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He could see now that he'd made a mistake in taking Lorya with him this far.
Yet it would have been death to leave her in Dodini, and he hadn't realized
she might come to care for him the way she obviously had. Damn! He'd been
remarkably slow in a matter where he was usually alert. Now he'd contrived to
drag another innocent person deep into danger, after swearing a mighty oath
he'd do everything he could to avoid this happening again!
He urged his heuda forward. "Come on, Lorya. Let's see what the inns have in
the way of wine.
They've got to have something better than the purple vinegar we drank last
night!"
Blade came up the winding stairs, hearing the wood creak under his weight and
ducking his head to get under the low beams. The stairs were swept clean of
dust, but still smelled of old wine, unwashed human bodies, and the oil from
the dim, guttering lamps that shed a faint orange light.
Blade reached the top of the stairs and turned right, down the hall leading to
the inn's half-dozen private rooms. To the left were the three large communal
chambers, each with beds for a dozen people.
Blade thought of sticking his head inside one, to see what kind of people were
snoring away there, then decided against it. In this village people were very
careful to keep to themselves, not asking others'
business or even meeting others' eyes.
Blade decided he would not ask Lorya to wait for him here. A few hours in the
grim atmosphere of this village was already making him edgy. Two weeks of it
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would make the poor woman a nervous wreck. He'd send her ten miles back up the
road to the village of Peloff and the Inn of the Blue Swan.
She could wait more safely and much more comfortably there.
Blade reached his room, turned the huge iron key in the lock, pushed the door
open, then stopped abruptly. The sleeping pallet beside the bed where Lorya
had been lying was empty. He scanned the room quickly. The candle still burned
in the candlestick by the head of the bed; and everything else was as it had
been when he left. But the room was as completely empty as if Lorya had been
spirited away by magic.
Blade's hand went to the hilt of his sword and he took a step forward,
surprise and the beginnings of fear rising in him. The fear was not for
himself, but for Lorya. Had the Wizard's powers reached out and struck at her,
or had human agents come after her? He drew his dagger and took another step
forward, trying to look in all directions at once. Possibly
Then Blade heard the unmistakable sound of a deep breath from behind the door,
the only part of the room his eyes couldn't reach. He froze in mid-stride,
then started to turn. A moment later came an unmistakable, uncontrollable
giggle. Blade whirled around and slammed the door behind him. Lorya stood
there, shaking with laughter that she was vainly trying to keep silent. She
was shaking so hard that she had to brace herself against the wall to keep
from collapsing on the floor.
She was also entirely nude.
Blade's breath went out of him in a whistle of pleased surprise. Then he
wanted to laugh at himself. A
fine spectacle he must have been, entering the room as though a hungry tiger
waited to leap out at him.
No wonder Lorya finally broke into giggles! Of course it was a dangerous joke
to play on a man with his training, who became a deadly fighting machine the
moment his suspicions were aroused. But he didn't have to tell her this and
spoil her fun, not on this evening, the last time they might ever see each
other.
So he said nothing. Instead he stepped forward, bent, and swept her up into
his arms. She let her head drop back, arching her neck and exposing her throat
to Blade's lips. He noticed that her breath was coming fast, and a tendon in
the slim neck was vibrating like a plucked harpstring.
This didn't surprise Blade at all. When he raised his lips from her throat,
his own breath was coming in gasps, as if he'd just run a couple of miles at
top speed. His strength seemed to have doubled so that he was holding Lorya,
not a small woman in spite of her slenderness, as easily as if she'd been a
child.
He held her for a moment longer, then turned, carried her over to the bed, and
laid her down on the quilt. She lay on her back, her arms at her side and her
breasts rising and falling with her quick breathing.
She kept her eyes fixed on Blade as he pulled off his clothes. In the dim
light those eyes seemed to be twice their normal size and Blade could have
sworn they were glowing like a cat's.
Lorya suddenly wriggled and laughed softly. "I wonder what anyone would say if
he could spy on us the Wizard's man and his 'servant'. Of course, some of the
Wizard's men are said to have a liking for boys."
"They might wonder at first," Blade said, smiling. "But not for long. No one
who got a good look at you could think for a moment you're a boy."
That was nothing less than the truth. Lorya was fine-boned and slender, almost
lean. She'd had little spare flesh to begin with and the long journey across
Rentoro had taken off much of that: Yet she was still beautiful, her breasts
shallow but exquisite cones with dark nipples now risen into points, her belly
extraordinarily taut and flat for a woman who'd borne a child, her legs simply
breathtaking long for her height, strongly muscled, exquisitely molded. Those
legs drew Blade's attention until he had to sit down on the bed beside Lorya
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and run his hands up and down them, from the feet up to the inner thighs and
back down again. Under his hands her skin was firm, and seemed to be cool and
warm at the same time.
Gradually his hands spent more time on her inner thighs, occasionally brushing
lightly over the triangle of fine dark hair nestling between them. As Blade's
hands worked, so did his lips, kissing Lorya's eyes, ears, and lips, again
caressing her throat, working down to her breasts and across the skin of her
belly until she shivered and moaned.
Lorya did not lie quietly under Blade's hands and lips. Far from it. Her own
hands were making their own thorough exploration of his body, and her lips
pressed against his as if she wanted to weld the two of them together. In the
brief moments when her arms went around him, he could feel her wiry strength,
feel her trembling, feel her nails digging into his skin.
At last there was no part of each other's bodies they hadn't explored with
lips and hands. Lorya was quivering from head to foot, her eyes were closed,
and from her open mouth came a steady whimpering.
Blade's own breath rasped in his throat like sand, and his groin seemed to be
glowing white hot. His lips returned to Lorya's throat again. She caught him
with both arms, hands gripping his hair. He wanted to slip gently into her,
but instead her legs seemed to fly apart and her hands tightened, dragging him
down, dragging him deep within her' n a single fierce moment.
Now her legs rose and locked around Blade's waist, while her hands slipped
down onto his back.
Her nails dug in deeper than before, but Blade felt no pain. He couldn't have
felt pain if he and Lorya had been hurled into a boiling cauldron. He could
feel nothing but Lorya, swamping all his senses, enveloping him, surrounding
his mind as she'd already surrounded part of his body.
He was slow to feel anything else. He was dimly aware that Lorya was moving
under him as he moved within her, that her legs were clamping tighter and her
hands were once again in his hair. He heard her moans rise and he heard his
own breath coming faster and faster. Yet he was less aware than usual of the
slow exquisite climb toward the final release, the quickening, the twisting,
his desperate efforts to hold
back and the woman's desperate efforts to push on to the end.
He still knew when the release came. It came so nearly at the same moment for
both of them that
Blade and Lorya couldn't have said who was first, even if they'd cared about
knowing.
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