The Cherished One Read online

  He managed to look both slightly embarrassed and yet completely unashamed at the same time, much unhappier at having been caught delving into her mind – which he’d grudgingly promised her he would only do in emergency situations - than at having noticed that she was running herself down, which he flatly refused to permit. To her, he looked much more like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar than a dangerously lethal man known to kill first and ask questions later. Of course, she knew she was the only person alive who was privileged to know the other, less lethal side of him.

  And he was the only person alive to know all sides of her. Not even her mother – with whom she was extremely close – or her close group of female friends knew her quite as well as Dag did, and she was glad and proud of that fact.

  As always, she stopped eating when there was more than enough for lunch and dinner tomorrow; The Roma’s portions were notoriously enormous, and she was the only one who was going to be noshing on them, which was quite all right with her. It meant she wasn’t going to have to cook for another couple of days.

  He had been watching her delicate precision as she made her way through the meal, as if he was going to devour her himself. Seeing she was done, he threw several large bills onto the table, literally growling, “Let’s go,” as his hand clamped down on her wrist and she fell into place behind him. Well, no proposal in the restaurant. She’d been dead wrong about that.

  They’d been together long enough, though, that he automatically shortened his stride so that she could easily keep up with him without danger of breaking an ankle on the stiletto heels she preferred. Although he adored what they did for those gorgeous stems of hers, he’d told her long ago she didn’t have to wear them for him. Fawna had shot back that she didn’t give a damn whether or not he liked them – she wore them because she loved how they looked, too hell with him. She hadn’t said that she also liked that they gave her a six inch height advantage that she desperately needed with him. He towered over her, and she hated that. If she could, she’d wear them all the time. One of the things he’d learned during their time together was one of the worst punishments he could give her that wasn’t in the least physical was to ban her from wearing anything but flats. She detested having to look up at him all the time, and once, in the middle of an argument during which, of course, she had become much more heated than he, she had actually gone and gotten a chair to stand on, so that she could look down on him for a change.

  It hadn’t had quite the effect she’d hoped for – making him dissolve into laughter and effectively end the argument just when she’d been lining up all her arguments – so she hadn’t tried to again. Instead, she made him sit down, where at least their height difference was a little less exaggerated.

  Despite their hurried departure, he made an impromptu stop at a florist and bought her a dozen of her favorite lavender roses, furthering her thoughts that she might be proposed to this evening, perhaps after she was spanked. Fawna wrinkled her nose. That wouldn’t be right. If he spanked her, he wouldn’t make love to her, by his own damned rule. If he proposed, she damned well wanted him to claim her right afterwards. She’d have to see what she could do about getting him to change his mind, if what she thought was going to happen happened.

  And, if it didn’t, she was fine, too. They’d been together for a while, and she knew the impediments to what she was thinking as well as he did. But he was acting strangely tonight, and, considering what had happened last night between himself, her big brother Dain, and Maximilian, who was at least as dangerous and powerful a vampire as Dag was, if not more so, she supposed it could be nearly anything.

  He and Max had been enemies for centuries, all over a woman.

  But what she’d thought was going to happen once they got home, didn’t. At least, not the more pleasant thought. Instead, once he’d very carefully put everything in its place, and she had grown complacent and was updating her Facebook page with tales of their wonderful meal and pictures of her gorgeous flowers, she found herself being led into their bedroom by the unforgiving circle of his thumb linked with his third finger, encircled, as it was, around her slender wrist.

  She found herself standing in front of him as he sat on the end of their bed. Calling it their bed was somewhat of a misnomer, though. It was her bed. He occupied it with her, held her while she slumbered, but he usually slept alone... elsewhere. She’d seen where his coffin was, although it had taken him nearly five years to trust her with that information. Five years during which she did her best not to feel insulted that it had taken him so long, because it was a blink of an eye, as far as he was concerned, and she could understand his reticence at revealing that kind of information, especially considering her family background.

