Living Blade (Blood/Fury & deadmanshand)

Vivian felt herself being lifted clear of the earth, but was so barely connected to it already that she trusted greater in his arms than the solidity of the world beneath her feet, and paid no mind to the lack of the lesser. It wasn't until that impact of the ground shook Eilert - and therefore some of her grip on him - that she realized what had happened. She'd been lifted clear of her standing only to land in his lap. It was then that the spell, that the idea she might not fully grasp what was happening, was broken.

Her lips pulled free of his, she leaned back to look up at him with a mixture of awe and excitement. Was this really happening? One trembling hand loosened in his clothing, smoothing the folds with shaky fingers as she licked her lips. When her eyes met his again, she found herself lost.

In the moment, it all fell away. She forgot that she was the eldest child of a noble house. She forgot that he was the stuff of legends, the soldier of myth. He was only Eilert, not a soldier, but a beautiful man. She was only Vivian, not bound by her house and only here for him.

Her breath was ragged, shaking in and shaking out as she looked pleadingly up at him. "Are you real?" She asked him, in a voice that was barely strong enough to be a whisper. He was there, obviously, and no figment of her imagination. He was solid beneath her in a myriad of pleasing ways, and she found that when she clenched her legs in just the right way, there was a thrill of pleasure that came from how her body rubbed firm against his. That movement was enough to make her fingers grip into his chest again, her jaw falling slightly open as the smallest of gasps slipped from her. Her eyes widened in reaction to the wonderfully salacious sensation that was at once foreign and pleasing. It was a bolt of excitement through her.

"Will you be real for me... tonight?" Pleading words could never say all that she meant. Could never ask him if he would... if he could... please be everything for her so long as the moon shone above them.

"Tonight and every night you ask of me," Eilert answered simply as enraptured with the wild, sweet creature against his chest as she with him. Tonight felt right as nothing had in so many years. A night for passion and flesh far from the demands of their gilded worlds. A night for truth without artifice or constraint or worry. Just them, the wind, and the moon above.

Her body against his made his breath grow heavy. Every tiny shift of hers grinding a thrill of pleasure through him. A growing wave of carnality that whipped at him without mercy. His desires were a burning, tightness in his fevered flesh. Unable to be hidden and unwilling to be circumspect. All driving him to her. To place his lips against the tender skin of her throat and rub his cheek against hers. To grip her tightly through the clothing that served now only to hide the form he wanted.

Every swell of hip and chest sent shivers through him as she rubbed against him. The soft breathy, whisper of her words fanned the flames. His hands ached to tear the dress from her but with a will he could scarcely believe was his own he refrained. Turning heat to gentle caresses across her back and over the sensitive stretch of her ribs and teasingly, achingly just over the swell where her back turned to luscious territory. Never pushing. Always wanting to see pleasure from her before taking the next step. Wanting her to want this - to need this - as badly as he did.

With fingers clutching at Eilert as though without him she might lose her very purchase on the world, Vivian found that each and every part of her craved that proximity, craved the attention of his whole being. She found herself unable to fathom any goal aside from the grip at the back of his head, the back of his shoulders or the way her legs spread shamelessly to straddle and grip either side of is hips. With a most unladylike fervor, she discarded all thoughts of consequence, of propriety, of the fear that had lurked just behind her intent only moments gone, chased off by the soldier who held her so possessively in his arms.

It was a dream, some vaguely-functioning portion of her mind concluded. It was some sort of fantasy, diverged from the reality of reputation and responsibility that found her clinging to the powerful form of the magnificent creature beneath her. How else might the surprise meeting have so suddenly and wholly come to a point where she felt free to give herself over so completely to him? Not only to permit it, but to crave it, to desire to the edge of pleading for him to accept every touch, every kiss she seized.

All of her life, all she had done, all she had accomplished, all she had learned was as nothing when she compared it so neatly to this moment. It was now that she felt herself being redefined. She pressed hungry lips to him, wherever she might have the opportunity, let hungry fingers roam wherever they might find purchase and she knew with no doubts that Eilert would never make her feel shame for this experience. He would never question her quality for this encounter, she was certain. In a heated bloom that began in her stomach and spread to every extremity, she felt sure in her faith in the old soldier who cradled her with his body as the kiss he'd begun took a life of it's own, a spark, a flame that was fanning dangerously high.

