Elijah by Jacquelyn Frank
“I did this to Jacob once. I told him I could move the Earth just like he could, and he dared me to prove it.”
“Like you knew he would.”
“Yup.” Elijah chuckled. “So I made it rain like hell and caused a mudslide that ran right over him.”
That was when mud began to splatter against the windows, darkening the room first on one side, then the next. The rain stopped so it wouldn’t wash the mud away. The wet soil had been dragged from the muddy ground in a small, wet dust devil of sorts that shook the mud against the building like a wet dog. When it dried, it would form a perfect lightproof mask.
“Very ingenious,” she commended him with half a smile, crossing her arms beneath her breasts, drumming fingers on her forearm as she waited with obvious expectation for him to turn back to her and face his thoughts.
“Yes, yes,” he sighed, finally facing her as her knowing curiosity penetrated his mind.
“It is not like you to avoid speaking your mind,” she prompted.
“My thoughts are no mystery, really. You have been having similar ones.” Elijah moved to seat himself on the bed, reaching to take her hand and guide her to him until she stood between his knees and he could wrap his hands around her waist. “We are married, kitten, and only know the basics about one another. How can we expect to take on the roles of bringing the Montague and Capulet families peacefully to the same table?”
She nodded once, briefly, her hands coming to brush soothingly over his shoulders. Which of them she was trying to soothe, she did not know immediately.
“And we have not even so much as thought about the issue of children,” she added.
“Neither of our species is shy of children, but I disagree with bringing a child into a union where the parents are still strangers to one another in so many ways.”
“If indeed we are even biologically compatible enough to have said children,” she pointed out.
“Another consideration,” he agreed gravely. “The heritage of your throne…”
“…is secure in Syreena’s care no matter what,” she interrupted smoothly. “We have time beyond measure to work all of this out. You cannot sit here and try to solve a list of the tasks ahead of us all at once. Pardon me for saying that you are thinking rather like a human. Humans are different, Elijah, because they do not have such compelling conditions as the Imprinting. This condition has propelled us together, though we are little more than strangers, but that does not make it a disadvantage. I wish to ease your mind and tell you that I am far more interested in us discovering more about one another than I am in rushing to fulfill my duty to produce royal heirs.”
“I feel the same,” he said quietly.
When he looked away from her once more, Siena sighed in exasperation and dropped to her knees between his feet, her hands falling to his thighs and squeezing so as to get his unwavering attention.
“Elijah, can we get to the honest point which you are still skirting?” she asked with earnest.
“Damn,” he muttered, giving her a wry half smile.
“Yes, I know. It sucks having a woman in your mind.”
“That could be the understatement of the century.” Elijah reached out to touch his fingertips beneath her chin. “I need to know if you are willing to keep a household that is joined in the heart and the spirit, but divided in traditions,” he said at last.
“To begin with,” she responded softly, “our house is already joined in the heart and spirit. You would not allow me to say so, but I will tell you now. I love you, Elijah.” Her voice broke, but it was from fullness of emotion rather than any hint of uncertainty. “I do not care if it takes ten years or ten centuries to know all these minor details that so concern you at times. I have seen your spirit. I have felt it mesh with mine. I know now that we are two halves of a single creature. An honorable warrior, a fierce loyalist, a powerful leader, a tenderhearted lover. All the rest becomes minor details because these basics are all I need to know about you. It is the essence of you. These things sculpt who you are and what you do just like they do me.” She picked up one of his huge hands, drawing it to her face where she pressed a kiss within the palm, her golden eyes flickering with painful intensity. “And I beg you to forgive me for being too much of a coward to tell you so on our wedding night when you needed so much to exchange the words and feelings with me.” Her rich voice was awash with hoarse agony. “When I think that I could have lost you to the next life without you knowing, I am ashamed of myself and doubt I even deserve this precious thing.”
