Mona Lisa Craving

EIGHTEEN

THINGS RETURNED TO normal, or as normal as they could be under the circumstances. Dante’s family, who had fled when he had, returned when he called them back. No word was mentioned of this second snatching. Perhaps because all understood now why Dante had done what he had done. What perplexed my people, no doubt, was why I had even considered terminating the life I carried within me.

Still…understanding only carried you so far. They treated Dante differently now. Before, they had seen him as what he had appeared to be—a twenty-year-old, gifted warrior. The knowledge of his previous life—his infamous killing of me, and the curse laid upon him—had brought caution and mistrust to their eyes. Add to this the knowledge that he could compel other Monère—not just humans, but Monère warriors and Queens—and they looked at him not only with wary distrust but active fear, melting away in his presence, not meeting his eyes. Afraid to look into them. Even Dontaine treated him with careful caution, ceding these last few days entirely to Dante. The father of my child.

What was it about seeding life in a woman’s womb that gave a man ownership of her body—in other men’s eyes, at least—during the time she carried that living, growing being? A perception that none others challenged. My bed had remained empty since we had returned.

Halcyon had kissed me and returned to his realm. “Until the High Council meeting,” he had murmured.

It was almost like a mantra muttered among my people and my men. Until the High Council meeting. Until the Service Fair when Dante, and likely the rest of his family, would leave us. Amber had called to say that he would not be coming that Wednesday as per his usual practice. He hadn’t even tried to give an excuse. He’d simply said, “I will see you in a sennight.” Seven days hence, when we would travel down to High Court, the seat of Monère rule here on this continent.

Dontaine slept in the next room—his room now—but he, too, made himself scarce, pressed no demands, made no requests for my bed. And the man the rest of them had ceded my body to…he also pressed no demands for my bed. Just my company.

During our days, when darkness fell—that was when our mornings began—he would sweep into Belle Vista and claim me. He had left me alone in my solitude that first night back. On the second day, he took me on a picnic, on a grassy knoll a five-minute stroll from the mansion, within the boundaries of my land. Chami and Tomas kept watch over us, but stayed a discreet distance away.

Dante fed me food from the basket Rosemary had prepared at his request. It was packed with odd things. Odd things for a Monère, but things I had acquired a taste for. Grapes and other fruits. Rolls of bread. Chunks of cheese, all kinds of cheese—smooth Gouda, sharp cheddar, smoked Brie. None of the others in the household ate this stuff. Only me…and Dante. He popped the cheese in his mouth and chewed with relish. When I looked askance at him, he said, “I grew up among humans, also.”

“This time. What about your other previous lives? Do you remember them?”

He took his time chewing, then swallowing, while he composed his answer. “My memories are most clear of my last incarnation, and of my first life. That, I never forget. I get random flashes of other lives, occasionally. I think it’s my mind’s natural defense, that selective memory. Remembering everything would probably be too much for one single mind to handle.”

The next day he drove us to New Orleans. We played tourist, ate dinner, and danced informally afterward in the carriageway outside of Preservation Hall, swaying to the music of the boisterous jazz band while Tomas kept an eagle-eye watch over us.

The fourth day, Dante drove me to the county fair, set up in the next town over, while Aquila trailed behind us in another car. At the fair, he bought me pink and blue cotton candy, and treated me to carnival games. We popped balloons with darts, bounced ping-pong balls along the rims of fishbowls, and won stuffed animals, lots of them, which he continued to trade up for a bigger prize until we ended up with a huge, stuffed, purple Scooby-Doo almost as tall as I was.

We twirled on the merry-go-round, the only ride I was permitted on. He stood beside me as I bobbed gently up and down on my carousel horse. It was on the down sweep, with laughter bubbling from my lips, when he kissed me. Our mouths clung, with the sweet taste of spun sugar and the even sweeter enjoyment of the day flavoring our kiss. Then my painted steed started its slow glide back up, and we broke apart with the warm taste and touch of each other lingering between us like fine, heady perfume.

The fifth night, he took me on a picnic again on the same grassy knoll, but this time it was different. This time we were alone.

“No guard tonight?” I asked.

“No guard.” Dante’s silver-blue eyes gleamed at me, reflecting the moonlight. “I promised that we would stay on the property, and asked them for privacy.”

“Why?” My voice came out husky, soft.

“Because I want to make love to you tonight. Will you allow it?”

