic’s reach. Knowing exactly what would be required once they began, her husband moved the dish of oil and one of the basins closer as well. Then he came to stand before her at the foot of the bed.

Emma twisted her fingers in the collar of Carlo’s tunic, and her frantic eyes tried to catch his. “Summon Jane. And your brothers,” she begged. “Ask them for help. Ask them if there’s another way.”

Averting his gaze, Carlo carefully detached himself from her grip. “No.”

“They won’t think less of you because you can’t perform,” she argued, accurately gauging the basis for his refusal. “Your injuries aren’t your fault. Nor are they any cause for shame.”

Dominic’s warm breath stirred the hair at her nape as he spoke. “Do you really think the members of your family will welcome an interruption? Now? Have you forgotten they will be engaged in the same Moonful rituals as we are soon to be?”

He was right. She knew he was, yet—

The wool of his trousers rasped as his thigh split her softer ones, sending a rush of vulnerability through her. Boldly it moved ever higher between hers until her naked, gaping flesh rode the seductive rub of its long–muscled strength. She moaned, helpless under a first, unanticipated brush of pleasure.

Carlo sank to his knees in front of her in much the same way she had earlier knelt before him. His hand ran upward along the length of Dominic’s thigh, which retreated to make way for him.

Catching her knees when she made a futile attempt to close them, Carlo held them wide. His thumbs parted her pursed slit, and he leaned close until his hair tickled the underside of her belly. “Resign yourself, Emma. Another course of action could prove disastrous.”

His tongue flicked out. She jerked at its first lash, then drew an unsteady breath as it stroked the length of her opening. Once. Twice. And then on its third pass, it snaked inside her and out again, and then again as quickly, mimicking the thrust of a male organ.

He’d only performed this service for her once before, on the evening of their marriage. She’d found it interesting. But it had been a brief exercise between them then, a mere tantalization too quickly withdrawn.

Now his lips and tongue worked their wiles on her far more intently and with obvious skill. Where he had honed such skill, she couldn’t help but wonder. He seemed determined to woo her body into submission, but she had a niggling suspicion that his performance was for some reason intended more to impress his comrade than to please her.

Though her channel dutifully moistened, her churning thoughts kept true pleasure at bay. For the moment, it was easy to deny any further stirrings of it.

She felt Dominic’s stillness, his keen awareness that another man was working between her legs, servicing her with his mouth. His grip on her arms tensed, and she sensed his covetous desire. Somehow she knew he was imagining himself acting in her husband’s stead. Knew she would soon be handed over to him to do just that.

Warm, unfamiliar lips touched the column of her throat and traced it downward, pausing to savor the angled nook where throat eased into shoulder. Lightly he suckled her skin, mimicking Carlo’s attentions to her elsewhere. She shifted, stiffening when the soft skin of her bottom encountered the masculine thatch at Dominic’s groin. And something else. Something thick and hard that prodded her hip.

He’d unfastened his trousers! This somehow made the ultimate goal of this entire engagement suddenly seem far more shockingly possible.

Gasping, she pulled away and glanced at him, putting a hand over the place on her neck that he’d just marked with his mouth. His head lifted, and silver tangled with brown. Thick, charcoal lashes lowered to half mast as he read the new awareness in her gaze.

Something simmered deep within this man, she realized. Something evil that warred with the good in him.

Her eyes fell to his lips, saw they were wet. The place they’d kissed was wet as well and cool in the night air.

“Please. Summon my family. Or a physician from Florence,” she entreated. “I’m Human. Perhaps my child can be born in the usual way of Human children.”

Warm, silken breath drifted over her cheek, but Dominic’s tone when he spoke was stark and implacable. “Your child bears the blood of the Satyr and must therefore be born by means of the ancient ritual. In the hours that lie ahead, I will service you in your husband’s stead. But only so your body can perform the function of giving birth come dawn. Carlo will remain with us throughout the night. If it comforts you, imagine I am he when I come into you—”

His words were abruptly severed as his entire body ripped taut. Ridged abdominal muscles contracted and clenched against her spine, hardening to iron. The arm that manacled her ribs tightened, stealing her breath.

She and Carlo both stilled as a bolt of recognition struck them.

Dominic was beginning to undergo the Change.

Behind her, he bit out a low, gravelled groan that was a blend of both joy and suffering. Then, with a rough, animal snarl, he shoved his trousers lower to sag and bunch haphazardly over the tops of his black boots. He fought the fabric’s restraint for a few seconds and then kicked them off.

