Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4) by D.L. McDermott Page A

syllables over her tongue like honey, slow and sweet. “You think you can hurt me?”
    The warehouse emptied out behind him.
    “I know that I can’t,” said Finn, taking a step toward her, breaking the circle and taking their dance in a new direction. “That’s what makes it so much fun.”
    She swung at him, and he twisted and dodged. She sprang toward him, and he braced himself, taking the impact and allowing it to carry him to the ground. Then he rolled with her, pinning her under him. She snarled and twisted. He expected the first kick . . . but failed to anticipate the second. She flipped them over so she was straddling him and, with her uncanny berserker strength, she pinned his hands above his head.
    He hadn’t been so turned on in two thousand years. She twitched her hips and ground herself against him, sighing with pleasure, because berserkers livedentirelyin the vexed space between sex and violence, thrived on it.
    “My lovely, lovely Ann,” he said. “It’s my mouth you want beneath that swollen cunny, that I promise you.”
    Her lips curled into an expression—almost a caricature—of carnal intent. Suiting actions with words, she replaced her hands on his wrists with her knees, keeping him pinned fast to the ground. He might struggle free, of course—perhaps—but he didn’t want to. She wrenched her little velvet pencil skirt up, revealing white cotton panties with a spreading bead of moisture dotting the gusset. She wrenched them aside and lowered her dainty pink center to his waiting mouth.
    He flicked his tongue out to swipe her bud. She tasted honey sweet and lemon tart, and her little nub grew tauter, transmuting in arousal from flesh to iron. He flicked again, swiped and swiveled and picked up the pace when she began to growl and whimper.
    Her movements were uninhibited. She was using him to get off. It was pure and selfish, and the most erotic thing he had ever experienced. She screamed once at her climax, then slid forward onto her elbows, spent.
    Finn turned her over and pulled her into his lap. She looked up at him, her eyes now brown again and dazed, but indisputably oh-so-satisfied.
    “My lovely, lovely Ann,” he said again. “Just what the hell are we going to do with you?”

    — right before one of her fugue states. Only this time, the curtain didn’t fall over sight or sound or memory. She lived it. All of it. Breaking Sean’s nose and his arm. Sparring with Finn. Briefly. And then . . .
    Oh god!
    Everything had been heightened. Senses, needs, desires . Everything had been possible. Even what she wanted with Finn. What she had needed, and taken, from Finn.
    And now he was holding her. The climax had shattered a tension in her that she hadn’t even been aware of. “What did I just do?” She ought to be ashamed and embarrassed. If past experience was anything to go by—although, frankly, all bets were off here—he was about to laugh at and belittle her.
    “You, my lovely girl,” he said, combing through her hair with his fingers as though he could be happy doing that, and just that, all day. “Why, you just went berserk.”
    “That’s not exactly news to me.”
    “But I mean it quite literally. You’re a berserker . It’s what you are, what you do. Or at least it’s what your kind used to do. I haven’t encountered one of you in two thousand years. And even then, not at such . . . close  . . . quarters.”
    She didn’t like the sound of this at all. “Does that mean I’m some kind of Druid?” she asked. “The creatures you hunted and killed?”
    Finn shook his head. “Not a Druid. No. Not that. Nor a Fae. You’re human enough. Almost. Well, not entirely . The gift of the berserker was present in the Fomoire, the strange people who were already in Ireland when the Fae arrived. The berserkers were fearsome Fomorian warriors with ingrained instincts to protect the weak, and hair-trigger tempers. In their berserk state, with a modicum of martial