  Dag took both of her hands in his, in a way he hadn’t before, kissing each of them. “I thought – I thought I was going to lose you last night, you know.” He caught her eyes just before they darted away and he watched that gorgeous pink stain her first set of cheeks.

  She heard – and felt – the unfamiliar hesitation in his voice, and in his heart, reaching out to tilt his chin up, forcing him, when no being in existence could have, to look up at her with his eyes blood red with unshed tears.

  Shocked down to the soles of her feet, she wasn’t given the time to consider what she’d seen. Instead, he had the sheath of a dress in an uncharacteristic heap on the floor, and her bottom arched over his lap in record time, the barely there scraps of lace she called panties serving as decoration atop of the expensive pile of dress material.

  Chapter Two

  Fawna had thought he’d been taking things a little too well, considering, and she was right. He’d just been holding it in until now, when she was going to have to pay the piper, or, more accurately, the Viking, and what he demanded in recompense was strips off her bottom, preferably collected by his own palm, or a weapon of his own making, of which she had many more than she cared to admit.

  In fact, their master bedroom suite had what was supposed to be a dressing room just off it that was the size of a small bedroom. She was allowed approximately half of it for her clothes and shoes, but the other half contained various implements and accoutrement, so that every time she went to get dressed, or even just grab a pair of socks, she was reminded that many of the choices in her life weren’t really her own.

  Usually, her punishments were accompanied by lectures. Long, involved ones. For a man who had been a formidable Viking warrior in his time, a society that she – apparently – had been woefully misinformed into thinking hadn’t been much in the way of talkers – he certainly did like to deliver a searing scolding, at least when she was on the receiving end.

  And she was perpetually on the receiving end of something from him, and it wasn’t always pleasant, and she definitely knew it wasn’t promising to be so this time, especially once his hand crashed down onto her vulnerable butt.

  Their apartment was well soundproofed. It needed to be, because Fawna had already proven at that point to be quite vocal when she was being disciplined prior to their moving in, and Dag wasn’t about to stop the discipline that he felt she really benefited from. That was one of the things that they had investigated quite thoroughly – much to the real estate agent’s, and Fawna’s, discomfort – before they’d gotten into it.

  But she was still a delicate flower, his love – with a hell of a set of lungs. She hadn’t known much in the way of pain or discomfort in her life, and he was glad for her. But it had made the spankings he delivered just that much harder for her to take. Dag had brought discipline and order into a very few, very select other women’s lives in his not inconsiderable time, but Fawna was the smallest of them, and the most sensitive overall, probably due to her family background. She was the least prepared to handle what he dished out. She had done her best to deal with what he’d expected her to take, but he’d made the decision himself, without informing her, to scale back just a little, and he’d never regretted his decision in the leas
t. She responded just as well to a little less physical discipline than he might deliver to a taller, more muscular woman, and he didn’t see the shadow of fear in her eyes that made his heart and his testicles shrivel when he’d seen it in hers that one time he’d reached for the paddle.

  Not that she wasn’t very thoroughly punished. She was. But he wasn’t the type of man to decide that one size fit all, and that was that. He had long since realized that adjustments needed to be made in almost everything, and something as intimate and personal as discipline could hardly be different.

  He loved spanking her with his hand. Just his big palm cracking loudly down onto that generously rounded butt of hers. For a naturally small, almost ethereal woman such as Fawna, she was most wondrously blessed with a gorgeous backside that he found he could barely keep his hands off even when he didn’t have her tipped over his lap.

  And when he did, Heaven help her, for his palm literally itched to set it ablaze, to bring it to that sunset hue that had her alternately kicking and squirming, moaning and crying, sometimes – and this was definitely one of those times – begging him to stop.

