Deathless by Belinda Burke Read Free Book Online

tumbled him into the strawberries, crushed them under Myrddin’s back and bent to kiss his gasp away. This time Myrddin was ready, lifted himself up, pressed back, but Kas was stronger, and though they rolled over, again, and again, Kas always ended up on top.
    Myrddin wanted to care. He did— he did . But he couldn’t. He just…
    More .
     
    Love . Sweeter than strawberry, darker than blackberry—better than please . It was the best taste, stinging, sharp, and Kas pulled back and stared down at the expanse of Myrddin’s brown skin stained with red fruit. One blue eye glinted up at him, a shard of cloudless sky displaced, but the other was invisible in the shadow of the green until Kas put his hand down by Myrddin’s head.
    Autumnal echoes ran through everything, clotted bowed stems with rust and turned the grass to hay. An emerald blinked at him, thus sorted from the dross, and Myrddin reached up, beckoning. “Kas, please.”
    He kissed the word away, couldn’t resist it, but he had his purpose, his own intentions, and he wouldn’t be swayed from them even by please . He licked strawberry from Myrddin’s shoulder, then his chest, felt his indrawn breath and kissed the spot he’d licked.
    “Kas…”
    It was more moan than anything else, and Kas was pleased by it. “A word, and a sound.” He allowed another kiss, a reward, then reached out for the raspberry bramble and touched the tip of a branch, watched the fruit fall to the ground and picked up a handful of berries. He straddled Myrddin’s legs and held the fruit to his lips. Myrddin took it on his tongue, licked the tip of Kas’ finger and Kas shuddered, did not expect the jolt of heat that flushed through him.
    He knew everything. Where to touch, and why, and how—but it wasn’t the same to know, wasn’t the same to be touched as to touch. It wasn’t the same to reach out when Myrddin’s fingers were reaching back for him instead of his own cold reflection. The language of his own nerves was new, equal parts tentative and tempted.
    Myrddin ate the fruit from his fingers one piece at a time, his mouth lingering where it had no need to, and Kas shivered, stared at Myrddin’s tongue where it touched him. He could not yet ask for what he wanted, but he had so much already that it seemed like the purest greed to seek more.
    Dull unease trespassed on his thoughts when he paused too long on that image-sensation. He could not be selfish, greedy, wanton in his wants. Something dangerous would come from that…something he should avoid at any price. He licked his lips then and tasted sweetness, bent and pressed his mouth to Myrddin’s lips again.
    This was safe. This was…good. New kinds of good, though maybe that was bad? It had been so long, after all. He knew that. It had been so long since his first moments, since that instant when dim awareness had counseled him of his own existence in a world of skin and shadows.
    So long, and all that time only the shadows had been his. Myrddin was his first touch of the world, his first taste of that skin , the first one besides tenebrous promise to be his companion. To give him some speech other than the umbral avalanche of his own being, silent and perfect but his alone.
    Death. Myrddin moaned against his mouth, let soft sounds slip free one after another, and Kas drank them up one at time, savored them as much as he had the taste of fruit. Death. I am death. I…am—
    “Kas.”
    He was still, run over in his own thoughts, the fragile chain of words disrupted and almost beyond his reach now. Kas? I am Kas. I am death, and death is Kas. The symmetry of it pleased him, and he took out his pleasure on the body beneath him, licked and kissed and nipped tenderly.
    He watched love-bruises blossom under Myrddin’s skin with fascination. Kas did it again and again—sucked heat to the surface of his throat, his collarbone, then slid back along Myrddin’s thighs and licked more strawberries from the hollow of his