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Chapter Twenty-One

Guinevere

Elaras had told her to listen to the song of the universe, and so she had.

She’d listened to the sound of water, roaring, rippling, splashing.

She’d listened to the wind stir the burnished leaves and the birds warble their hymns of harvest’s close.

As Oskar’s large hands moved so carefully over her, she’d listened to his breathing grow ragged against the back of her neck and his voice drop as low as night in her ear, and she’d understood that this was a melody as old as time.

Most of all, Guinevere had listened to herself. To her heart speeding up and her blood bringing a flush to the surface of her skin. To the throb of desire within her that unraveled throughout the secret parts of her body like hunger and like hope.

This had definitely not been what the warden of the forest had in mind, but she’d listened, and she’d made her decision. Because she wasn’t about to go the rest of her life not knowing.

But now she was leaning back against Oskar and he wasn’t doing anything and oh, dear stars above, what if she’d miscalculated?

She’d miscalculated, and she was naked in a lake with a man.

Her face started to flame from reasons that had naught to do with arousal, and she made to peel away from him and perhaps sink under the water and never emerge ever again—

He reached around her, parting her hair and pressing the soap into the valley between her breasts.

It was an outcome brought about by her own making, her own wanting, but still she hadn’t been prepared for the sensation.

She would have given a jolt of surprise, but his arm slung across her torso held her still, trapping her against the wide wall of his bare chest.

In truth, there was very little by way of seduction in how Oskar washed her.

He was efficient. He had a job to do, and he did it, and it wasn’t long before her upper body was squeaky-clean and covered in pinkish suds.

But he was peering over her shoulder while he worked, and the intensity of his golden gaze scorched her soul.

Every time his rough palm grazed her breasts and her stomach, it added to the fire.

And she could feel… him. His manhood, as the other girls back in Rexxentrum had laughingly called it in conversations held well away from their chaperones’ ears.

Guinevere had never seen a manhood before. She desperately, voraciously wanted to see Oskar’s. But that would mean turning around and no longer feeling it resting on her buttocks, hard and thick against the base of her spine—which was another kind of revelation, in its own way.

He must have noticed that she’d noticed. “This is the consequence of what you asked for,” he said gruffly. “Just ignore it.”

“What if I don’t want to ignore it?” Heavens, she was shameless. This little adventure was making quite the strumpet out of her.

He scoffed. The soap traveled lower and paused, as though its wielder waited for confirmation that this was still permissible.

Guinevere could only nod. Oskar’s hand dipped into the water and pried her legs apart so he could scrub at the inside of her thighs, and once he did that, once he opened her up like that, something leaked out of the place that the Shimmer Ward ladies had also laughingly called their flowers—the dripping wetness of arousal, quickly whisked away by the lake’s currents.

The side of Oskar’s hand brushed very near where it had come from, and Guinevere could no longer hold back what sounded almost like a sob.

She needed him. She needed, she wanted, she craved. Teinidh was swirling within the walls of Guinevere’s heart in a dance of flame and darkness, and Oskar was…

Oskar had let go of the soap. His hands had latched on to her waist. “Hold your breath,” he instructed. She did, and he guided her under the water, rinsing off the suds. And when she came back up, he was still her glorified backrest, only this time—

Only this time, he was kissing her neck.

His right hand palmed her left breast, his other hand tracing heated patterns on the plane of her stomach.

She eagerly surrendered to the delicious sensations, arching into his touch as he played with her nipple, lolling her head against his shoulder to give his lips unfettered access to her throat.

At the corner of her eye, a flash of pink was being borne away by the turquoise waves, and she grinned despite herself. Despite what he was doing to her.

“That was, ah, my only bar of soap, Oskar,” Guinevere admonished in between hitched breaths.

“I’ll buy you another in Zadash,” he rasped into her skin. The hand that was on her stomach drifted lower, into the soft curls that shielded her wetness. “I’ll buy you anything you want, just, gods, Guinevere, let me in.”

She parted her thighs, and his hand slid between them.

He cupped her in his palm, which was warm despite the coolness of the water, and she whimpered and strained, torn between shock at a man’s hand being there and the primal insistence that it wasn’t enough.

He needed to move his fingers. He needed to put them in. Hadn’t he asked her to let him in?

So impatient. Teinidh’s voice was wisps of smoke blowing over a high prairie. Did you get that from me?

It sounded like a taunt and a secret all at once.

Shut up, Guinevere seethed. She rolled her hips, rubbing herself all over Oskar’s palm. Just once. Just to see what it felt like. She bit back a cry at the exquisite friction of it. He pinched her nipple lightly, and she jerked.

“I can cover you with one hand, princess.” The words came out slightly strangled, yet still at that low, low pitch that echoed through her like a pulse. “Sure you’ll be able to take me?”

“Oh!” Her eyes widened. “Don’t say”—his fingers began stroking her under the water, and her thoughts scattered to the winds—“things like—like that,” she finished weakly, panting.

“Things like what?” Deep voice like rough velvet, darkly amused.

Hot fingers sliding and caressing between her legs, strumming at her breasts.

