Chapter Twenty-two
HARMONY shivered in anticipation as King guided them to a corner of the hot spring, hooked his elbows on the calcified edge of nature’s spa, and drew her between his legs. Her anchor. Her target. No, she must be the target, because King wielded the dart. Big, thick and long, his dart.
She wound her arms around his neck, her legs around his hips, and before she could put him where she wanted him, he stole her focus by kissing her. Oh, yeah. Foreplay. She forgot. This was new to her, this spicy male musk permeating her senses; hot, talented lips grazing her ear, melting her, slow nibbling at her nape, fine-tuning her sensual receptors and causing a slow rise in her heartbeat.
He tasted of salt and sweat. Man and sex. More like romance than lust, but more than romance. She could fall for this man. This was more than sex for sport, this prelude to enduring pleasure, except that King’s version became a pleasure all its own. Ultimate foreplay.
He held her hips away from his, controlled her movement in the hot, licking spring, so only the tip of his shaft touched her, stroked her, wherever, however he wanted, depending on how he moved her. She flowered and opened to await his pleasure. She ran as hot as the spring, and yet he continued skimming her surfaces until her every nerve ending stood at attention, and the slightest abrasion, like his whiskers at the crown of her breasts, made her want him more. How much higher could she rise before she climaxed without him?
He looked up from his attention to her saluting nipple. “Do you have any idea how beautiful and luscious you are? Can you know what you do to me? I can’t believe I tried to turn you away.” He lifted her hand. “I don’t care where you got the ring,” he said, stroking it. “It made me see you in a different light.” He laved her nipple, scattering shock waves, like mini orgasms, that she could hardly bear, yet rode with wonder. “Last night was probably the best sex I’ve ever had, and I didn’t even have you,” he admitted.
She kissed him then, because she didn’t want him to see her tears. The best sex. Less than lust. Something mystical, no doubt, but not romantic. Certainly not love. They’d only known each other for a few days, after all.
He kissed her inadvertent tears, whispered his concern, pulled her toward and away from him letting his shaft slip the slightest bit in, then out as fast. A new experience, always to remember. Never to have with another. It wasn’t possible.
Pay attention to the signs. Words to live by. But she’d missed the biggest sign of all: sex for sport—a warning she’d ignored. And yet that’s all she’d ever wanted . . . until King.
She took him in, and he stopped controlling her. At his entry, her sharp burst of pleasure took her by surprise. His thickness and length stretched her, amazing, wondrous. He touched new pleasure points, deeper points, yet he raised her up. Rapture, and he’d barely entered her.
They moaned into each other’s mouths.
Yes, he was the king or commander. Whatever. She’d never had a lover like him. Not that she’d had many, but last night had been better than all four.
Their presence in this Goddess cathedral was more than serendipity. It was synchronicity, the earth and all its elements in alignment so she could be here with King, lost to the world, but more alive than ever. Here, she found her true self. Mating with King. She could do that. She didn’t need him to return any sentiment. Knowing how she felt, however premature, was enough.
The hot water added to their buoyant play, as they rode in harmony, her climax close, so close . . . yet he kept pushing it away, making her reach. He rode her hard. Someone screamed. Her. Him? Both of them. Over the edge in a rush down the far side of a rainbow they went, then over the falls into the sea, until they bobbed and drifted.
Heat pooled between her legs. A loss. He’d left her. Empty. She whimpered, and he consoled her. Nothing would be as beautiful as the experience they’d left behind. But when she opened her eyes, she saw beauty in his whiskey gaze. Concern. Caring. Honest and true. No walls. Vulnerable. Open to being cared for.
His vulnerability wouldn’t last, but she’d cherish the moment. She kissed him and drew the nectar of the Goddess from his lips, abundance, joy. Entwining her shaky limbs with his, she drifted toward sleep, her cheek against his chest, his chin on her head, him cradling her as she floated free, warmed by the water that surrounded them like babes in the womb.
“Harmony, darling, wake up.” Prince Charmy kissed her awake.
She opened her eyes. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Who did you expect?”
“Prince Charmy. He called me his darling in my dream. Couldn’t have been you.” She read King’s confusion. “It’s a fairy-tale dream I’ve carried around forever. My sisters make fun of me.”
“What? I’m not good enough to be your prince?”
“Good? You’re spectacular. But I never thought of Charmy in the sexual sense.”
“Well, there’ll be no happily ever after for you without sex, Orgasmatron. Time to upgrade the fairy tale.”
