I stroked her body with mine. I slid deep, I groaned into her skin, I felt her hair and her nipples glide over my chest, I tasted her lips and her tongue and felt her gasp into me, filling me with her breath.
Before long, I felt her tightening. Her little claws were beginning to dig into my shoulders and I huffed, my pace increasing, giving her long, full strokes of my cock.
When she began to come, I pulled back to look down at her features, knowing what I would find. There was a brief smile—that smile that sizzled in my blood—before her lips parted, her eyes closed, and then she was deep in the pleasure of her orgasm.
That smile triggered my own. She took me deeper inside her, pulling and demanding my seed, and I gave it to her, bellowing out my release, feeling it burst from me.
Pleasure from sex had always been fleeting but this continued for long, long moments and when it was finally done, I dropped down beside her, pulling her against me, shuddering.
I waited for the restlessness to come, as it always did. I waited for my blood to feel like it was bubbling under my skin, as it always did.
Only it didn’t come.
Chapter Thirty-One
“What are thesper?”
My question was a whisper against his skin and I had the strangest sense that I could smile until I fell asleep.
It was later in the night but the fire in the basin was still burning hot. Davik had put more fuel onto it after another round of sex. And now, after our third, I was lying boneless and content against him, nestled in the crook of his arm, tracing his scars and the golden tattoos embedded into his skin.
Something was different about him. The horde king was almost…relaxed. As relaxed as I’d ever seen him, so different than the first time we’d had sex, when we’d fought and he’d stormed from the voliki after seeing whatever it was he’d seen in the shadows.
And he was touching me. Soft little caresses all over my back, up and down the bones of my spine. They were lazy touches but they made me tingle. A deep sadness had lodged in my chest briefly as he did, knowing that soon I would never experience this again. I would never lie next to a male like this again. It was only with him and it was only temporary.
He was gliding the backs of his claws across the upper cheeks of my bared backside but then he stilled at my question, only briefly before he thumbed the bones at my hips.
“They are creatures,” he told me, his voice roughened with his contentment. I wondered if he was tired, if he wanted to sleep, but then I remembered he’d been sleeping for three days. “Creatures that can fly over long distances.”
“Like birds,” I said, remembering my mother telling me about those. Creatures from the Old World, creatures that had thrived in the colonies as well.
He made a sound in his throat. “Perhaps. We use them sometimes to send messages.”
“Your pujerak said one came from Dothik,” I commented, shifting my chin so I could look up at him. His red eyes flickered down to mine and his other hand came to brush my lips. The look he was giving me made my heart pound…and I was certain he could feel it.
That look made me feel like I was melting. Melting away like the frigid frost after the cold season.
I wanted to melt away until there was nothing left of me. Until I was this little pool on the ground, this little mess.
“Lysi,” he said. “Two of the other Vorakkars were in the archives in the city, looking for whatever information they could about the lost heartstone.”
My heart thudded again but for an entirely different reason. Instead of excitement, I’d begun to feel dread whenever I thought of the heartstone. And because of that dread, I felt guilt because I thought of my family, still underneath the Dead Mountain, and I knew that the heartstone was our only hope…if Lozza kept his word.
“Did they find anything?” I whispered.
“Just what we already know,” he told me and I hated that I felt relief at that. I was a selfish woman, for wanting to lie here in his arms and not think about what would come next. “You spent a lot of time with Lokkaru while I was asleep. She didn’t mention anything?”
“No,” I said, swallowing. “She just mentioned more