Chapter 23 – Climbing a Tower

The Tower immediately spun around and his hand shot to his belt, where a knife hung. The speed with which he moved was frightening for a man of his size. For a heartbeat, he stood there, tense as a bowstring and ready to strike.

Then she could see from his amazingly expressive eyebrows that he was making one realization after another about what he was seeing.

A small woman. Alone. In a cloak, her hood still covering her face.

His hand relaxed. He straightened up, and his expression changed from alertness to something else, a kind of weary recognition. Not that he recognized her, but the situation seemed familiar enough to him.

“Looks like it isn’t the first time a strange woman has come to him at night,” Vyxara chuckled in her thoughts.

Of course not. She had greedily absorbed all the rumors and whispered raves about him and his virtues like a sponge. Of course she wasn’t the first.

But that didn’t matter. After all, what she wanted from him wasn’t for him to make her feel special.

His hand released the knife and he looked at her with his grey-blue eyes, which held a kind of jaded resignation.

A heavy breath escaped him, almost a sigh.

“‘Nother wun,” he said in a voice devoid of courtly polish, in the same accent spoken by the guards accompanying the Ashbournes, the way the commoners in the Western Marches spoke. Another one, he had said, as if she were the third or fourth woman this month to sneak into his stable at night. Maybe she was?

“At least now we know that those juicy rumors probably have a solid basis,” Vyxara remarked amusedly.

Valentina pushed back her hood and showed him her face.

His eyes wandered over her, from her face down over her coat-covered body and back up again. It wasn’t really a lustful gaze, but he seemed to be coming to a conclusion, though Valentina couldn’t tell what it was.

“So you know why I’m here,” she said.

“You want what they all think they want.” His voice was as expressionless as his face. Only his bushy eyebrows twitched.

Valentina smiled slightly. “Oh no. I know exactly what I want.”

A snort escaped him, not entirely unimpressed. “Who are you? The daughter of some magnate?”

He tried to classify her, to place her somewhere in his understanding of the world, and judging by the fabric of her dress, she must be a noblewoman, but he was obviously not sure which one.

“Perhaps,” Valentina replied, without losing her smile.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I’m satisfying my curiosity.” She held his gaze. “Are you interested or not?”

There was no coquetry in her voice, she wasn’t trying to seduce him. She was simply asking him a simple question.

“If you get pregnant,” he said bluntly, “that’s your problem. Not mine.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Valentina replied just as bluntly.

He nodded briefly and accepted her statement without further questions.

Then he turned back to his horse.

For a moment, Valentina thought he had rejected her, but no, he was just finishing what he was doing. A few more gentle strokes of the brush over the stallion’s flank, who snorted contentedly. He didn’t let himself be rushed, simply continuing at his own pace.

That alone sent a rush of warmth through Valentina’s lower abdomen.

Then he put the brush aside and turned back to her.

He approached her, and with each step he took, it became clearer to her how enormous he really was. She had seen his size at the tournament field, but here, in the confines of the stable, standing directly in front of her, it was something else entirely. He towered over her by more than three heads, and her eyes were level with his lower rib cage. As she looked up at him, she could barely make out his face because his broad shoulders blocked the light from the Essence lamp behind him.

Valentina’s knees trembled slightly.

This was exactly what she had wanted.

Without a trace of the gentleness with which he had just been grooming the horse, he pulled her toward him with hands like iron clamps around her waist. His body was hard and unyielding as stone, like a warm wall of muscle beneath the coarse linen of his shirt.

Valentina gasped as he lifted her effortlessly, as if she weighed no more than a quill. Her feet lost contact with the ground and dangled in the air as she reached for him, trying to find his lips, to kiss him as he carried her.

He simply ignored it. His face remained a motionless mask and his grey-blue eyes scanned her uncaringly. Only his bushy eyebrows twitched as he set her down on a pile of hay bundles in one of the stalls, pushed her shoulders down, and impatiently pushed her skirts up to her hips.

She was surrounded by the smell of dry hay, horse sweat, and man. There was nothing of the things she was supposed to want. Not a hint of romantic mood, no whispered words, no loving glances, none of that. It was all raw and primitive, menacing even.

It was perfect.