  But that wasn’t going to happen. Not this time. When he’d seen her held intimately in Max’s arms, because Max knew how to push every button he owned – even though he’d known she wasn’t being harmed; he could feel it within their connection, despite the other vampire’s best attempts at blocking that intimate link – his enemy’s rapier fangs sink into her jugular, when she was milliseconds from almost certain death, knowing there was precious little he could do to stop it should Max decide to even the score and take from him the one woman in the world who meant everything to him, he felt his warrior’s soul burn to life within him, with all of its pent up testosterone and anger.

  He switched, mid-swing, it seemed to the howling Fawna, and grabbed the ever-present hairbrush. It was a wooden, solid oak one he’d made for her himself. Woodworking had long since become a hobby, whereas, when he was alive, it had been as much a part of his identity as his name. His family had built the boats from which they had then explored and conquered any and all shores on which they’d arrived, bringing back with them the spoils they had accumulated as they’d traveled. It had been during one of those raids that he had lost his life – seen his last sunset – and gained whatever this existence was. He’d been driven from the village he’d known all his life, spurned by his love and his family, cast out to fend for himself.

  He hadn’t been so frightened in all his thousand plus years since then until last night, and then it hadn’t been for his own safety, for whether or not he existed was a rather moot point as far as he was concerned except that he knew it would devastate Fawna. But he could not – would not – lose her, for without her, there would be no light in his life at all. And he had already accepted the bald fact that the darkness that had surrounded him for all of those years would engulf him again, and he would lose himself in it until there was nothing at all left of him.

  Dag dragged himself away from his musings to the important task at hand. Sometimes, when he spanked her, he was slow and careful, almost teasing her, because the both of them knew that she would find no ease in his arms that evening. He’d spank – hard, of course, because it was still a punishment – and then stop and force her to spread her legs enough that he could explore between them, and, always triumphantly, to Fawna’s deep embarrassment, show the both of them just how hollow her protestations rang.

  Then he would rub her bottom, which was both a blessing and a curse to Fawna, because although it alleviated some of the atrocious ache he’d caused, it instigated other aches, not the least of which was the fact having her highly sensitized flesh rubbed wasn’t necessarily the most pleasant of sensations, regardless of how much it actually assisted her. Fawna couldn’t decide whether she wanted to try to squirm out from under his hand or arch up to it.

  This time, though, the thought of stopping hadn’t so much as crept into his mind until the sound of her fairly bellow/begging his name finally permeated the fear he’d managed to relive from last night.

  Her bottom was most thoroughly dealt with indeed, and he was – despite the depths of his fear – completely besotted with her, as always. How could he not be? She was a delicate faerie of a woman, draped – however childishly – naked over his lap, smelling of roses and lavender, the jewels he had bestowed upon her still dripping from her ears and neck, that lucky charm nestled between her breasts, where he so wished to live most of the time, feeling the gentle thump of her heartbeat, the human warmth of the source of her blood pumping away, smelling it, reveling in it and the flowers and sunshine scent and feel of her.

  He lifted her, as if she weight nothing – and she did weigh, especially to him, next to nothing – up to the top of the bed, having no care for the condition of her rump, since she had been the cause of it, she would bear the brunt of the responsibility for its condition, letting her flow out of his arms and down onto the flowery meadow of the comforter as he followed her down and flowed over her himself, his mouth watering at various tempting spots – just behind her ear, allowing himself the smallest of smiles at her high pitched giggle, her eyelids, the line of her jaw, those plump, soft, pink lips, where he allowed himself to linger for just a moment before moving on to even more interesting territory.

  But he found he couldn’t tarry very long much of anywhere, no matter how much he wanted to, and he did. He wanted to linger at her breasts, in particular, at the curve of her waist, which the animals always tried to beat him out of, at the ultra sensitive insides of her elbows and the back of her knees, and even, and perhaps more so than others, those well-roasted hillocks he had already paid such terrible court to.

  His body, however, wasn’t going to have any of it. Having escaped from that awful situation last night with body and soul – well, both of their bodies and at least her soul – intact, parts of him were eager to reestablish their most primitive bond with her, and weren’t about to allow him to take this as slowly as he would have liked.

