“Why would you think that Dred saved Tristan at Shale Creek?” The handsome features hardened and his eyes narrowed.
“Why do you care? You’re a centerfold. Shut up and be objectified as you’re told.” That always worked with hers; hopefully, they were all wired like that.
She felt a touch on her cheek. “That’s not my programming. Good thing that the real Dred would be mortally opposed to harm befalling you.”
“Why is that?” Dred asked, casting off his invisibility charm.
The Dred-bot paled, its reality fading in the presence of the real thing.
“Were you programmed to kill her?” Dred demanded of his double.
“How is that possible?” Middy asked, both irritated he’d been watching the exchange, but thankful he was there. She knew that whatever he was, whether his magick was white, black, or gray, he wouldn’t let anything happen to her.
“We’ll discuss that later.” Dred closed the distance between them.
Middy decided, in that moment, with two Dreds touching her at once, that the centerfold didn’t have to kill her.
The overload of sensation might just do her in. Dred’s fingers were warm and real on the side of her cheek and the Dred-bot was touching her, too. He’d moved behind her and she could feel the unearthly sensation of a ghostly touch.
She’d seen someone write in to
Cauldron Forum
about this fantasy. Middy would have to remember the user name later when she could think. Right now, thinking was not a high priority, not while being sandwiched between two Dreds.
“Answer me,” Dred demanded of the bot.
“Yes, I was programmed to kill her. To close my fingers around her neck just as she came for us.”
Both of their hands were still moving over her body.
What this had to do with questioning the bot, she had no idea. She was just going to go with it.
She wasn’t afraid. Dred wouldn’t let anything happen to her. Middy knew that she should be afraid, and the rational part of her mind was screaming for her to run, to break free from this madness. Her muffin was louder. It seemed to have taken the wheel and she wasn’t going anywhere.
“Us?” Dred questioned as Middy leaned into him.
“Oh, yes, this is what you are supposed to do.” The Dred put his hand on Dred’s arm. “My master said you’d love to fuck yourself.”
“Master or mistress?” Dred questioned.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“I see,” Dred said, trying to move Middy away from his lookalike.
“So, would you, Dred? Would you like to fuck yourself?” The bot asked.
Middy decided that this might be the pair of stilettos that broke the stripper’s back—seeing all of that hot male Dred-ness together. . . . It was definitely a witch who’d set this scheme in motion. No warlock would envision Dred-onDred scenarios. Well, he might, but he wouldn’t say things about fucking himself. No, that was a very witchy thing to say.
Dred’s lips were on her ears now. “Close the magazine, Middy.”
She didn’t want to! She wanted to be shrouded in Dred . . .
“Do it now!”
Damn. She reached back and flipped the magazine shut and the Dred-bot sputtered to a pitiful nonexistence.
Middy was still left pressed up against a dusty bookshelf with one Dred. The real, in the flesh Dred. She supposed that asking for two would be unreasonably greedy. And really, if she thought about it, her virginal self only had a vague idea of what to do with one Dred. Midnight doubted that she’d be able to do anything with two, at least not comfortably. For a moment though, she’d been damn sure that she wanted to try.
“Are you afraid?” Dred asked as his fingers cupped her chin and tilted her face to his.
“No, should I be?” She was drowning in him, falling into his magick, the way his very presence seemed to steal the air.
“Yes, very afraid. That centerfold was sent to kill you.”
The pressure of his fingers changed and now, his hand was on her throat and his thumb caressed the delicate line of her jaw. “Those sensations of pleasure felt real, and so would those of death. Your brain would read it as such and shut down accordingly.”
“You wouldn’t have let that happen,” Middy said breathlessly and turned into his touch.
“You shouldn’t trust me.”
“I don’t. I know you need me though. At least until the end of this charade. ” She touched her lips to his fingers in a ghost of a kiss.
“You’re still under the spell. That thing was infused with Sex Magick,” Dred said coolly, though he made no move to put any distance between them.
“That’s your superpower, isn’t it, Mordred? Sex Magick,” she said as her tongue darted out to taste his skin.
