Daemon & Sunny Ch. 02

{Author’s Note: This is a part of a larger story, which may one day be published. All rights reserved, yadda yadda, blah blah blah… I got pestered by several of you to hear more of this tale, so here’s another sexy snippet. Enjoy! ~Lotm}

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When he didn’t come back by the time her heartbeat had slowed and her strength had resurfaced, Sunny once again rolled her sore body off of the bed. This time, she went into the bathroom and shut the door, wishing the thumblock on the knob would respond to her. Using the facilities only proved how tender she was; hobbling to the edge of the huge bathtub and its raised, marble dais, she figured out how to activate its controls and filled it with warm water. Investigation of the bottles to one side of the platform uncovered masculinely-scented oils, and even a foamant. Squirting a heavy amount in, she eased herself into the water as the bubbles started to form.

The gentle heat was soothing to her body…and arousing as the oversized pipes filled the tub quickly. It swirled around her thighs, crept up and caressed her belly, and tickled her breasts with the mounting foam. Tipping her head back against one of the curves of the scalloped tub, she sighed and closed her eyes. The water shut off automatically, leaving her in blissful silence. Until the door clicked and swung open. She tensed, her eyes flying to the doorway.

Daemon had panicked for a moment when he hadn’t seen her in his bedroom. Just a moment, but he felt relief now to see her in his tub. He would have to do something to keep her from wanting to escape. Seeing the wariness in her eyes, the edge of fear in those rich turquoise eyes before she looked away again, he planned his campaign. Striding to the edge of the platform, he sat on its edge. The water swished as she shifted forward, away from him. Reaching out, he caught her by her bare shoulder, pulling her insistently, gently back against the rim next to him again.

“That’s better.” A wisp of her hair, red and curling, brushed over the back of his hand. Tickling his flesh. There were any number of wisps and large curls that had worked their way loose by now. Those locks were rich and silky, springy to the touch. Daemon slid his knee up onto the marble rim and started hunting through her hair, picking the pins and combs out, loosening the rolled bun and fingering out the artfully looped braids. “Red hair is rare in Astorra,” he murmured conversationally, pleased to discover that, the more he untangled, the more her hair looked to be waistlength, as long as his own. “Long hair is a sign of good health, and good fortune.”

“…I should shave you bald,” Sunny muttered under her breath, sinking lower in the water. The prickling, tickling pull of his fingers through her hair was arousing her, and she didn’t want to be aroused. Not again.

Daemon heard her. He struggled a moment to contain his laughter—she might have been named Sunny, but she was definitely prickly—and finished stroking out the last of the swirled locks, spreading them out over his knee and lap. Catching a few in his fingers, he lifted them and brushed the dangling curls over her shoulder.

It was one more unwanted stimulation. She jerked her forehead forward protectively. “Don’t.”

He tugged on her hair, pulling her gently but insistently back. Tickled her again, until she jerked forward once again.

“Don’t!”

Daemon brought her back more firmly, using her own hair as her leash. “Did I not hear you swear you would stay and be my concubine?”

Sunny, remembering the exact circumstances, blushed red. She tried to think of any way to get out of it. “…I only swore I’dstay; I didn’t say anything about being y—”

Daemon buried his hand in her hair and brought her head back. His other arm bracing his weight on the edge of the tub, he leaned over her with soft, slow, coaxing kisses between his firm words. “You swore to both, Consort.” Leaning closer, he kissed the protest from her mouth and out of her head. When he lifted his head, he smiled, satisfied by the dazed desire deepening the color of her eyes. “I will be glad to remind you of the exact circumstances any time…and gladly with another demonstration.”

Her face on fire, Sunny wished for something—anything—to take that smug smile off his face. The only thing she could think of was making him as embarrassed and furious as she was, and she acted without thinking. Grabbing the lapels of his dark blue, silk robe, she hauled him into the water. Caught off guard by her attack, he slipped over with a satisfying splash, legs and arms flailing too late to prevent the results of her attack.

Again, the auburn wench had felled him! Daemon struggled towards the surface as the water slapped in around him and his backside hit the hard bottom. Something shocked the water near his hip and he jerked and twisted, getting his legs under him. Standing up with a gasped, half-choked curse, he dug his hand into his robe’s pocket. Out came the sodden control box for her slave collar.

