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The spring looks to be at least a quarter mile away. But thanks to his size, Ivar quickly closes the distance. And thanks to the immense amount of heat radiating off him, the trip’s not at all uncomfortable for me.
After he sets me down on a stone ledge jutting from the hot spring’s wall, I let out a long, grateful moan and sink all the way down to my chin in the soothing water. Actually, maybe I’m not so disappointed.
“This is even better than sex,” I tell Ivar, who’s still on the shore, shedding his boots, fur mantle, loincloth, and bracers.
Now he laughs. “You jest. Nothing is better than the sex between us, Little Bride.”
He enters the bath with a heated look.
I mean, I thought I was totally serious.
But my body swells with arousal when he strides into the hot spring, his elephant trunk of an erection bobbing.
Oh, god, is this mega lust going to be an issue for the rest of my life?
“Do not fret, I will not bother you again tonight,” he says, mistaking my look of upset for dread. “I am aware your body has already endured too much from me and that you need rest.”
As if to illustrate his point, he moves farther into the water until his orcasaurus dick is hidden underneath the surface.
But the damage is already done. My pussy clenches as I ask, “Actually, I was just wondering when this pheromone reaction will wear off.”
He tilts his head with another bemused look. “It wore off the moment your body accepted my first claim.”
“Oh… it did? Already?” I guess the embarrassment isn’t done with me yet. The only thing hotter than the water is my face.
Ivar comes closer and crouches in what looks to be a full squat in front of me. Even hunched all the way down, he’s taller. It feels like talking to a building that decided to contract to hear you better.
He places his hands on the ledge on either side of me. There’s a tattoo on his right wrist, a band of intricate black markings and runic script. The ink has a strange quality to it. Almost like it has a heartbeat, as if it’s alive and pulsing.
“Adora.” My name on his lips brings my eyes back up to his, which are smoldering. “Is my Empress saying that she is not worried her Emperor will further burden her with his dynasty, but hoping he will?”
So… I was in the Army, and most civilians think that makes me a bad-ass. But here’s the real truth: I’ve never been that bold.
At no point in my adult life have I ever been asked what I wanted. Even becoming a Foreign Language Specialist was a decision I was funneled into because my recruiter looked at my high school transcript and said, “Straight A-pluses in Chinese and French. You seem smart.” I got used to being a chess piece on someone else’s board. For years, I was moved from windowless room to windowless room to translate recordings I still can’t talk about.
And even after my separation from the Army, I never learned to ask for what I want.
It always felt easier to say “that’s fine” than to ask for what I truly wanted. Easier to go home and re-read a Clara Quinn book when my former best friend, Lisa, was too swamped to meet up after work. Easier to quietly finger myself in the bathroom after Vance rolled over and fell asleep post-nut than to ask him to keep on going until I came, too.
But I guess that poster on the wall of the career center I visited before I finished up with the Army was correct.…
It’s Never Too Late to Become a New You.
“On a cultural note, your Empress wouldn’t mind doing it just the two of us,” I admit, “without a bunch of people watching and providing commentary.”
A slow smile spreads beneath his tusks, and the water sloshes as he pulls me off my rock and into his arms. “Ivar would not mind that, either.”
Somehow, we never get around to that Q&A.
While Ivar’s subjects party in the main hall, we end up having another kind of conversation in the hot spring.
That’s the last thing I remember before I wake up alone in bed the next morning, buried underneath a sea of golden silk sheets and soft animal furs.
So, it wasn’t just a really good and strangely sexual Clara Quinn dream, then.
I know this for a fact because despite spending hours in that hot spring, I hurt everywhere, my stomach is grumbling, and I have to pee like a racehorse.
Which is why, when the smell of roasted meat and fresh-baked bread wafts into my nose, I rise like the dead from the furs.