He’d courted me these last few days. Courted me with laughter, with fun. We’d played among the humans for a few blissful, irresponsible days. He’d made me laugh, giving me a respite from my duties and burdens and fears.

“I want this memory of you and I,” he said softly. “Will you give me that to take away with me?”

The two remaining days until the next Council meeting loomed like a shadow before us. We hadn’t just played among the humans…we’d played at being human. As if he was a normal twenty-year-old boy, and I, a girl he was dating, with the prospect of a happy, finite lifetime together before us, with no other goal in mind than marriage, the 2.4 requisite kids, a house, and a nice-paying job to cover the mortgage. It was a sweet, brief illusion. A paper dream that would rip apart with the first tug of reality. But not yet…not yet. With deliberate choice, I continued to drift us along in that lovely illusion.

“Yes,” I said. “I will allow it.”

He fed me from his hand. Fast food—Chicken McNuggets, french fries, an apple pie—and I greedily ate it down. Food that no one else would have thought to buy for me. His eyes caressed me; he looked at me so tenderly. Why had I ever feared those eyes, I wondered?

Pushing aside the empty bags, he pulled me into his arms and kissed me with lips warm and gentle. He laid me down on the soft blanket, and I sighed at the feel of his body against mine. I pulled the tie from his hair, freed its long length so that it spilled over and around me like a shining curtain of silken honey. He kissed me as if he cherished me, as if he loved me, raining soft kisses down my face and neck to the gentle slope of my abdomen. He paused there and pressed trembling lips against my skin.

“May I?” His hand hovered above my shirt, asking permission. I nodded, and his hand slid beneath the soft cotton to lay gentle claim to what lay below it.

I watched him, no words, emotions held at bay. Just simply watched as he lifted my shirt over my head, tossed it away, as he carefully undid my jeans, pushing down the denim. I quivered beneath his heated gaze, beneath the reverent touch of his hand splayed protectively, possessively, over my belly where our child grew inside of me. My eyes fell on a ring I’d never seen him wear before. I felt the cool metal band warm as it touched my skin. Watched as the smooth, ugly gray stone flared with power, changing into a sparkling aquamarine color. With that pulse of power, two life forces shimmered into view—mine, a pale shimmering golden aura just above my skin, and below it, part of it and yet separate and distinct, was a tiny, delicate blue bubble, not much bigger than a tennis ball.

“Is that the baby? Its life force?” I asked in an awed whisper.

“Yes.” His eyes were moist and damp.

It hadn’t seemed real before, just a nebulous concept…a child. It didn’t even have a heartbeat yet. There were those that argued that true life did not begin until that very first beat. But seeing that little ball of energy centered within me, I could not deny the conviction that I carried life.

There’s a little guy or gal growing inside of me, I thought, stunned.

Dante took his hand away, and with the loss of contact our auras disappeared. “Forgive me,” he said. “I just wanted to see it once. To know it this way. You have no need to fear me.”

He thought that the stunned look on my face was from fear.

I shook my head. “I’m not afraid. It’s just…the baby suddenly became real to me just now. How did you do that, make its aura visible?”

“The ring I wear. Here. I want you to have it.” He started to remove it from his finger. I stopped him.

“No. Keep it, please.” It looked old and valuable, the ring band crafted from the same burgundy metal as his wrist bands—the same distinctive bands his ancestral father Barrabus had worn. They were heirlooms he had somehow managed to keep from another lifetime, I realized with a shiver.

He mistook my tremor as fear of him rather than as what it really was…fear of our past. His face closed down and he started to draw away.

I sat up, caught his hand. “Don’t go.”

He stilled, like a bird poised to take flight. “The mood is gone.”

I smiled. “You’re right.” I slid my other hand up his T-shirt, slowly revealing his sleek, lovely muscles. “Let’s set a new mood, then. Undress for me.”

With a perception that was new to me, I knew that he needed this moment…we both did. Another small step toward each other. Another knitting closure in our healing wound. As much as he needed this memory to take away with him, so did I.

“Love me,” I whispered.

He did. With gentle touches and blazing eyes, not that eerie phosphorescent glow but with the shattering intentness of a man about to join his body with a woman he greatly desired. He ran his mouth over me, down me. Worshipped me with his touch, his hands, his breath, his long hair that glided over me like a thousand silky caresses.