Sunny stared at it. She grabbed it from him, found the collar release button, and jabbed it. Nothing happened. She pressed the other buttons, even the prominent pain button. Nothing. “You broke it!”

Daemon, water still dripping from his nose, narrowed his eyes. “You pushed me into the water!”

She stood up to face him, hooking her thumb under the inch-wide metallic ribbon circling her throat and waved the box under his nose threateningly. “How am I going to getthis off, withoutthis thing working?!”

Bright Astor, but she’s magnificent… Daemon followed a puff of bubbles slithering down from her collarbone, followed it dip into the valley between her full breasts. He dragged his gaze up from her glistening, dripping body and fitted his finger under the band circling her throat. Sliding his finger under the slave collar, he tugged her close, taking the defunct control box from her hand and tossing the useless device away. “You’ll be free…whenI decide you are free.”

She shoved him again as he pulled her in for another kiss. Unfortunately, his legs were better braced than her own…including the soles of her feet. They slipped out from under her and Sunny fell back. He yanked on the collar, saving her from a concussion or worse against the curved but hard stone rim of the tub; her hands flew up to his thighs as she splashed down onto her knees, water swirling around her breasts. Just like that, she was on her knees in front of him, her hands clutching at the backs of his thighs, her fingers splayed over the wet satin clinging there. Her eyes level with the wet satin clinging to the bulge at the apex of those thighs, fastening her gaze with the pull of a magnet and nail. Air caught in her lungs, arrested in her throat as Sunny stared.

Astor! One hand still with a finger hooked in her collar, holding her close, Daemon followed the intensity of her gaze…and fumbled at the wet knot of his sash with his other hand. He managed to get it unknotted, but his impatience for her direct attention was too much.

“Open it.Open it.”

The hoarse longing in his command numbed any resistence she might have had. A small portion of her mind wondered if he’d used some sort of drug that had attuned her mind to the sound of his voice, making her aroused and willing to do whatever he commanded her, whenever he commanded it, but her trembling hands had already come around to the front of his thighs, and peeled back the wet, clinging fabric. Revealing the prize already straining and growing to greet her. Daemon watched her mouth part softly in confrontation with his need, watched the slightest flick of her tongue and the rub of her moistening lips as she stared at his masculinity. He wanted to be the next thing that tongue dampened, those lips caressed.

“Taste me.”

More erotic words had never been spoken, Sunny was sure. This was something sacred on her world, the Prayer for Rain was the proper name for it, and one of the recommended religious activities during the first quarter of a woman’s month. She had never done it before, though its theory had been included in her general education as a Craidan, somewhere between reproductive education and religious theology. It was meant as a prayer of fertility, for the land, for the couple having sex, even as a fun prayer-ritual to end a hot summer day. To do it with this offworlder, this non-Craidan, bordered on the forbidden.

But he already did the Prayer for Sun with me, almost the very first thing…As his manhood finished most of its expansion and twitched in front of her, waiting for her bidden taste, Sunny gave in with a groan. She had already had her first experience without the proper preparative rituals—what was one more rule bent almost into taboo? Her tongue licked the underside of that cherry, velvety head, then her lips came sliding around him as his fingers held her throat close to his body, giving her no room to back away from her intimate kiss. He moaned and clutched her head, burying his fingers in her auburn curls as she tasted him with lips and tongue and even the light touch of her teeth, licking away the slight flavor of soaped water for the warmer one of his flesh. But he pulled her away before she could taste the flavor of his rain.

Daemon couldn’t, daren’t let her take him any further than that. He almost lost control, closing his eyes on a shudder when he lifted her by her arms and his turgid manhood slid down the rising curves of her skin. He shouldn’t take her; she was undoubtedly sore, perhaps even raw from their near-constant coupling. Once more would make eleven times, barely within the space of a full day’s cycle. Holding her on her feet, slightly away from his turgid need, he sought for control to leave her alone at least for a few more hours, and opened his eyes.