“Siena.” He repeated her name on a sigh as he swept her tightly against himself. Elijah had never known such elation as he had felt when she had said her words of love. All of the rest, the recriminations and sorrow, could not penetrate that feeling. He nearly squeezed the breath out of her as he tried to pull her deeply into his body. “I would think you would realize that I am too stubborn and far too egotistical to die without the satisfaction of hearing you tell me these things.”
He made her laugh, compelling her to reach around his waist, hugging herself even tighter to his chest, exactly what he needed and wanted her to do.
“I was trying to have a serious, loving moment, but I truly do not think you are capable of one,” she announced with exasperation.
“I was entirely serious,” he said, making sure he sounded serious. Siena only laughed again. “But I must tell you that…” He paused and his voice filled with infinite gentleness and tenderness. “You are so very precious to me,” he whispered against her neck. “You are my heart as it beats within my chest, my soul as it moves through my mind. The breath in my body that so fascinates you is your essence pouring in and out of me in a wave that drowns me over and over again until I cannot breathe for wanting you. Needing you.”
Siena tried to swallow, but her heart was stubbornly caught in her throat. He was doing it to her again, making her entire being swell with emotions beyond her capacity, her eyes burning with the overflow.
“Elijah,” she whispered into the golden fall of his hair, her tears skidding down the filigree strands that fell over her cheeks as she buried her face in his neck, “I love you. I will share your traditions just as I share your heart. The Goddess brought you to me; your traditions secured you to me and mine secured me to you. If not for both of our beliefs coming together as they did, we might never have known these feelings. Might never have had this love. Of course I will respect your beliefs and traditions. They are proving to be not so different from ours.”
“Mmm,” he agreed, smiling into her hair as he petted the strands softly. “I am so lucky to have so wise a wife,” he told her. “Although I confess I was thinking of a specific tradition.”
“Tell me,” she encouraged.
“I was considering the Siddah ceremony and my responsibilities in that role when Bella’s babe reaches the proper age.” He pulled back to see her expression. “It will mean fostering a child. A very powerful child with very unique abilities, if our prophecy is to complete itself. I see great opportunity for learning if she shares our lives in a court of combined cultures. But I will relinquish the role of Siddah if this troubles you too much. I understand it is a hard responsibility. Though, I confess, it would pain me greatly to disappoint Bella and Jacob in such a way.”
“I would never think of asking you to do such a thing,” Siena scolded him. “The rearing of children is one responsibility both our species take very seriously. She would be lucky to have you as her mentor. Luckier still to have me.”
She chuckled when he reached through her hair to pinch her for being impertinent. Siena responded by running warm, apologetic hands up over his back. She felt him sigh heavily and she knew it was because her touch relaxed him as much as her generous responses did. He did not have to worry so much about so many things all at once. Time would sort everything out. He was tired and weary from a battle that made the future a tenuous thing, so she understood his disquiet.
She also had a cure for
While his head buzzed with thoughts and questions, she began to whisper a soft litany into his mind in her native language. It was soft, imperceptible in the clamor of his thoughts, and she did not even know for certain if he knew the language. However, if he wanted to share traditions, this was one she was happy to provide. Normally, the words were spoken aloud to one’s mate, but Siena had the advantage of telepathy to aid her, and this left her mouth available for other things.
She began to rub her soft mouth against his neck, finding the beat of his pulse, feeling it for a moment because it represented the beat of the life coursing through him. Then she parted her lips and touched her tongue to that steady throb. Elijah’s focus immediately took hold of a single point of interest, discarding everything except the velvet slide of warmth and moisture slowly licking a path up the length of his carotid artery. Heat like a flash fire exploded in his mind, rippling over every inch of his skin, finally settling low and hot in his body. She was on her knees between his thighs, her incredible breasts cuddled against his chest, and her hands were reaching down to slide over his denim-covered thighs.