The four preceding days of poignant laughter, of fun escape, had laid the groundwork, and now I was like a flower that had been stroked open by the sun, unfurling my petals, welcoming his touch.

With simple strokes he readied me. The graze of his fingertips down the side of my neck. The light brush of his fine-grained beard, rough, over the upper slopes of my breasts. The snuffling of his warm breath against my belly. The feel of the cool tip of his nose running down my thigh, raising goosebumps along the sensitive skin. Laughing softly, he nuzzled his way to the back of my knees and set his hands upon my feet, pressing deep into my soles with his strong thumbs. A jolt ran up through me and I caught my breath at the stunning reminder of that previous time when he had touched me there. The memory of it blazed between us, burning laughter away. Leaving only humming anticipation in its place.

He touched me in all places but two…no, three—my lower body where I wept softly for him, my peaked and aching breasts, and my lips.

“Kiss me.” Yearning for his taste, I tugged at his strong arms, urging him up.

He answered my plea and kissed me. But not where I expected. He kissed me at the lowest point, where I hungered most for him. His breath fell on me first, giving me a second’s warning before he delved between my legs. Opening me wider with his hands, his shoulders, he kissed my soft, glistening folds. I lay there, shocked, stunned, surprised, until that first, rough-delicate lick up one side of my nether lips. Then I moaned and spread my legs wider for him. Arched up as he lapped down the other side. Gave a muffled shriek as he delved deeper, stroked his tongue into my channel’s wetness. Oh!

It was the worst tease, building me up slowly with devilish licks, teasing tongue, hot smoky breath. My body jerked and quivered beneath his totally hedonistic appreciation of me, of my wetness and desire for him. He rumbled his appreciation against me and the vibration was transmitted from his mouth to my sensitive, weeping core. I moaned, lifting my hips, twisting harder against him. He turned his face, stroking the short stubbles of his jaw over my mound, scraping over my half-hidden pearl, stabbing it with sensation. He rubbed against me like a purring cat, a brief, spiky caress followed by the smooth, soothing rub of his soft, silky lips.

“Dante,” I moaned, as he alternately stimulated me then soothed me. And all the time he did this, his hands touched, pressed, and caressed my feet, giving me sensation on top of sensation in places I was not used to feeling so sharply. It was as if his touch, there in those two spots, polarized my entire body, spreading to my breasts, my womb, my quivering thighs, my throbbing lips. His thumbs stroked the arches of my feet, and my body tightened, flexed, my hips lifting up into him. He purred and rewarded me with a deep, penetrating stab of his tongue that both filled me and left me aching for more. For something harder, thicker. Much, much longer.

“Dante.” His name was plea and demand, prayer and affirmation.

“Do you want more?”

“Yes!”

He slid his thumb inside me with a gentle thrust, and I gasped. Moaned as he withdrew it, pushed it back in again like a little miniature penis. Both of us watched as that single digit slid inside me, the fat head disappearing, the slender stalk swallowed up. Then watched it come back out in reverse, wet and slick with my dewy desire.

Both the feeling of what he was doing with his thumb—again nice, but like a tiny, teasing appetizer, not the main course—and the fact that he was watching it so raptly as he exercised that deliberate, slow, in-and-out fucking movement…tightened me, inside and out, swelling my desire, and brought light to my skin, beginning its incandescent glow.

His lips and cheeks were smeared wet from my intimate fluid. I could see my essence coating him, could smell myself on him, and the light within me flared even brighter.

His eyes lifted, spearing me with his hot gaze, with the knowledge and awareness in them—that my legs were splayed wide, my body open to him, lifted up like a flower opening to the sun, welcoming his warm, stroking attention.

He rotated his hand, shifting the angle so that his thumb pushed against, instead of with my body’s natural pathway, stretching the thinner posterior wall, flooding me with sudden, new, unexpected sensation. I bit back a cry, unable to help the involuntary squeezing down of my walls against that penetrating thumb that I suddenly felt with incredible sensitivity as it plowed a slightly different path inside of me.

“Touch yourself. Stroke your breasts for me,” he murmured in a soft, gentle voice that was so completely at odds with the fierce shine of his eyes. Everything about him was like that. Gentle but intense. His angled-back thumb dipping in and out of me, his knowing gaze. His awareness of how hard it was for me to do as he asked. Touch yourself for me. Give yourself to me that way.

