Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1829: Expressed Desire

"Leave some of him for me, you greedy girl!" She shouted, running close to the ferocious pair. "Quin~ how about we build Kaeli a bower?"

Quinlan didn’t put her down.

He shifted her weight to one arm, palm settling under her backside, and walked them both to the hollow between two great roots where the snow-light pooled. His free hand rose, and the earth answered.

The floor of the hollow breathed in and swelled into a broad, moss-deep couch between the roots, its edges rolled like a bedframe grown rather than built. Magma, banked to a whisper, slid into the stone far beneath until the moss went from warm to sun-warm.

A sphere of flame the size of a heart pinched itself into being above the hollow and hung there, small and patient as a private sun, and a curtain of moving air drew itself around the whole of it, keeping the heat in and the winter’s opinions out.

Halfway through, he kissed her again, unhurried, one hand still shaping the bower while his mouth found better uses for itself, and Kaelira made a sound against his lips that had nothing to do with the forest and everything to do with the arm holding her up like she weighed nothing.

"Are you kidding me," Sera said. The pout was enormous. The grin underneath it was bigger.

It took him less than half a minute. Seven elements, the same seven that had brought down armies, taught to do bedroom furniture one-handed, because putting his smith down wasn’t something he felt like doing.

Kaelira felt every element pass through him while he held her, all of it traveling through his chest into hers. Being pressed against him while he worked was a cruelty she had no interest in surviving.

He laid her down into what he’d built.

The moss took her weight like it had been expecting her all day. He came down over her slowly, forearms bracketing her head, and the ferocity they’d been trading since the snowbank gentled into a stillness that held. His thumb traced her cheekbone. He knew exactly what was underneath him. The last first of his family.

"You’re sure," he asked, and there was no tease anywhere in it.

Sera, folding herself down at the hollow’s edge with her chin on her palms, had the grace to stay quiet.

"Am I sure?" Kaelira repeated it flatly, like he’d asked whether steel was hard. Then she inhaled, and it all came out at once.

"I asked you to wait, yes. But... I’ve been ready for a while. It’s just the world kept getting in the way and I never found the chance..."

Her voice was climbing, and her ears had passed red and were working on crimson. "And then Nyxara, who joined the harem LONG after me, strolls past the queue like it isn’t there... A demon older than the language I’m complaining in. Do you have any idea what that does to an elf’s confidence?"

"Kaeli," Sera managed, but was interrupted.

"I’m not finished." The smith’s finger came up between their faces, trembling with conviction. "If Black Fang laps me too, I’m done. I mean it. I’ll renounce having bodily needs altogether. I’ll take orders, join Isveth’s maidens, and worship you from a respectful distance for the rest of my unnaturally long life. A shrine maiden." A pause. "A shrine smith tank maiden."

"..." Quinlan remained silent, listening to this wonderful girl put her thoughts out there for once. Always so shy, always content to remain in the smithy while he was having fun with his girls.

Both of her calloused hands came up and framed his face, and under all the ranting her eyes were steady and bright and serious, because that was the confession beneath the comedy: she had wanted him for a while now, quietly, thoroughly, with the same patience she gave a long fold, while duty and war kept taking her turn away from her.

She had never once complained about the waiting. She was complaining now because it was finally over, and she could at last afford to admit how heavy it had been.

Sera moved first.

"Let me help you~" She slid in behind Kaelira, fingers finding the shirt’s hem, and her voice dropped low, meant for no one but Kaelira. "Is it okay? Me being here for this."

Kaelira’s hand found Sera’s wrist and held. "Yes... Please stay. I need you to stay." A shaky exhale. "I’d combust on my own."

Sera giggled at that, bright and warm, and patted Kaelira’s hair. "Then let big sis Sera take care of you~" She gathered Kaelira’s head onto her thighs, soft and unhurried.

"I’m older than you," Kaelira murmured, but she settled into Sera’s lap and did not move a centimeter away.

"Shh~ Big sisters are a state of mind."

Sera took the shirt’s hem in both hands and peeled the forge-smudged linen up and over her best friend’s head in the half-second Quinlan’s mouth left hers, and his mouth was back before the linen hit the ground. Then the wraps beneath, unwound turn by turn, Sera’s fingers patient and practiced along the bindings, each discarded layer folded once and set aside. The snow-light received what the forge-light never had.

She was built the way she built things, nothing wasted: the sweat-sheened plane of her stomach with its chiseled ridges, the hard taper of her waist into hips set like a stance, the smithing arm with its cords of quiet muscle, and above all of it, freed of their binding, the surprisingly heavy curve of her breasts, a softness the wraps had been flatly lying about for all those months.

Kaelira did not cover herself. She planted her palms in the moss on either side of Sera’s knees, chin up, flushed to the collar, and let him look until looking visibly stopped being enough for him.

"Say something," she soon begged.

He wasted absolutely no time and decreed with a straight face: "I’m looking at the best thing a smithy ever produced."

"Quin... I can’t do this..." Kaelira whimpered.

His mouth started at her throat and worked down without hurrying, and he handled her exactly the way she’d always suspected he would. Thoroughly, patiently, in the correct order. He learned the weight of her breasts with both hands and then with his mouth until her spine came up off the moss and her gasp rang off the roots.

He traced the ridges of her stomach with his tongue like they were a personal gift to him, which, judging by the low sound he made against them, was his honest position on the matter. Muscle earned over a lifetime at the anvil jumped and trembled under his lips, and he took his time with every ridge, murmuring his appreciation into her skin, shameless about how much he liked them, until she was squirming from the praise as much as the touch.

Then he found the faint old scars along her forearm and kissed those too, one by one, and that, of all things, was what made her eyes sting.

Above her, Sera’s thumb caught the first tear before it reached her ear, and said nothing, and kept combing.

Then, as he shifted to settle lower, Kaelira’s hand closed on his shoulder and pushed.

He let her push. "Oh?"

Two meters of primordial rolled over into the moss, interested, and the smith sat up, swung a thigh across his hips, and looked down at her naked lover, flushed and resolute, like she’d rehearsed this decision in her head a hundred times.

"My turn."

"Oh my~" Sera’s eyebrows climbed, delighted. "And here I sat, ready to hold your hand through the scary parts. Look at you go~"

"He’s my lover." Kaelira’s palms spread flat over his chest and started mapping, slow and thorough, reading him the way she read everything worth reading, hands first. Her ears were incandescent. Her touch did not waver at all.

"I find him..." one hard swallow "...extremely attractive. I have watched this body across a forge for months. Today it worked a bellows for me, half-naked, for an hour. I am not going to lie back and just receive like some... some dead fish woman." Dignity and blush fought over her face. "I want to feel him too. Why should he get all the... the doing?"

She bent, and put her mouth on him.