He was fully naked now except for those boots. A light coat of faun-colored fur was sprouting on his haunches, tickling her bottom and the back of her thighs. It was one of the first of the changes that would come over him on this sacred night.

Unable to help herself, she twisted, peering downward between them. Her breath hitched at the daunting sight that met her eyes. His prick was enormous! Straining high and eager from the coarse, tangled nest at his groin, it was easily as thick as her wrist and as almost as long as her forearm.

She swallowed audibly and looked toward the window as panic rose to a boil within her. The moon had not yet shown itself. But soon.

With its appearance would come another more profound change. One that would gift this untamed male animal with a second rod that was twin to this one. Then he would open her with them and slide those shafts as deep inside her as it was possible for a man to go.

And then he would give her his seed.

It seemed impossible that he would fit. Yet already, high in the waiting aperture between her legs, her tissues were moistening, beginning to ready for him, yearn for him. A long, low growl emanated from his throat as if he knew.

His handling of her changed subtly, becoming more purposeful. His hands were more possessive now and sensuous as his body realigned itself with hers, pressing her right shoulder into the cushioned bone of his pectoral muscle. The plush globes of her buttocks gave against the rock of his thigh.

And all the while, his breath came in steady, deep draughts. Those beautiful lips nuzzled her shoulder, her nape, and her throat. He was locking on her scent. Marking her with his.

Soon, very soon, he would lose his grip on the power of higher reasoning. The primal need percolating in his veins would begin to dictate his every action. Once completely in the throes of the Calling, he would kill in order to mate with her. Not Carlo—not even the Satyr lords themselves—would be able to stop him then. Not without killing him.

Carlo’s tongue found her again, more voluptuous in its duties now, as if Dominic’s altered physical state had excited him. She glanced toward her husband where he still worked between her thighs. Unlike his friend, he didn’t grimace and groan. His cheekbones weren’t flushed with desire.

It was true then. There could be no question. Carlo remained unaffected by the moon’s pull. He wasn’t going to experience the Change.

If she didn’t accept this other man—this stranger—into her body tonight, her son or daughter wouldn’t emerge at sunrise. It would die inside her, unborn.

Carlo’s need to prove himself in Else World’s war had exacted far too terrible a price. She felt angry at his sacrifice. And a trifle guilty. For she’d long suspected that the only reason he’d retreated to that other world had been to escape her. To escape the burden of her need for a love he didn’t feel for her.

Was this one night too much of a sacrifice for her to make in return so their child could live? So he could become a father and she a mother?

This reasoning calmed her as nothing had before, and she gave in to the inevitable necessity of what must happen in the hours ahead. A naked male stranger was embracing her. Planning to copulate with her. Her husband condoned this. And she would allow it. For tonight. For her child.

Once her struggles ebbed, it became impossible to ignore the potent stimulation her two lovers were providing.

Under Carlo’s attention, her feminine flesh had plumped and swollen with the heated rush of lustful blood. Her splayed thighs trembled now, and her hips swayed languidly back and forth, aiding his tongue in its stroke. Her channel had become a slick void, ready to welcome him inside, if only he could oblige.

From the corner of her eye, she saw a masculine hand reach out. Dominic’s. Transfixed, she watched him scoop a dollop of cream from the jar on the table.

The muscles of his left arm shifted along her back. She jerked when blunt fingers came between her rear cheeks, daubing her pruney ring with cool cream. Gently he began oiling it.

For a while, his heavy cock set the pace of their ménage, rocking at her hip in time to the languorous stroke it required. Her slit and Carlo’s mouth could only haplessly dance to his tune, which determined how often and how deeply the lips of a wife and a husband would marry.

She tried to disassociate her mind from what was happening. To shut out the slick smacking sounds of fingers and tongues and mouths as the two men attended to her.

Dominic’s right hand covered her breast, surprising her into overlaying his with her own.

Her free hand fell to the top of Carlo’s head, and for a moment, her palms connected her to both men. Absently she smoothed a lock of her husband’s fine hair and watched it flop back into place. She no longer loved him, and it was impossible for her to fully understand his physical loss, but she felt regret for the grief it caused him.

The fingers at her breast drew outward to pluck and twist at her sensitive nipple, sending a prurient thrill over her. Dominic’s touch on her there almost seemed to hum, alive with some strange, stimulating force. Sparks arrowed directly from this distended peak to throb at the nubbed stem of flesh Carlo now worshipped. An erotic pulse, stronger than any she’d ever felt before, reverberated outward from it along her slit.

