Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga by Regina Watts (red queen ebook .TXT) 📕

the meantime taste the delights I’ve come to know in just a short span of time. Weltyr has had concubines beyond counting,” I added, lifting my eyebrows while she laughed merrily. The sound was often broken up with little moans of pleasure as I filled her, her thoughts barely able to form.

“That explains why you’re such an eager goat of a man…oh! No, no, a bull—oh, Rorke, yes, by Anroa, take me, Rorke, harder, harder, please!”

I braced her back against the stones, the new angle of her pelvis deepening the potential of my thrusts and leaving her speechless. As I worked her rapidly, the delicate elf’s features trembled as though she might cry. Her brow furrowed with a kind of consternation and her eyes rolled up. While her pupils angled toward her brow, nearly crossed, her trembling eyelids and quivering mouth foretold the sudden quake around the dagger I buried in this traitorous wench I nonetheless loved. Branwen moaned my name, her legs tightening about my waist as she climaxed, her brow unfurrowing with the bliss of her body’s crescendo. Yet still she seemed unsatisfied, begging me even as she came, “Rorke! Oh, sweet Anroa, yes, by the goddess, let me be your love-slave! Use me as it pleases you, give me to your other women…I will obey you, if it will earn forgiveness. If it will earn your love back, Rorke.”

“You already have it back,” I assured her, my head light with pleasure that tightened all the muscles in my body. While her voice began again to mount toward its euphoric peak, I nuzzled my lips and nose against hers. “But I’ll gladly command the direction of your love until you’re comfortable enough to admit you’d like the company of the durrow as much as I do.”

“Oh, yes! Yes, Rorke, yes, oh, if there’s anyone who can manage such a thing, it’s you—yes, Rorke, yes, please, I want to feel you inside me, dripping out of me! Rorke, Rorke, fill me to the brim, go on—”

Groaning, I did as she begged of me and pounded home into her until I saw stars—until those searing stars shot their light into my brain and sped through me into sweet Branwen’s belly. She moaned, trembling, her body quivering with a second climax to receive my seed. Her face searched mine and, without having to be begged, I kissed her.

Somehow her mouth seemed to have grown sweeter with the course of our lovemaking. I sighed into her soft lips, drawing from her when the storm had passed, then eased her down upon the stones of the tunnel beneath us. We kissed while I straightened out my clothes, and I found on leaning back that she had gotten her breeches back up. I smiled, about to utter some word of fondness for her.

Something massive scuttled in the darkness at the edge of the lantern and I pushed her behind me, the scimitar in my hands at a second’s notice.

BITTERSWEET FREEDOM

ADONISIUS HAD A knack for surprising us, it seemed—but I still felt terrible to have more than once drawn arms on the good-natured misshapen. He raised up his hands, in fact, laughing as he took a few more steps into the light and revealed the spider torso that distinguished his race from that of the durrow.

“I wondered if that was you from a distance, Burningsoul,” commented the Nightlands guide, “but now it has to be you! No one else is so quick on the draw.”

“Hail, Adonisius! How good it is to see you again. The Nightlands being as they are, I expected our paths unlikely to cross again…at least, not so soon.”

“My kinfolk live this way,” he explained to the immediate sinking of my intuition. “It’s funnier that I should find you here! I thought for sure that spirit-thief would make quick work of you…I guess I was wrong.”

Trying not to let my ego be bruised by this well-meaning but backhanded praise, I instead struggled to think of how I would tell this misshapen the unfortunate truth about his kin. It seemed to me that, unless this area formed a complex of misshapen dens, (and, considering the structure of El’ryh and its strange hivelike arrangement, that might have been the case), the odds were more than good that I had slain most if not all of Adonisius’s family members.

Unsure as I was on how to proceed, I was almost relieved when Branwen said with a quick look of shock at the spider-centaur’s lower half, “You’re a misshapen, too! Like one of the bandits Rorke saved me from.”

Adonisius’s mouth opened in fright. “Bandits? Oh, no—”

Looking shocked, then, slowly, horrified, the misshapen removed the helmet Valeria had given him. His pupiless gaze darted between myself and the high elf still half-hidden behind my shoulder.

When next he spoke, Adonisius’s voice was soft.

“Why is it that you’re here, Burningsoul?”

“I heard the screams of my friend,” I told him, trying to walk the fine line between solemnity and condescending insincerity. “And I had to help her. I’m sorry, Adonisius.”

As the gentle man’s eyes filled with tears, I reached out to lay a hand upon his arm. He took a step back and I admonished myself for the sting this caused in my spirit. What right had I to feel any sort of bruise? What obligation had he to tolerate comfort from the same hand that had dispatched his relatives but an hour or two before?

“Please,” Adonisius said, covering his eyes with his free hand. “Don’t—oh, don’t. You killed them?”

“Yes,” I said, glancing at the floor, feeling the abashment of a child before a parent. “It is my oath, Adonisius. I must defend the defenseless. She was defenseless; they were not.”

“I’m sure,” said the weeping misshapen, turning to study the shut door around the corner from where we stood. “No, I’m sure you did what was right. They were vile men.”

Adonisius at last forced himself to look upon me, a curious tone to his voice. As though