a trifle ... irregular? Both Harry and the Gypsy, each wondered what were the other's thoughts.
In the same moment that he felt he must touch her, finally she moved, got up, went to the door - and barred it. And Harry knew, in the way people do, what was going to happen; also that he wanted it to happen.
She came back, her Gypsy hips swaying hypnotically, and sat down again. But as she adjusted his blanket, so her hand crept beneath it on to his naked thigh. Harry stopped breathing, stiffened with the shock of her touch, and her suspicions were at once confirmed. Her laugh was low and husky. 'I thought your fever had cooled a little. But look, here you are hot as ever! Hot -and hard ...'
Already erect, his manhood grew more yet into her tightening, deliciously mobile fist, to hammer like a heart against her palm. Until he groaned, 'No! Wait! Nana, don't waste me!' His trembling hands found the buttons of her blouse and her breasts tumbled free. While he fondled and kissed their softness, teasing her brown nipples to life, she struggled to be rid of her clothes and into bed with him.
'Fill me, Harry Dwellersire,' she moaned, 'for we've both been empty and aching for far too long. I'm not sure why you ache, but this may be part of the cure.'
He made no answer, found the sucking gate to her sex and drove into it. In the next moment, for a moment, he held himself back, then panted: 'I can't - daren't -damn it, I'll get you pregnant!'
'No,' she shook her head, rolled over on top and came down slow and heavy on him, trapping his flesh deep in her lava core and his face in the silky curtain of her hair. And slowly working her body, with her breasts lolling in his face, she gasped, 'I'm ... barren.' It was a lie; Hzak's seed had been at fault, she knew. But as for Nana, she wanted a child - so why not Harry's?
Harry felt himself swelling, shook his head wildly. 'Nana, I can't hold it!'
'Don't try,' she told him, and instantly felt him jerking, geysering into her. His long bursts seemed unending, lubrication for the hot engine of her womanhood.
Too quick,' he moaned, angry with himself. 'Too damned quick!'
'Yes,' she murmured, smothering him in her breasts, her kisses. Too quick. But that one was for you. This one will be for me, and it will be slower.'
It was. And so was the next...
In the grey twilight, just before sunup, Nana crept from Harry's bed and dressed, went to The Dweller and told him that his father's fever had broken. When she left her lover of a few brief hours, he was sleeping a dreamless, exhausted sleep, and somehow she knew it was the last she would see of him.
But, warm inside, she also knew that it was not the last of his works.
Chapter 2
II
Four years later: Lardis Lidesci's house stood on a rise a little above Settlement, where the grassy, temperate but abrupt foothills of Sunside climbed towards rocky outcrops and steep, forested heights. He liked sitting in front of the house at sundown, to catch the last rays of the sun; likewise before sunup, to watch it rise. Unthinkable four short years ago (two hundred 'days', or sunup-sundown cycles), and even now nerve-tingling: to be up and about, safe and sound, and the parent star itself not yet risen. Strange, too, to live in one place, in a house; though almost all of the Szgany did these days -certainly the majority of Lardis's prosperous, ever-increasing band.
The Szgany Lidesci: Lardis's people.
Oh, there were still a few families who preferred their hide-covered caravans along the valley trails, and those who dragged their scant belongings on travois from place to place, unwilling to rest, relax, rejoice in the fact that the scourge of the Wamphyri was a thing of the past. But in the main they were settled or settling now, while other tribes, clans, bands of Travellers were following suit, building their own places along the forest's rim, east to west down the spine of the barrier range.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
Lardis's cabin was styled after The Dweller's house on Starside. Providing shelter for Lardis, his young wife Lissa, and not least their small son Jason - who had been named by his father after someone he very much admired - it stood a mile east of Sanctuary Rock. Lardis