Sunny didn’t know why he had stopped her. Until she saw the look in his eyes. Untamed, unabridged, impassioned need. He wanted her to fulfill him another way. Her core was still sore from the last time, and the time before that…but it was also still slick with his seed, deep inside. Even though her sensitivity to her body told her the contraceptive was working, that she wouldn’t get pregnant, Sunny found the idea of his liquid seed inside of her incredibly arousing. Her hand came up, feathered along the underside of his shaft, then wrapped around him just as he groaned and caught her wrist. Holding her still, though if his intent had been to remove her hand, he didn’t move it. Lifting her lashes, Sunny looked up at him. Her master. Her owner, damn his eyes.

Her lover.

Seeing the unshuttered passion in her jewel-bright eyes, Daemon groaned and hauled her against him, angling his head down for a hot and devouring kiss. She met him mouth to mouth, breasts to chest, belly to groin, her arms freely wrapping around him. Her fingers dragged down at the wet silk clinging to his skin. Impatiently, Daemon freed first one arm, then other for her to scrape off the damp fabric; he barely heard the robe slapping into the water behind him because he had returned his arms to her waist, and his palms to her buttocks. Lifting her by them, he grinned in savage, masculine satisfaction as she lifted her legs and wrapped them around her waist, clinging to him automatically. It brought his manhood to the edge of her womanhood, and he slid automatically, instinctively, primally inside. Wiping his smile away with a groan of deep sensation as she sank down onto him. It was insane, possibly suicidal to take her like this here in his bathtub, the water swirling around his thighs as he rocked his hips into hers. Where a simple fall like the one she had experienced before tasting him could end his kingship and his life as surely as it had his father’s and his brother’s.

Daemon didn’t care. All he cared about was pounding into her, and the way she gripped him with her inner muscles, something no Astorran woman had ever done so thoroughly, so strongly, so willingly before. She clung to him on a breathless cry as his savage possession shuddered her through a hard and fast climax, and he poured himself into her with a shout. When the long, trembling moments of passion had eased, he felt actually surprised to still be standing. Bending down into the water, her hips still clasped to his, her flesh still surrounding him, he dropped to his knees. The water swirled around them, bobbing her breasts against his chest as he kissed her.

When Daemon slipped out of her, she winced and caught her breath, grimacing for a moment against his lips. He felt a bastard for making love to her until she was sore…but even as he felt a touch of remorse…he also still wanted her. Even though his body was exhausted of its readiness at the moment, he still wanted her. Marshalling strength for his will, he reached behind him, found the raw silk scrubbing cloths by awkward touch, and managed to wet the rag and squirt soap onto it from the chased gold dispenser, all with one hand. All while kissing his incredible concubine.

Massaging the rag to create the cleansing foam, he pulled back from her mouth, both pleased and distracted when she followed his own, seeking more. Wrapping his arm around her waist, her legs still straddling his hips, he lifted her up out of the water and set her on the marble edge.

Sunny, her world turned topsy-turvy by the events of the last few days, wished she didn’t feel so confused. She wanted to flee, wanted her freedom. She needed his touch, needed to stay and know this physical bliss he could give her. She needed to keep him away from her, to avoid whatever drugs and their effects his palace servants had given to her…and she wanted to succumb again. So she didn’t protest beyond a soft sound when he picked up one arm and started soaping her fingers, then moving up to lather her arms. The brown spots of her odd line of freckles showed through the white foam, and when he got to her shoulder, the newly crowned king of Astorra trailed his finger from the edge of her wrist, past her elbow, to the spiralling ring that circled her bicep.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. Is it…natural? Or some sort of tattoo?” Daemon lifted his paler gaze to her own, his fingertip gently rubbing the flesh of her upper arm.

“I…don’t know.” Sunny glanced down at her arm, and found herself confessing the whole thing. “They were just…there. When I bathed in the slave house, the day they brought us in.”

“They? Us?” Daemon questioned. Normally, he tried to keep slavery out of his kingdom; he had no experience, no knowledge of how slavery occurred—he didn’t even know the full reason why he was keeping her as his slave as well as his concubine, other than he didn’t want her leaving him.

“The pirates that attacked the archaeological dig I was on. They killed two of the others, and dragged us off to another world…Tovedd, I think. We were only in space for a few days away from Tarkat, and that’s the nearest non-Imperium world that far away, out on the Fringe near the Tarkat system.”

“You’re an archaeologist?” Daemon asked, surprised. When one thought of slaves being taken by stellar pirates, one thought of the working classes, of farmers and spaceport workers. Not of scientists.