My hands shook as they lifted up, my head falling back, my eyes closing as I did as he asked me to do. As I touched myself while he watched me do it.

Closing my eyes made it worse instead of better, because I could feel everything more that way. His watching eyes. My cool hands as I stroked the soft, curving slopes of my breasts, brushed over my turgid nipples. As I cupped myself and squeezed as if it were his hands stroking over me. That was how I touched myself. Imagining it as his hands, not mine. His hands that circled my pebbled, pouting crests. That thumbed over them. Brushed over the sensitive nubs. Pinched the hardening peaks.

Pleasure rolled deliciously over me, and I opened my eyes. Looked at him. “Like this?” I murmured.

His voice, when he answered, was hoarse and thick, his eyes gone a smoky gray, as if clouds had swarmed across the sky. “Yes, like that.”

I smiled at his answer, at his reaction. And what had first been awkward now became easy. It was as if the hands that were touching me were touching him also. Teasing, caressing. Soothing, tantalizing.

I circled my nipples with forefinger and thumb. Squeezed.

I bit my lips, tightening inside around his thumb. Held it for a moment in my tight, greedy grasp before it slipped from me, then pushed back in. I groaned and opened my eyes to find his eyes locked on the rosy red tips of my nipples, engorged and lengthened from my pinching caress.

I ran my fingertips around the flushed areolas, smiling like a game show hostess drawing graceful attention to a waiting prize. Yours if you gave the right answer.

“Or like this?” I asked, my voice sultry, low, like Eve offering up forbidden fruit to Adam. With slow seduction, I put my finger and thumb back around the hard little peaks and squeezed my nipples again with another slow, rolling moan, another delicious tightening of my body around his pumping thumb.

I pulled, tugging on those swollen tips for two long seconds, pulling them out. Then my fingers cupped and framed what I had wrought—my nipples flushed cherry red, fully elongated, jutting out like little fingers.

With a hungry growl, like a beast teased past what he would resist, he tore open his pants and swarmed up my body, latching onto a jutting nipple with his warm, wet mouth, sucking on it hungrily while his left hand covered my other breast in a frank claiming. Mine! that hand proclaimed as he wrapped his fingers around the turgid tip and squeezed with firm, possessive pressure.

I cried out and arched against his sucking mouth, his torturing hand, my legs bending up around his waist. His other hand slid beneath my bottom, grasped my cheek and lifted me, grinding my mound up against his hard sternum. The angle of it was just right, catching my swollen pearl in the place of greatest friction. His teeth scraped over my nipple, capturing it with the dull-sharp edges of his teeth, pulling on it. Simultaneously squeezing and tugging on the other tip with his clever fingers. One more stimulus added…the unexpected graze of his fingertips there along my anal pucker…and I climaxed. It rolled sharply, suddenly over me like a huge, cresting wave, sweeping over me, drowning me in shaking ripples, in tearing, convulsive sensation. My light and my pleasure spilled out from me like the sun bursting apart.

After the giant peak had passed, he slipped into me while I was yet shuddering in the helpless, quivering aftermath. As my light dimmed, his began to glow. It was like one of the most natural things in the world, that my ebbing spark of light would beget his.

He was so gentle, staying so still inside of me. As if he knew my sensitized nerves could not take any more sensation at that moment other than the slow, stretching slide of his hardness in my softness. Just his filling length where I craved him most. Where I held him deep inside me, my inner ripples stroking him like a squeezing hand.

There in that frozen moment, he was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. Poised above me with effortless, waiting strength as I felt him throb deep inside me. The strong cut of his muscles lovingly defined. The sweeping breadth of his shoulders. The curve of his biceps and more streamlined triceps. The gentle swell of his chest. His sloping deltoids, starkly delineated. Ready strength gathered, held in abeyance, calm for the moment like storm clouds slowly gathering on the horizon, biding their time to unleash their torrent at just the right moment. That same waiting gentleness of how he had slid into me. Thinking about it, remembering the feel of it, that gentle friction, stirred me from my post-coital languor.

I gazed up at him through half-closed eyes and felt my body tighten once more at just the sight of him. The divine illumination of his skin against the fading glow of mine. He looked like an angel with his honey-brown hair spilling in a loose, wild tangle around his face, framing those fierce eyes in softness. He reminded me not of a playful cherub, but of a warrior angel. A ferocious beauty that took my breath away.