Elijah felt the instantaneous reaction that she always struck up in him so easily. He made a quiet sound of agony as her teeth came into play against his neck. She nipped at him and he felt a bolt of erotic lightning spear down the center of his body. It was then that he began to hear the words drifting in his head, in her native tongue, a language he had learned long ago, as any wise warrior would have. It had the rolling cadence of Russian to it, but it was far older than that, far more elegant, deeply reflective of the Lycanthropes with its sexy, guttural consonants and the roll of the tongue that made the words sound almost like soft growls.
You are for me. I am for you. My body is yours. Your body is mine. Touch me. Taste me…
Elijah groaned from the depths of his soul, the words a delightful enough torture all on their own, but Siena’s hands were sliding into the junction of his legs, stroking him through painfully confining denim. She pressed her fingers up along the hard heat contained just beyond his fly, her palms following. She nipped at his neck again. She shifted so the sensual weight of her breasts drifted across his chest, her nipples teasing points of excitement right through her dress.
Then, quick as a twitch, she was reaching for his tank shirt, dragging it free at the waist while she surged up to find his mouth. Elijah complied, seizing her mouth in a wild, rampant kiss. She drove him mad with her aggressive tendencies, like a sexual fantasy come to life. He felt her sliding silkily through his thoughts, picking out what he would like, what drove him out of his mind. She shucked off his shirt and immediately dragged her mouth from his in a line right down his throat, over his breastbone, straight down his belly until she was back on her knees and he was a firestorm of arousal and need.
Elijah’s hands were anchored in her hair, his fingertips massaging her scalp with frantic undulations. He felt her smile against his belly, knowing he had been plunged so swiftly into her surprise trap that he could hardly think. She reached up and pushed him back onto the bed, her body and mouth following all the while. Her hands slid down his sides as she leaned forward to lick a tracing line over the definition of his abdominal muscles. His entire body clenched with need, exploded with molten heat. He twitched harshly beneath the scrape of her teeth as her lips began to shadow the golden path of hair leading to his waistband.
Her fingers fell deftly to the buttons of his fly, and he was finally released from the torturously tight fabric, bursting into her waiting hands. Siena heard his savage groan as she engulfed him with her eager fingers. He was hard and thick with need. Need for her. And there was no way in the world to describe how exciting that was. How powerful. But there were thousands of ways to feed that power, to make it grow. She stroked him softly at first, just the pads of her fingertips shaping the contours of velvet skin stretched over iron. She embraced him, wrapping both her hands around him and gliding up the length of him. Elijah’s exclamation of pained pleasure echoed off the high ceiling above them. Before he could finish the outcry, she suddenly slid her tongue over the sensitive tip and then took him into the hot seduction of her mouth.
The warrior felt as though he had been run through. He was helpless with shocking sensation, his belly and loins a conflagration of torrid need. Her mouth was wickedly hot, a wet, skillful haven that sealed with perfect tightness around him. He felt that sinuous tongue of hers, tasting him hungrily, using his flavor to excite herself until she was breathing hard against him. Elijah knew she was going to kill him. His heart was pounding so hard he expected it to burst from his chest any second. She was relentless, too damn eager and full of an unholy curiosity that was just unbelievable. He couldn’t take it another second.
Siena felt the demand of his hands in her hair, drawing her up his body, away from her delighted explorations of his body. He dragged her to his mouth and attacked her with a savage kiss that left her bruised and breathless. Then he disappeared from beneath her hands, and she felt herself disappearing as well seconds later. One moment she was there, and then she was air. When they shifted back to solid form, all of their clothes were gone and Elijah was trapping her beneath his heavy, powerful body. She laughed up at him when she saw the wild desire burning emerald fire in his eyes.
“So you like teasing?”
It was a threat, loud and clear and capped off with a male growl of intent. He devoured her mouth in endless chains of kisses even as his hands roamed with untamed compulsion all over her lushly curved body. He filled his hands with her breasts, taunting the sensitive nipples until she cried out into his mouth, arching her body up hard into his. He drank it up like a potent narcotic, feeling the burning of her golden skin, smelling the arousal pooling wetly between her legs. He reached up for both her hands and dragged them off his body. He cruelly captured them and pressed them flat onto the bed. It left him only with his mouth as a tool to torture her in return, but that was just what he had intended.