“I suppose here is where I should tell you that you don’t know what you’re doing to me, that you don’t want to lose your virginity with your dress up around your thighs, and your back pressed into a musty library shelf, but I think you do.” His hand slipped to her hip and then between her thighs.
She wasn’t wearing any knickers. Middy had found that she quite liked how naughty she felt, with only a wisp of fabric between her body and Dred Shadowins. Being in such close proximity to him, it made her feel powerful in a very primal sense.
“You’re wet for me. Or are you wet for ‘us’?” he asked with a knowing smirk.
“Both,” she whispered as Dred slipped a finger inside of her.
She dug her fingers into his shoulders and he hefted her easily, propping her against the bookshelves with his forearm as he guided one leg around his waist.
Middy’s eyelids were heavy with desire and she had trouble keeping them open. She had trouble processing anything that wasn’t Dred between her thighs. She forced her eyes open to look at him.
There was a dark intensity on his face and she could feel the magick pulsing through them both. She knew he wanted her. This was it; there was no turning back now. It frightened her and thrilled her at the same time. She knew that it would be nothing like what she imagined, nothing like her ideals of courtly perfection, but she knew that it would change her forever.
She wasn’t so blind as to think that it would change him and yet, she had a feeling that it would. This was a precipice for them both.
“Kiss me,” she demanded.
His mouth crashed into hers, claiming and conquering.
Just as if she were really a village girl and he was the pillaging Viking. He dwarfed her and Middy wasn’t a small witch.
Dred was so strong, he held her up as if she weighed less than a feather.
These were all things she’d dreamt about, fantasized about, all things she’d programmed into her own Dred. She still couldn’t believe it was real.
“Do you want the magick, Middy?” he asked raggedly in her ear after he broke the kiss.
“Isn’t
this
magick?” she replied and kissed the corner of his jaw.
“So there’s no pain.” His mouth was on her neck, his fingers still pushing in and out of her sheath, just to the barrier of her virginity, and his thumb working her clit. “Isn’t the Sex Magick what you want?”
She surprised herself. “No, Dred. I want you. Not your magick.”
And she did. She wanted the whole experience; she wanted to feel something real. She could play games with the centerfold when he was gone, when this charade was over. So much wasn’t real and Middy wanted something solid, if only to know that later, it had actually happened.
A sound that might have been a growl started low in the back of his throat and he carried her to the large desk where he’d been seated before. Dred splayed her before him like a rare delicacy, positioning her heels and her bottom just at the edge of the desk.
Then he knelt before her like a supplicant and his lips touched her labia, his tongue slid inside her and then up to her clit. Middy had to grab the desk with both hands to keep from crying out.
She wanted to push against his mouth, but if she moved, she’d fall. Middy was at his mercy and she knew that Dred Shadowins had none.
He laved the swollen flesh until she felt her body tense and then he stopped. He stopped!
“Please!” she begged and propped herself up on her elbows to watch him.
His hands were unbearably slow, yet somehow beautiful as they moved to reveal his body to her. First, it was the gradual slide of his black shirt as it inched up his flesh and revealed his hard abs.
Everything about the warlock was hard. His broad chest, his wide shoulders, his biceps . . . He could be an artistic study in the beauty of the male form, more divine than Adonis.
Because he wasn’t perfect.
The otherwise flawless expanse of his skin was branded by what she assumed to be his ordeal at Shale Creek. Five long, angry scars marred each side of his body and ran in jagged gashes from his shoulder blades down around to his hips. As if something with claws had tried to drag him down to Hell.
“Do you still want this without magick?” There was no shame on his face, but he knew what his scars looked like.
Middy realized then that those scars were a secret part of him, something that he usually glamoured. She’d said no magick and he was willing to give her what she wanted.
Even if it meant showing her this part of him, this secret.
That slight admiration she held for Dred, the person, bloomed a little bit more. She was even more desperate to have his hands on her now. Middy knew that he’d given of himself when he’d gotten those and there was no doubt in her mind that he was a hero. There were whispers that he’d been marked by his dark master, but Middy knew otherwise. She could feel it in the way he touched her.