Holding my eyes, he began a gentle, graceful dance with his body. Slow, poignant movements rocking in and out of me. Poignant because his face, his eyes, the coiled energy emanating from him in invisible waves that you could feel…all spoke of the fact that he was not normally a gentle man. But he was gentle now, for me, with me, inside of me. Slow, languid strokes made even more erotic because of the unexpected pleasure of it. Like expecting a storm to strike with fierce, pounding fury, and finding sweet, gentle rain kissing your skin instead. That restraint, that containment of all that he could have unleashed, made me moan.

I lifted my heavy arms and legs, wrapped them around my gentle lover, and drew him down to me. He kissed me, the lightest touch, as he stroked within me in that soft and easy way, his rhythm never changing, as if he were savoring the feel of it, the sweet intimacy of our joining. I savored him in turn, without demand, just appreciation, my hands gliding over his shoulders, down his back, stroking the muscles there that flexed and moved as he moved slowly, gently. My hands swept lower, reading him, feeling the tight clenching of his buttocks as he pushed into me, the easing of those muscles as he pulled back out.

The movement of his body above me was like lapping waves, ever constant. Even when I arched up into him, my skin brightening anew, asking for more, he kept to that maddeningly slow pace, that languid rhythm.

He spoke to me then, telling me how he felt, what he wanted to do to me, what he was doing to me. Coarse love words. And the rough frankness of the words he used was in such marked contrast with his movements, to the gentleness with which he made love to me. The dichotomy of it stirred my mind, my body, wound me even higher without a single alteration in rhythm.

He touched me no other way, just the turgid length of him in that maddeningly slow and intimate dance, graceful, beautiful, ever gentle. The light brush of his lips over my lips, my cheeks, across my eyes, feathering down my temples. The lightest brush of my nipples against his chest as he dipped and swayed above me, into me and out of me. The rough stroke of his words against my ears—gritty, male, shockingly explicit. Words that excited me, made me tremble, made me moan.

He stroked me slowly, sweetly, brought me once more to the edge that way, nothing more. Kept me trembling there on the brink for so long that it became like agony and ecstasy combined. Wanting and having. But not enough, not enough.

“Dante.” I said his name over and over again feverishly. My body lifted into his, but he held me in his rhythm with a restraining hand upon my hip, not allowing a faster beat. When I tried for more, he stopped and stared down at me with those fierce, glittering eyes, withholding his body until I yielded once more to that gentle, maddening stroking. He was deaf to my cries for “harder, faster, more,” delivered first as a command, then as a plea. Nothing moved him from that torturing slow and easy pace. Not his tight, straining body. Not my inner clenching, my weeping need for him. Honey poured out of me. So wet was I that you heard the slurping sounds we made as he slipped in and out of me.

I finally surrendered and lay quiescent beneath him, just accepting his easy thrusts, what he chose to give me, with silent tears rolling down my cheeks with the pleasure and frustration he had built up in me. He lapped up the spilled wetness with tender strokes of his tongue.

“Dulcaeta”—beloved—“don’t cry.”

The endearment only made more tears flow.

“Please,” I begged. Nothing else. Just that plea.

Looking down into my eyes, he gave a shuddering sigh.

“Thank you for this time. For this sweet gift,” he said. He didn’t alter the force or speed of his rhythm. But his hand slid beneath my thighs and I felt his fingers stroke my wet outer lips, probe over where he stretched me, penetrated me. He traced that sensitive, swollen tissue back to where it rucked up tight and became perineal tissue, and his touch there was even more sensitive, disturbing. My breath hitched, and my body clenched around his shaft as he grazed a fingertip around my back opening.

With eyes both tender and fierce, his voice gentle and rough, he said, “Come for me,” and pressed down, sliding that moistened fingertip into me, penetrating me as his cock withdrew and stroked back into my sheath, easy, gentle.

“Come for me,” he demanded. And I did. With crying blessed relief, I finally came. A rippling tremor that seized him, squeezed him so tightly inside me. A release that broke gently over me like the wash of calm waters against the still shore. A sweet convulsing easing that went on and on until I felt it trigger his.

Like the wash and play of our light—my shine dimming as his brightened—so did his release begin as mine ended. Extending it until it felt like one endless, gentle liberation. A letting go.

A rippling, shuddering, cleansing of the senses, washing us anew.