  No, he had to be a part of her, immediately, and he was. There was no need to deny himself, and in this, all parts of him reveled.

  He flipped her onto her back again, again with absolutely no care for her recovering backside, slipping between her legs without so much as a by your leave and pressing himself inside her to the hilt in one massive, powerful stroke, nearly peaking instantaneously at the sound of her indrawn, breathy moan and the way she writhed in what he knew from her descriptions after similar movements was a kind of ultimate pleasure pain as she tried to absorb and accommodate his rude invasion.

  And yet, she was soaking wet. He knew he would receive a warm welcome from her body, even if her mouth was hurling protests at him. And he’d never been wrong.

  Dag thought he’d probably stake himself out in the desert if that ever happened.

  He loved those whimpers and half moans as he plunged into her, giving no quarter, pinning her wrists to the bed and taking her forcefully but with a careful eye to her ultimate pleasure, surprising her with it, concentrating on it almost to the exclusion of his own, forcing her past any point of resistance and making her scream and brand him with her teeth marks when she finally surrendered her pleasure to him and he arched into her with everything he had at his moment of ecstatic triumph, groaning well back in his throat as he spilled his essence within her, collapsing on top of her in a way that he used to worry would completely crush her, but now knew she absolutely adored.

  Her wrists loosed, Fawna was finally able to indulge herself in one of her favorite pastimes. She ran her frosted pink-tipped fingernails up and down his back, almost tracing the individual muscles, stopping here and there to massage slightly, then giving him the back scratching she knew would have him moaning and groaning and promising her anything she wanted if she just wouldn’t stop.

  She didn’t know what she’d done to deserve that unexpected piece of pleasure, but she sure wasn’t going to question her good fortune, since it w
as the first time she could remember that he’d broken his own rule.

  But still, she’d always found she could barely keep her hands off him, even eight years later.

  When he rolled off her, as always, she tried to stop him, but he, of course, got his way. For some reason, he refused to believe that he wasn’t crushing the breath out of her. She adored this position, but was no martyr. If she couldn’t breathe, she would have been beating on him to get the hell off of her. But she loved the weight of him on her. It felt . . . right. Just right. The way things should be.

  ***

  As Fawna was recalling the events of last night in her head, she reached out to Dag automatically. It was daytime, and he would be asleep, but their deep connection remained unbroken, even by that. She always felt that sensual tickle of his presence in her mind –

  Until now.

  Fawna sat bolt upright in their bed, frantically calling out to him in her head, screaming for him, crying for him, but he wasn’t there. Tears poured down her cheeks as she allowed herself a scream fit to wake the dead.

  And it did.

  Dag, even disconnected from her as he was, and well hidden as he felt he had to be, had come wide awake at her cry, his own eyes full to overflowing at the pain he felt in her heart, and he knew, then and there, that he’d made the wrong choice. But the wheels were already in motion, and it still came down to the fact the only way he could keep her alive was to step out of her life for good.

  So he closed his eyes and forced her from his brain, severing those tiny last ties, squelching that image of her in tremendous pain from his mind and surrendering himself to his own, darker version of Morpheus and the thousands of years of living in pain without her that lay ahead.

  Fawna, at first, refused to believe that he had left her. She scoured the apartment for a note, and, finding none, knew where he went to when he slept, but that spot, as well as every “emergency” spot she knew he kept around the city was dead empty. Her cell rang for the umpty umpth time just as she sat down outside the last one, which was in a particularly bad part of town. She glanced at it. Her brother again. He wasn’t any too happy to be ignored by anyone, especially his little sister, whom he thought was entirely too spoiled for her own good. Especially considering who she’d decided to live with. He’d be only too happy to find out that Dag had left her, considering he’d been only too eager to fight the vampire to the death to keep him from his sister.