(5) Crucia

"No," Sanguineus said.

Ambrosia, by the bedroom window, her form lit softly by the moon, had placed a hand upon the gold clasp on her shoulder.

"No?" she inquired.

"The gown will come off in the process of bringing the goddess down to earth," he said, his hands on her hips.

"But mere mortal men can not kiss a goddess, let alone carry her down to an earthly bed. I must disrobe. I must clothe myself in mortality, or what chance have you to violate my divine dignity?"

"Goddesses are made by men," Sanguineus replied in a husky voice, his loins tensing, "and men can unmake them."

"Oh? And I am not worthy to trod the sacred heights of Olympus? Will a mortal ruffian overthrow my status as the goddess of lust, and make of me a woman of flesh and blood?"

She laughed, lightly striking his bare shoulders with her fists. "You have denuded yourself, except for your briefs. And they are prodding my stomach like a battering ram! I feel assaulted, and out of character with my title, standing here in my Olympian clothes, and you nearly naked. Let me see your muscles and your hairy chest in the moonlight. Maybe it is you who are a god, and I just a wench with delusions of grandeur. Put me in my place! I deserve your discipline."

Grasping her hips firmly he lifted her up and draped her over his shoulder, a hand sliding over her firm warm bottom as he carried her to the bed.

"Suppose I change my mind," she said, "and call upon Zeus?"

Sanguineus flung her onto the quilts.

Even as she bounced, laughing, she caught the elastic band of his briefs and attempted to pull them down. But the fire in his blood had gathered in the iron furnace of his manhood, stoutly throbbing, and of a length that kept the briefs in place.

Ambrosia lay back on the bed, her arms crossed above her head, where, after a moment of heavy breathing, she said, "Start the process then, I tire of being a goddess. Treat me like the lowest whore. I am nothing more than meat for your hunger."

Sanguineus let her wait, watching her writhing with impatience, increasing in himself a desire that was cracking the dam. Then he pulled his briefs outward and down, the handless arm of his intention looming over her spread thighs, her gown's skirt in a wadded roll on her rising and falling stomach.

She lunged upward like a striking serpent and caught his penis with her teeth, a bite that could hardly dent the stiffness of his passion. With it he pushed her head down on the mound of pillows, scouring her throat. He seized her wrists, extending her arms out across the bed as his body slid down and crushed hers under a hot thunder of weight.

"Put your legs together--now," he demanded, the thickness of his length driving its way into her tight slit that yielded to him its wetness and its heat, her back arching from the burst of pleasure that stabbed her again and again.

She closed her legs, squeezing the hard rapidity of his thrusts.

"Crucify me!" she gasped.

And such he saw her, his weight on his spread knees, his own outstretched arms pinning her wrists to the black velvet covers, her head lolling in the ecstasy she craved. And seeing her thus, the Crucia of the Intel file, of the damning reports and the candid photos, seeing her for what she was, he dropped forward and kissed her lips like a man savoring a luscious fruit.

There was no lessening of his rhythmic hammering that drove cries and moans from the mouth he had captured, its tongue twisted by the force of his own.

He could think of no more appropriate death for her than crucifixion. His mind flamed with the thought of killing her with the nails of his lust. Each orgasm that shook her body was a cross fired into the clouds, under the hoofs of the winged stallion. He pounded her even as he launched her into the heavens that in his imagination dripped with the blood of her victims.

So absorbed was Sanguineus in this fantasy hit, this sexual version foreshadowing the real death, that he was unaware of his exhaustion. Never had he slammed his masculine power so fiercely against a woman as he did this one. He would pause only long enough to sustain his erection, not to catch his breath or ease his muscles, but to guarantee another crucifixion, another bliss that was so intense as to be the ecstatic counterpart of torture.

But it could not go on forever.

An hour after it began the final illusion of death by pleasure wracked Ambrosia into a breathless sigh, a euphoric delirium. She lay as near to a likeness of death as a living body can be.

Beside her, utterly spent, lay her lover, who, if she only knew, was also her worst enemy.

In the Corinthian Blue Hotel room of Fredrico Rolgo the phone rang in the usual apologetic tone.

He got up from the table where he had been revising his lecture for the Socrates Club of Athens, and walked in his flannel pajamas to the nightstand.

It was the concierge.

"Forgive this intrusion, Professor Rolgo, but a courier has delivered a package addressed to you. Shall we bring it up?"

Rolgo frowned. This was entirely unexpected and outside the protocols of Red Rum. He said, "Would you please store it in a locker for me? I'll come down in the morning."

"Of course, sir. That will not be a problem."

Let's hope it's not a problem in the morning, Rolgo thought, and put down the receiver.