“True enough. Look at us making love in nature’s sacred place. I’m living a fairy tale, after all.”
“Not for much longer. The air’s getting cooler, if that’s possible. Time to swim out and see if there’s an escape route to be had before the sun goes down, or we’re gonna have a long, cold night.”
“You’re aces at warm-ups,” she said. “We’ll make our own heat.”
His laugh lines triple crinkled this time. She pushed off his chest and swam away. “King Paxton. I think you do know how to smile.”
“Great guns, sunshine, don’t tell anyone, especially not Aiden or Morgan, or my hard-ass rep will never recover.”
King’s walls remained down, Harmony realized, as they swam the serpentine spring toward a wide, round opening in a cliff, like a window to the sea. They held to its granite edge to look down on a suicide ledge of thorny rock, warm water sluicing past them over their hands, roaring down the side of the cliff into the sea a hundred feet below.
“Is that a dolphin?” she asked. “Never mind. It can’t be.”
“Yes it can. I saw dolphins around the island when I was a kid. Not long ago, a Newburyport whale watch tour had more than a hundred Atlantic dolphins playing around their boat.”
Harmony pulled herself up on the edge of the opening to see if she could find more.
“Hey,” King said, “you have a mermaid tattoo at the base of your spine.”
Harmony slid back into the water. “Really? Who knew?”
“I’ve never seen a mermaid on a woman. Men yes, all the time. That’s natural, but not on women. What gives?”
“Mia is a symbol of the Goddess and of female sexuality. The mermaid is a water spirit capable of utilizing the energy of the sea.”
“You named her, like you named your dolphin vibrators. Why does that turn me on?”
“Everything turns you on.”
“Everything about you,” he said, but she read his regret for the disclosure. “Pretend I’m a sea captain,” he said to distract her, “and take me down.”
“To the sea in ships? That’s a myth. Mermaids don’t lure men to their deaths. Men go willingly, too stupid to realize that if they follow a mermaid into the ocean, they can’t breathe. Mermaids have saved many a man from his death.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Harmony shrugged. “No man has ever seen Mia. I thought of her as . . . a rite of passage, except, well, I planned to share her with someone special.”
“I’m special.”
“But you’re not the one.”
“The one? Oh, ‘the one.’ ” King put some water distance between them. “No. No, I’m not. That’s a beautiful waterfall,” he said, scared spitless. “I’ve seen it from my boat.”
“What kind of boat?” she asked, changing the subject so he wouldn’t have a coronary.
“You never ask the expected question. My boat’s a beauty, a ninety-foot wooden schooner called The Sea Horse.”
“You’re kidding? I love sailing, and I love sea horses. I have a sea horse tattoo.”
He swam closer. “Seriously? Where?”
“That’s for you to find out.”
He put his arm around her shoulder. “Do you want to know if we can get out of here or not?”
She shrugged. “I know we can’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Your body language. You’re being protective. We’re sunk, you’ll pardon the pun, and Mia had nothing to do with it.”
“Mia is not under suspicion, but we are up the hot springs without a paddle.”
“At least it’s not a swamp of eternal stink, and we won’t go hungry. We have bananas.”
“If they’re not mush, they’re black by now. I dropped them on the way down.”
“I know. They arrived before you did, and I rescued them. Frozen bananas are awesome, especially with chocolate sauce . . . like sex. Hot fudge sounds especially good right now.” She shivered.
“Here, let’s get away from the cool sea breeze and swim underwater to get warm on our way to lunch.”
Beneath the green blue surface, they kissed and teased, frolicked and chased, and Harmony felt like a mermaid, cavorting with ‘the one’ fate intended for her. Wow, she was a sucker for a fairy tale.
Pulling her attention from King and futile fairy tales, she looked down to see the white caps of the stalagmites below them. So the spring was a relatively new addition to the cavern. She surfaced, sluicing water from her face and hair from her eyes. “What about the source of the spring?” she asked as King surfaced. “Maybe we could find our way out that way.”
“The source has to be somewhere beneath the cavern floor beyond the spot where we made love,” he said.
The roar of the falls was nothing to the sound of her heart roaring in her ears. He said they’d made love. He misspoke, of course, but, wow, he didn’t catch himself. The poor man needed rescuing in more than the usual way.
“I’ll bet I can’t find a banana as big as your pecker,” she said, diving beneath the surface to race him back to the cavern.