Eilert's control was slipping with every moment. The kiss between them was consuming him. Washing away the poor imitation noble he'd become and returning him to the monster he'd been on the battlefield. Lighting a fire within him with the touch of her lips and the weight of her body against him. His flesh betrayed him pressing hard against her. Urging him on turning delicate caresses into grabs. Fingers digging the tender muscle beneath the dress.

Unable to help himself anymore he started pulling up the length of her dress with eager hands. The need to feel her skin under his fingers was running the show. To feel her against him without the layers of cloth between them calling and cajoling. When he was finally able to lay skin to skin along the smooth expanse of her legs Eilert moaned gripping her tight. He wanted to be gentle - to be slow and romantic but everything was too much. The night too perfect. Vivian too perfect.

He rolled them suddenly till he was on top pressing her between him and the soft grass beneath the cloak. Letting his weight grind them together. Heavy breaths escaping him with every pump of his chest. Eilert broke the kiss with a deep gasp. His eyes almost burned in the night so fever bright were they as he looked down at Vivian. She was beautiful. Angelic and wild and young and alluring all at once. When he leaned back in he buried his face in the crook of her neck and started his way down the hollow of her throat till he was working the edge of her dress down with his lips.

The touch of Eilert's hands on her flesh drew a gasp from Vivian, despite the way her lips were busy eagerly receiving all the attention he could spare. She found herself tensing deliciously as he showed himself, no longer soft and weakened and beaten down by the same life that stole her passions, but instead stronger than those same challenges and turning that strength to a passion he slowly spent on her. Her own touch followed suit, matching his movements as she pulled herself close, crushed her body into his in a firm statement of desire. She wanted, from him, and would not be without.

She was taken by surprise in the moment he pulled her sideways, the moment he rolled with her until she was sprawled beneath him, over the cloak and under his body and surrounded by the scent and the warmth of him. It was enough to make her lightheaded, reaching up to grip at him for stability that should not have been needed. She was beautifully pinned between him and the solid earth.

And he, like the earth, was solid. Solid in a way that excited her, that spoke of the promises still hidden in the dark of night. Solid to the touch, the weight of him comforting and the intensity of him, from touch to gaze to breath took her own and she found she did not mind a bit. She looked curiously up at him as he paused, concerned that perhaps, in the moment, he was regretting what he had done. Concerned, because she... she wasn't regretting it at all, and instead found herself beginning to mourn the idea that it might all be lost to her now.

If she had truly been made of water, that liquid melt would have seen her join the grasses beneath the cloak when his first touch to her neck was his lips. Her chest expanded once, meeting the bellows of his own before she she relaxed completely, the worry that he might stop flung far and dashed on some distant surface. Instead, her only mourning was that she could not, in her position, offer more than to hold him, than to set her fingers at his temples and comb them back, letting her fingertips scrape and slide and massage over his scalp, let her hips rise up in wild abandon as her knees came to peaks on either side of him, unabashedly parted to welcome the weight and length of him in between.

The welcome embrace of her thighs pulled him close. Their hips driving together separated now only by cloth that seemed to grow thinner with every passing second. Fingertips in his hair massaging - gripping - in a way he had not felt in years. The air between hot and tangy with desire and excitement. Her desire for him matching his for her move by move. Touch by touch. Breath for breath.

It was glorious.

The slow tugging of his lips at her collar grew more insistent till he gripped the edge in his teeth and pulled. Every bit of skin revealed egged him on stoking his resolve to see more. To feel more beneath his touch. Exposing more and more the breast that rose against his own. He was fire now. All desire and hunger lapping at her. Burning with need for the wild creature beneath him. Liquid to his heat.

When Eilert looked up at Vivian he was the Dragon of Ashes. The stern lines of his face fierce, wild, and alive. The smile he wore promising pleasures. An ember glow flickered in his dark eyes. His body almost thrummed with energy. A half felt vibration like he could explode into motion any second. All power and force waiting to be unleashed. And she was the first to look into that face without a battlefield between them - the first to face it without any need to fear it. Keeping his gaze upon hers he tugged the bodice of her dress down with a sharp motion exposing to the night air the delicate, delicious secrets it had sought to keep. And, still locked eye to eye, he lowered his face and took the soft bud of her nipple between his teeth.

