Page 9 of A Bloom for a Blacksmith

He reached up and turned off the overhead spigot. The water dwindled to a trickle and finally stopped. “What then?”

Stella glanced down and grinned when she saw he was aroused. “Not now,” she murmured, before reaching through the opening in the curtain to pluck a bath linen from the stack she had set on the chair. “Over dinner,” she added, noting how his brows were furrowed. “After I’ve seen to making love to you, which is what I discovered only today is what they call it here in England.” She began rubbing the bath linen over his body.

“Making love?” he repeated. “Huh. Well, it’s certainly better than ‘sexual congress,’ which sounds like a term for an orgy.”

She tittered as she continued drying him. “English is such an odd language,” she agreed. “It’s taken me far longer to learn it than any of the other languages I’ve had to speak.”

He snagged one of the bath linens from the chair and began drying her. “But you’re obviously doing fine with it. I haven’t heard you say anything in German or Greek or Latin for several weeks.”

Shrugging, she glanced down to where he held the bath linen over one of her breasts. “That’s because you haven’t been in the bookshop.”

He chuckled before he leaned down and captured her lips with his, one hand reaching up to remove the mobcap from her hair.

Her hair dropped to hang well beyond her shoulders. A moment later, and he had her knees over one arm and her back over the other as he easily carried her into their bedchamber, a bath linen draped over her middle.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked in a whisper.

He once again chuckled. “I’m wondering how it is a woman as old and as wise as you still puts up with me.”

She scoffed. “It’s not as if I have a choice.” When he seemed about to dump her onto the bed, she added, “There isn’t another man on this planet who could please me as you do, Your Highness.”

Darius’s eyes darkened at hearing the old title others had called him. Back when they ruled their own Greek city-state two thousand years ago.

“My queen,” he countered. “I do believe it is I who will be making love to you right now.” He placed her on the bed and covered her body with his, his lips once again capturing hers in a torrid kiss. A moment later, and he had his lips trailing down her jaw to her neck, along the front of a shoulder, and around one side of a pert breast.

Stella inhaled sharply, delighting in the sensations he caused on her still-damp skin, her fingers scraping his scalp through hair he had kept unfashionably short for the entirety of their thirty-four-hundred-year marriage. She felt him shiver, heard his sharp inhalation of breath, and she giggled.

Between kisses that continued down her body, he emitted a string of French and Italian words entirely appropriate to the moment.

She answered with murmurs of appreciation in Greek, lifting her legs until she could rest her calves over his shoulders.

When his tongue invaded her most private place, setting off a series of the most delightful frissons, she could no longer speak but to say yes in a dozen different languages.

When her orgasm had her gasping for breath and her hands gripping both sides of his head, he finally pulled away and chuckled. “I’m not sure I understood everything you said,” he teased.

Her gasps turning to giggles and then she inhaled sharply when he impaled her with his engorged manhood. His groan of satisfaction filled the bedchamber, and he murmured, “My queen, my lady, my love.” Slowly pulling his manhood from her body, he grunted when her hands moved to his buttocks and her legs wrapped over his thighs. She pulled him forward, and he allowed it, grinning when his manhood was fully seated inside her.

“My king,” she whispered, clenching on him. “My lord.”

He reacted with a groan before beginning the ancient movements that would bring them both to levels of intense pleasures beyond what mere mortals experienced during their orgasms.

The moment Stella cried out, he allowed his own release, and the two descended into a maelstrom of mutual pleasure, their bodies seemingly merged as one and the buzzing in their brains leaving them both satiated and boneless.

Darius rolled off of Stella and emitted a long sigh of satisfaction when he landed on his back. “Damn, but you are a good lay,” he whispered.

She tittered as she turned and draped a leg over one of his, her head ending up in the small of his massive shoulder. Beneath her ear, she could sense his slowing pulse. “Glad to hear it.”

They were quiet for a time before he said, “Thank you for allowing me to blow up the house on occasion.”

She slapped his hard stomach. “I’m not exactly sure I allow it,” she replied.

“It won’t happen again. At least, not on this project.”

“Glad to hear it.” When his stomach grumbled, she grinned. “I think it’s time we dress for dinner.”

He groaned. “Must we?”

She lifted her head from his shoulder. “No. We can wear whatever we want.”