“Like how soft you are? Like how I’ve wanted to do this from the moment you first looked at me with those sweet eyes?

Like how I think about your tits all the damn time?

I want to suck them until you cry out, Gwen. Do you think you’ll ever let me?”

“I’m…I…”

She was blushing furiously, the ghostlike spray from the falls doing little to cool her heated face.

She’d heard about love-talk, of course, but the ladies of Rexxentrum had said it mostly involved their partners telling them what fine women they were.

Nothing this meltingly crude. Then again, nothing else in the world was like Oskar.

He nuzzled at her jaw, the curve of one ivory tusk grazing the edge of her cheekbone, and under the water his fingers found it—what the other ladies called the pearl, less laughingly and more coyly, as though imparting a great secret.

Guinevere’s knees went weak, and she reached back to clutch at Oskar’s nape for support, and he rumbled his approval while he slicked the calloused pad of one finger against that sensitive bundle of nerves.

“That’s right, my lovely adventurer,” he said. “Hold on to me while I’m making you come.”

“You certainly think highly of yourself,” she moaned into his shoulder, writhing against him. “I haven’t come yet. ”

He muffled a scrape of laughter against the side of her face. “Is that a challenge?” he asked, pressing a quick kiss to her temple.

And he sank a finger inside her.

It slid in easily at first, thanks to the water, thanks to her own frenzied wetness. But the moment it started to sting, she winced, and he went no further.

“Gods, you’re tight,” he gritted out, and something about those words made her clamp down on him, as though to prove it. “Fuck, Gwen. So tight, so beautiful—”

And then he was giving her these shallow, careful thrusts, the angle allowing him to rub against her swollen little bud as he did so, and she was looking at the waterfalls and thinking about flowers and pearls until he picked up the pace and she saw only stars and thought about nothing except chasing the pleasure, the pressure, rolling her hips against his marvelous hand, arching closer to his marvelous chest, dotting that stern, clean-shaven jaw with kisses, breathing in the scent of him.

Before long he added another finger, and she took it with a gasp, with his gravelly curse resounding in her ear.

“I’m almost there,” she whined, because there was no other word for it, for the spirals of aching need, for a life spent so long without loving touch.

Her peak was so close she could nearly taste it, but what if it never happened, what if some vagary of fate were to snatch it back—

Guinevere panicked even as her world poised on the brink of sublime shattering. She thrashed in Oskar’s embrace, clawing at his arms and nape, distressed noises spilling from her lips.

“It’s all right.” He slanted his mouth over hers in a soothing kiss, swallowing up her cries. “You’ll get there. I’ll take you. Just trust me.”

And, wonder of wonders, she did—because his heart at her spine was strong and steady in its beating, because Oskar had never let her down.

Not once since the night they met. She stopped fighting for it, she surrendered, and soon the tangled paths of pleasure that his clever fingers wove caught on fire, and Guinevere was crashing headlong into climax.

Screaming with the waterfalls, her toes curling over the lake bed, her body seizing within the strong embrace that was the only thing keeping her from floating away.

Oskar didn’t give her any chance to recover. While she was still reeling from sheer bliss, he eased his fingers out of her and grabbed her by the hips. “Sorry,” he muttered, sounding barely tethered to the last thread of his sanity, “sorry, I have to—”

And he hunched over her, settling his chin in the crook where her shoulder met her neck, and his erection slid between her thighs, rubbing along her wetness, his hips snapping against her buttocks.

Oh, Guinevere thought hazily, oh, my.

Somehow she knew to shift her stance to give him easier access.

Somehow she knew to rake her fingers down his scalp and encourage him with nonsensical, keening exclamations.

Somehow she knew to arch so he could paw at her breasts while at the same time moving back against him, thrust for thrust, dragging herself all over the throbbing length and girth of him.

They rocked together in this strange and exhilarating imitation of sex, lake water sloshing all around them, and if the Shimmer Ward ladies and her parents could see her now—sheltered, prim, proper Guinevere, stark naked, used by a man in the great outdoors—a man mindlessly seeking his own pleasure, huffing and panting against her neck, his thick fingers rubbing her nipples raw—

Her second orgasm took her by surprise. It was hauled out of her on the crest of her aftershocks, and she cried out and fluttered, Oskar’s name rolling off her tongue like a hymnal as she fell off the edge of the world once more.

And, this time, he joined her there. With one last squeeze to her left breast, with a few more haphazard thrusts and then a stilling of his hips, he spilled into the water between her legs. She saw it fleetingly—a burst of milky white—before the turquoise currents melted it away.

Oskar spun her around and kissed her. Guinevere sighed happily into his mouth, her fingers tracing the pointed shell of his ear. When they broke apart, the tension was gone from his usually stern features, and his topaz eyes were warm in the sunlight.

He ran a hand down her wet hair until his thumb caught in the hollow between her collarbones. “You’re going to be the death of me, you know,” he remarked.

It might not have been as refined and romantic as all the other love-talk she’d heard about, but Guinevere decided that it was quite perfect, actually. She wouldn’t have it—or him—any other way.