He dragged himself away from her addicting kisses and rushed a wet trail down her throat and sternum. He instantly seized her left nipple with his teeth, lips, and tongue, sucking hard and wild until she was moaning those feminine purrs of pleasure that he loved so much. She tried to free her hands instinctively, but he refused. He switched breasts and she cried out. Elijah licked the tender gold-and-rose point, laving her wetly, and Siena felt an almost malicious intent chuckling through his mind. Suddenly a breeze blew into the room. Not just any breeze, but a very cold one. A burst of nearly freezing air blasted over Siena’s exposed, dampened body and she screeched with the erotic sensation of hot and cold contrast. She shuddered and shivered as the breeze died away. Her entire body was shaking with a fine vibration, and Elijah enjoyed it as he replaced cold with fire, burning a trail to her navel, then lower still. His lips slid through filigreed curls, and then his tongue reached out to taste her.
Siena gasped wildly, her hips wrenching upward, reaching for that velvet stroke of his tongue even as he repeated it. Fire. An inferno exploding up her body, starting at that center point where he created magic against her. He would not release her hands, but he did change his grip so their fingers interlaced. She was seeping heat and honey and Elijah cherished the confection of her even as he teased her into a numbing world of promised release. Her entire body was locked with the impending crash, even the leg she had blindly thrown over his shoulder to drag him closer when he wouldn’t release her hands. He teased her relentlessly, loving the raw, primal sounds of feminine need that burst out of her.
“Elijah! Please!” she screamed out, begging him to have mercy.
He let go of her hands suddenly, grasping her hips, and held her to the precise position her wanted her to be in. He needed only to drag his beautiful mouth over her three more times before she ignited. She expelled a lusty shout that went on endlessly, even as he pushed her beyond a single peak of pleasure. He was relentless. He had no choice. The shocking jerks of her body, her cr
The warrior broke under the pressure of her pleasure and his need. He had never felt so heavy and violent with it before. It raged like a berserk beast inside of him, crouching low and demanding satisfaction.
Elijah grabbed his pleasure-limp mate with rough need, dragging her off the bed and herding her with his steely body and fast strides that barely allowed her feet to touch the floor. He stopped only when her hands slammed against the log wall, her cheek pressing against the smooth surface as her hips were jerked back against his, the enthusiasm of it lifting her feet off the floor. His scent, rough and masculine, poured over her as he crowded her against that solid wall. She felt him, titanium hard against her bottom as he leaned to press his lips against her exposed ear.
“I have wanted this since I first laid eyes on you,” he confessed hotly, his breath a burning wash over her ear and shoulder. “I saw you, so proud and so damn confident.” He tilted her hips in his calloused hands and he slid against folds of wet, feminine flesh. He was hot enough to burn, and Siena gasped. “I knew right then that you were the sexiest, hottest woman I would ever lay eyes on. You made me hard, scorched me with those haughty golden eyes, and all I wanted to do was grab you, throw you up against a wall, and…”
He plunged into her in one violent stroke, burying him self completely in the center of fierce heat, unimaginable tightness, and sweet, slick heaven. Siena, already highly keyed to pleasure, burst into instant orgasm, crying out long and loud as his ferocity of need swept over her. Elijah felt her convulsing around him, muscles rippling like violent vises, taunting his control. Her pleasure licked at him enticingly, but he would not give up his fantasy so soon. She had unleashed this, and she would tame it. There was no other solution.
He roared inside, like a tempest, a wild hurricane that wanted to tear up everything it could get its hands on. And his hands were on her. His chest pressed to her back, his mouth falling open against the crest of her shoulder, his hands holding her hips so he could draw himself out of her and return in a thundering force of ever-hardening need and craving for depth. Siena felt it, the need, the pulse and swell of his body inside hers. Every move, every thought was erotic to him, because it was her, and it brutalized him with his own want.