An expectant purr echoed in her mind as Vyxara became more present in her spirit, sharing her sensations, getting drunk on her sensory impressions.

Valentina didn’t mind the company, on the contrary, she enjoyed sharing this pleasure with Vyxara, feeling her own arousal mirrored by Vyxara as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

The Tower spread her legs wide apart, and his huge hands on her skin were hard and rough and calloused, as was to be expected from someone who had wielded a sword and led the reins every day for years.

The fingers of his left hand dug into her thighs, leaving red marks on her pale skin, while his other hand fumbled with his pants until they fell to his knees.

His hard cock sprang out and fell heavily on her stomach. The sound alone, a dull thud of skin on skin, made her shudder.

All the rumors about its size had been true. It was fleshy and thick and warm and reached up to her belly button. Valentina could only stare at it, and a shiver of anticipation ran through her.

“They really weren’t exaggerating!” Vyxara cheered in her mind.

He cleared his throat and then spat directly between her legs. The warm saliva hit her bud and ran down her folds to her entrance, mixing with her own moisture.

It wouldn’t have been necessary. She was already soaked, dripping with desire, but the gesture was so raw, so indifferent, that it only increased her arousal. He made no attempt to prepare her first, he simply claimed her.

Valentina bit her lip and a moan escaped her as he slowly pushed his cock into her, slowly enough that the stretching was perfect, until there was nothing left in her mind but the all-encompassing feeling of being filled to bursting. He pushed further and further until his tip hit her deepest point, even though he wasn’t even fully inside her.

She was complete. Valentina whimpered involuntarily as pure bliss flooded through her, mingling with Vyxara’s demonic giddiness.

The slow penetration was his only concession to gentleness. Now that he was inside her, he hammered away without mercy. His weight pressed her deep into the hay, its stalks piercing through the fabric of her dress and leaving tiny tingling pricks on her skin.

His powerful hands clasped her hips tightly enough to leave bruises. She would bear marks where his fingers had been, but the thought excited her more than it frightened her. She could heal them later with a simple Leb pattern.

His rhythm was brutal and relentless, showing no concern for her well-being. He simply took her as if she were his property, thrusting deep inside her, and every time his tip hit the mouth of her womb, a lovely flower of pain blossomed inside her, merging with her lust.

Valentina loved it. She pushed herself greedily against him, lifting her hips, meeting his overwhelming strength with her own as best she could, and his deep, animalistic grunts as she dug her nails into his back through his linen shirt drove her almost crazy.

The sounds of her pleasure joined the stable noises, increasingly drowning them out. The loud smacking of flesh on flesh, the obscene squelching sounds of her body impaled on his cock. The horses whinnied restlessly in their stalls, stamping their hooves and snorting loudly.

Valentina herself did not hold back, on the contrary, she made sounds she did not know she was capable of, and throaty cries and deep, drawn-out moans burst out of her as if something wild and untameable had awakened in her.

The Tower responded by placing his huge hand over her mouth, stifling her sounds, and that caused her to let go of her last remnants of restraint and self-control. She screamed her lungs out against his rough palms and stared into his unmoved grey-blue eyes, which looked at her indifferently, as if she were nothing more than a hole to fuck.

And that was her undoing.

She reached the peak violently, rearing up, screaming into his hand as stars sparkled before her eyes and her muscles twitched forcibly enough around him that he had to grunt. And Vyxara whined and jubilated in her head with her, in a pure rush of shared ecstasy.

A minute later or so, the Tower followed, and a soft moan escaped him as he spilled himself inside her, pumping his seed deep into her, pulsing and hot and plentiful.

Afterward, they both breathed heavily and panted in the stuffy stable air, and a drop of sweat dripped from his eyebrow onto her cheek. He slowly withdrew from her and his manhood slid out of her, glistening from her juices and his seed.

He adjusted his clothes as if nothing had happened and tied his pants back up.

Valentina sat up, legs trembling unsteadily like a newborn foal, and his seed ran warm and sticky down her thigh. She pulled down her skirts, smoothed them, and brushed hay from her hair, which was stuck to her everywhere.

She felt thoroughly used and completely satisfied, fulfilled in a way she had never felt before with such purity. And Vyxara just purred and sighed wordlessly, sated and content in her mind, like a cat licking catnip.