It squeezed. Once. Hard.

No! Surely, she wasn’t going to embarrass herself in that way. Surely she wouldn’t attain fulfillment standing here in the middle of the room, where her features would be revealed to anyone who cared to look when it happened.

Embarrassed, she pushed Carlo away. And immediately she wished him back. Wished for a finish to the wildfire passion he and Dominic had lit in her. She stroked his hair again, trying to induce him closer without the use of words.

But her husband only pressed his cheek to the sloping underside of her rounded midriff, kissing her there with masculine lips still rouged by her own feminine juices.

Dominic’s mischievous palm at her breast began to rove. Like a dark cloud, it stroked stealthily down the landscape of her body, along her breastbone, between ribs, and over her gently rounded belly. There, his strong fingers spread wide, shaping the mound of her child as though he was staking a claim.

Carlo’s head yanked back, startled. Off balance, he tottered back on his heels and gaped at the possessive hand that had forced his lips away.

Emma saw how it crushed him to see another man usurp his rights to her, his wife. How, then, was he going to bear watching his friend mate with her throughout the long hours that stretched ahead?

Her husband’s eyes rose to hers, and he saw the pity there. He looked beyond her to search Dominic’s face, and whatever he read there distorted his features with agony.

Without warning, Dominic’s creamy finger prodded the prudish, tight ring of muscle along her rear cleft. It invaded, going deep.

A cry that was a confusion of shock and raw need welled from the depths of her soul. Hurt tinged the pain in Carlo’s face, an emotion that quickly flamed into jealous anger.

“What did you expect?” she whispered. Had he intended her to endure his friend’s touch, yet somehow inure herself to the pleasure of it?

A second finger joined the first, stretching her. The fans of her lashes drooped to half veil her eyes as her chin lifted on a moan.

With jerky, uncoordinated movements, Carlo stood and began backing away.

“Wait,” Emma croaked. She reached her hand toward him, but he ignored it and continued making his way toward the door, his eyes glued to Dominic.

Oblivious to the drama being played out, Dominic nuzzled her nape, shifting her hair aside to make way for the graze of lips and white teeth. The clever fingers at her backside left her, and she heard a splash. He’d plunged that hand in the crystal waters of the basin she’d readied earlier for cleansing.

Abruptly the first strands of moonlight came then, lancing through the window glass to bathe them all in its silver.

Dominic raised his face toward the sacred light, glorying in its cool caress. Along Emma’s back, the muscles of his abdomen rippled and yanked taut. A terse, strangled shout broke from him.

Carlo halted, transfixed by the sight of her and Dominic’s naked bodies locked in an erotic embrace. He watched with obvious envy as his friend hunched over her, his massive frame cruelly seized by the brutal cramping that heralded the last physical effects of the Calling.

Dominic clutched her to him, and her body bowed willingly within the cavern of his. Ravaged by the onslaught of this new primal pleasure-pain, his lungs sawed with ragged breath. Held this close, she felt the final Change come over him with a zinging sweep of Else World magic.

When he slowly uncoiled behind her, the transformation in him was palpable. His skin was hotter now, his body harder, his demeanor more passionate and determined.

But the greatest difference could be felt pressed high along the hollow of her back. For instead of one male shaft extending from him, there were now two.

There was nothing subtle in the way he handled her now. Nothing subtle in the way his twin cocks angled high, twitching and straining for a taste of her. He was readying for rut. Within minutes, he would make her his.

Carlo stumbled awkwardly backward, tripping over the footstool and then knocking into the dressing table.

His attention riveted on Emma, Dominic didn’t acknowledge the disturbance in any way.

Fumbling behind himself, Carlo blindly gathered his belongings from the table where he’d set them. The clink of coins came, and the whoosh of the drape falling from the mirror. The creak of the doorknob. Emma’s fingers dug into the muscles of Dominic’s arm, trying to dislodge him. Trying to reach the dubious haven that was her husband.

“No! Don’t leave us!” she pleaded, realizing he was about to go.

A calloused male hand rose to her breast again, covering it. The pad of a thumb brushed her nipple. She moaned, helpless to deny the pleasure it wrought in her.

Across the room, Carlo’s face contorted with despair. His throat worked soundlessly, and he shook his head.

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

With that, he swung around and fled, slamming the door behind him.