The sight of him alone should have given her pause. The fierce gaze, the intimidating intensity... It should have sent her back, away in fear of what she was doing, what she had awoken, but she could not find the lack of nerve to do so. Directed at her... perhaps it was, but that focus intended her no harm. The only threats within that stare were those towards which she rushed with abandon. She did not fear the reality of what was happening around her - that he was slowly stripping her to a bare she had never been in the presence of another since she was old enough to be identified as a girl. But she wanted to see more. She longed for the moment when his patience was lost, trembling in anticipation of what he might accomplish to get to all she wanted to offer to him.

Her lip was in danger of being mangled between her teeth, but it was far from her mind as her brow drew close together, a helpless expression of desire as she watched his face come so very close to the tender flesh of her breast, the maw of a beast opening to devour her and she could do nothing greater than want it with every fiber of her being, the time between his lips parting and his mouth closing on her skin a tormenting eternity in that single long heartbeat.

Once his teeth claimed their prize, her back arched as though to push her in closer to his face, to demand greater contact. Her hands gripped at the sides of his head and pulled him insistently downward, the motion lost to her mind in the bliss of sensation. Her head fell backward, supported only by the gentle cradle of his cloak beneath her. She bit back a moan, but her efforts were early spent and the whimper that followed sounded loud in comparison. Her hips bucked in a shallow measure against him, barely restrained by the lingering manners of a courtly lady whose hunger was slowly taking control of her mind.

"Eilert..." She whispered, a desperate plea, a reverent prayer, an expression of gratitude together in a single word.

His name from her lips was lightning - an electric thrill running through him from crown to stem. The pleasure in her voice matching the torrid sensations running rampant through him. Everything was sharper as if seeing the world for the first time. The night did little to hide her from his sight. The taste of her upon his lips and the softness of her skin under his tongue painfully exquisite. The press of their bodies strong and right. A union that had wakened something long dormant in him. A fire long thought lost on the field of Saint-Mande. The breath of the dragon his men had called it. His mother had called it the star inside him. The enemy had called it the demon in his flesh but they were all wrong. It was passion. His passion.

And it was his again.

Eilert moaned around the tender flesh between his lips the joys of their embrace dragging it from him. With eager hands he started to draw more of her dress from her wanting - needing - to see more of her. To see and touch more of her till he knew her body as well as his own. Every inch of pale skin entranced him drawing the attention of his lips as he kissed and nibbled and licked his way across her breasts and down the smooth expanse of her stomach. Everything about her was perfect. More alluring than any woman he had ever known and a thousand times more glorious than anything he deserved to experience. For the first time in many years he felt a flicker of nervousness as if she had undone all his discipline and experience. As if she had turned him back to the fumbling teen he had been his first time. Before pulling the bunched cloth past her hips he looked up to her and asked permission, "Vivian?"

She could feel him drawing her onward, a pull so strong that Vivian dared not attempt to fight it. Instead, she barely seemed to keep her head above water and her mind functioning... At all. As his breaths came more rushed, so did hers. She felt his pace increase, his fevered touch more full, more insistent, more encompassing. As he forged on, she came up behind, minding the new pace with enthusiastic bliss. Her hands were of their own mind, reaching out to whatever stretch of him she could reach, particularly fond of the long locks that fell between her slender fingers. Never had she considered herself the sort to take up with a man in such a way, particularly so soon after first learning his name. But she'd repeated it often enough, now, a mantra falling from lips that shivered with the warmth of the man above her.

It seemed his very touch seared across her flesh, stinging in an exquisite moment and then doused as soon as she felt she might never survive the heat. Was it possible to be this warm in the cool grass, even atop his cloak? The intensity of it - or was that merely his kiss? - drove her to gasps, whispering his name now and again between increasingly belaboured breath until she vaguely became aware of a change. In a sudden silence, cut off from the frenzy but a few moments beforehand, she heard her name. She stopped, gazing down to him and made a disgruntled sound at the back of her throat. He was... She blinked at him. He was asking her... asking her what?

When she realized his intent, she was caught between a sob of overwhelming affection for a man so keen to be peaceful, a laugh that indicated her disbelief that she was not, at this moment being entirely enthusiastic with her desires, and a groan that was intended to indicate the futility of stopping now, even had she any inclination. The result was that she attempted to make all three sounds, a sort of strangled explosion that marked the grip of her hands at the sides of his head, pulling herself closer to him, or he closer to her, and hissing desperate directions into his ear.

"Don't stop... not now. Dear gods, don't stop."