“No magick, Dred.”
“Don’t dress me up in shining armor, Middy. I’m the same person I was an hour ago. Just because I can make you scream my name, with or without magick, doesn’t change what it means to me when it’s over.”
“No magick, Dred,” she repeated.
He pulled her legs around his waist and she realized that he’d finished disrobing magickally. Which was too bad; she really wanted more of a show. Middy was startled to feel the tip of his cock pushing against her slit.
Suddenly, a paralyzing fear gripped her. Maybe she should have let him use the magick. Just his finger pushing against her barrier had hurt like chewing on aluminum foil.
She knew the dimensions of his cock, she knew them intimately. Logically, she knew her body was made to stretch to accommodate him. Logically.
The primal part of her brain screamed at her to run. That mating with him was a mistake and . . . He rubbed the tip against her, moving from her entrance to her clit, stroking her like he had with his fingers.
This was what she wanted, what she needed. Middy had thought there would be more kissing; maybe there would have been a bed, instead of being flat on her back on a desk in a library. She had to admit it was original.
Her body burned for him, so she arched her hips. Pain shot through her.
Middy prayed that he wouldn’t move—begged the universe and two pantheons of gods to hold him still.
Tally had assured her that she’d waited so long that her hymen was probably more like a spiderweb than an actual barrier. Well, that had been a big fat lie.
Then something else happened. Something unexpected.
She felt warmth curl in her belly and it spiraled out like an electric current. It was pleasure, but it wasn’t hers. Middy was feeling what Dred felt, the tight heat of her body sheathing him, the instinct to move, to thrust, to claim. It was a whirlwind of intensity, of need and it was all for her.
Yet, still he held himself stoically, waiting for some sign from her that she was ready for more.
The pain had abated some and she moved against him experimentally. Sensation flooded her and it was like a hurricane. She felt everything he felt, but she felt her own pleasure now, too.
It was almost too much, but she couldn’t stop. She had a tight grip on his forearms and Middy tried to pull him closer. Instead, he moved an arm beneath her to position her for deeper penetration, that closeness she desired.
He knew her every need, every fantasy that was in her head and she knew his. She knew his every thought for each touch. She knew that her skin felt like silk, that he loved her pink. She saw visions of herself splayed naked on the black marble tiles of his penthouse. She saw herself in ways that she’d never imagined herself to look, but it was how she looked to Dred. Middy knew that he was ready to come, but that he wanted her to come first. He wanted this to be good for her. That made her body clench and feeling Dred’s response sent a shudder through her.
This was more intimate than either of them had bargained for, she knew that, too. But it was all secondary to the pulsing ache in her body and the need that sang a siren song in her veins.
Dred thrust again and she cried out, but rolled her hips to meet his next thrust. Each movement struck the core of her, inflicting a pleasure/pain that caused stars to burst behind her eyes. This was just like the books she’d read. That was unexpected. And it was real.
Middy wrapped her legs around him and gave herself over to the pleasure, the rhythm of his cock drilling into her softness, the feel of his corded muscles beneath her hands as they contracted and flexed to play her body in a way she’d never known.
What pushed her over the edge wasn’t his fingers between them on her clit. It wasn’t the way his body already seemed to know hers. It was feeling his pleasure. It was knowing that his orgasm, this sensation that was so much like the birth of a nova, had come from her.
Her walls tightened around his cock again and as she was crying out his name, Dred spilled his seed inside of her. He gave a last thrust as if that act alone had marked her as his, then withdrew abruptly.
Her eyes were still heavy with the aftershocks of her orgasm, but she opened them to look at him. She was still splayed out like the most wanton of creatures, but he was already casting his grooming charms and was dressed as if these moments had never happened.
Now she understood why he’d warned her. Now she understood why he’d thought he’d be doing her a favor by not taking her virginity. He’d imprinted himself on her indelibly; no matter who came after, there would always be Dred.