“Historian. Imperium Historian,” she corrected him, eyeing her other, unsoaped arm. He brought the rag over as she lifted and studied it, and Sunny let him bathe her. For a moment, she was distracted by the oddity of the king of a ten-world empire bathing a mere slave, but then his thumb brushed over her freckle line again and she was caught back in the original subject. “I should be freckled all over, but…”

“All over?” Daemon asked, intrigued by the idea. She gave him a quelling, narrow-eyed look for the direction of his thoughts, and he laughed softly, soaping up over her shoulder. “I’m not sure which I would have preferred: you with these…intriguing lines,” he stated, trailing the soapy, raw silk down and around in its spiralled path over her breasts, “…or you with freckleseverywhere for my exploration.”

She wanted to hit him for his possessive tone and words. She wanted to have him investigate personally with a little Prayer for Sun to make sure there weren’t any where there had used to be some. Sunny settled for breathing hard a few moments.

He wanted her again, when he looked up into her eyes and saw her passion there. Their color was a little more turquoise, her air annoyed with him…but she wanted him; Daemon could tell. That passion gripped him. Deliberately, he massaged her breasts with the rag, and listened in masculine satisfaction as she let out a faint groan of pleasure. “So you were brought in and bathed. What happened to all the freckles that should have been here, and here…and here?”

Shuddering as his soapy, rag-clenched hand brushed her breasts, her belly, and finally her feminine curls, Sunny closed her eyes for a moment. He tormented her a moment longer, just the lightest, wisping touches, then pulled back and waited for her answer. Pulling her scattered thoughts together, she picked up the thread of her story again. He started bathing her body again. “There I was, in the communal showers, scrubbing away—I was happy to be able to bathe.”

“You were?”

“We’d been three weeks at that dig site, inside a camouflage dome tent, in summer jungle heat. The tent was to hide us from pirate raids, though we’d already been attacked once before. Anyway, we didn’t have much water to spare for washing, and I didn’t get much of a chance to bathe locked up in the pirate’s slave cell, and I was dying for a decent bath. My people believe in cleanliness,” she added as he started working on her toes. She frowned at him. “Are you sure you should be doing that?”

“Bathing you? Why not?” Daemon asked.

“You’re a king. I’m a…” She flushed, unable to bring herself to say it.

Daemon shifted forward on his knees, water swirling around his chest. He slipped his soapy hand behind her back, bringing her close for a swift kiss. “I’m your lover. And if I want to bathe every inch of you, then that is what I will do. Continue with your story,” he ordered her, working his way to the top of her knee, then on up her soft, freckle-seamed thigh. “You were in need of a thorough washing.”

“So I scrubbed myself. Thoroughly,” she added as he skipped the very top of her thigh, where it joined to her hip and buttock, and worked on her other foot. “When I stepped back under the spray…it was like my freckles just…washed away. And I suddenly had more, all compressed into these.”

She nodded at her arms and legs, lifting her feet from the water to display her striped calves better. Daemon slipped between her thighs and gently scrubbed her back, enjoying the slick feel of her lathered skin against his own as her thighs and breasts rubbed. Startled, her eyes flew to his. “Go on. Were you scanned by any medical equipment?”

“I’m sure I was—everyone claimed I was healthy. That the freckles are natural…for all that they’re definitely not in a natural pattern,” she added as he urged her back to arch, rubbing her breasts against him as his rag-soaped hand rubbed her back. His head was only a few inches below her own as he lathered her body. For a moment, her breath caught, then she cleared her throat and continued. “They even took an exfoliant soap to my skin, and nearly scrubbed me raw. I know it isn’t some sort of tattoo, and it isn’t bodypaint, and it doesn’t hurt in any way… I suppose I could have contracted something while I was on Tarkat II…but no one’s ever contracted a freckle-striping disease there, as far as I know. No one’s ever caught a virus like this before, if it’s the side effect of some bug bite or germ.”

“No other side effects?”

“Not unless you count your drugging me,” Sunny pointed out dryly. Letting some of her earlier displeasure surface again in her tone. She squirmed as he slid his hands down to her buttocks and urged her forward, onto her feet in the water. Standing, her belly was about the same height as his head, sending wanton images through her thoughts. “How long does this stuff last, anyway? How long do I have to keep wanting you?”