The Forever Heart
Blurb
Valentina Peacock of the Kingdom of Hartfall is a hearthealer guilder; her lover, Flavio, is an automated man with a ruby heart. Valentina's past is lost to her and her craft of mending broken hearts and her lover at her side are all she needs or wants. Suddenly her calm, well-ordered world is shattered when Flavio brings her a summons from the heart-king--it is a royal command to attend his court. Will a journey to court bring back her memories of a forgotten love? Or will it shatter her finally and forever.
Excerpt
It took a delicate, steady hand--one attuned to the mechanism to wind properly without shifting and causing irreparable injury to the workings. The mechanism should not be wound too tightly, nor allowed to remain too loose. The key fitted properly, she then fused her open palm flush to the pliable stretched muscle in the vicinity of his fine, solid chest. She willed a measure of her special hearthealer magical energy into his casing as she carefully turned the key, feeling the tension tighten in the mechanism surrounding the keyhole. Beneath her touch his skin warmed, the heat radiating through him as he slowly revived like waking from a long sleep.
Ear to his chest, she listened, her finely attuned hearing vigilant to the least nuance of change in the rhythm. Almost immediately the steady hum and whiz of perfectly weighted clockwork met her hearing. A smile of relief curled her lips when she felt a large hand cup the back of her head, pressing her close. "As always," a deep, rumbling voice said, "your work is unparalleled, my beautiful hearthealer."
She tilted her head to look up at him. So tall and broad and handsome. Had she been in possession of her human heart she might have learned to love him as she would any man. But a heart of gold left little room for so deep and true an emotion. And considering how fragile her human heart had been, she could not deny that this was really the safest emotion. But still she enjoyed him, cared for him in a manner and with a depth of passion that sometimes surprised her. And scared her. There always seemed to be an echo of something from her darkened past that she should remember, but it refused to be realized. Perhaps that's what stopped her from loving deeply--the memory of a bruised past--and not the workings of a gold heart.
He lifted her. Her plain brown woolen dress and pretty white petticoats shifted up past her thighs as she parted her shapely stocking-clad legs to wrap them around him, and the lips of her pussy flowered. She felt the nudge of his cock against her opening, every part of him now in perfect, and lusty, alignment. He thrust, burying the thick rod inside her. She wound her arms around his neck; his hands cupped her buttocks, holding her firmly, pressing her close as he filled her so perfectly and completely.