How to Tame Your Tikbalang Ch. 06

"Delicious. I love eating crablets with a side of stars," Buhawi said as he released her wrist from his firm but careful grasp. "I could eat that every day." What did I just say? Cool, cool. Just stay cool, dude.

Tala's ears were almost as red as her dress and the flush on her cheeks was not from the tropical heat—it was the monsoon season and they were so close to the sea the salty breeze of the Habagat, the North Wind, kept them cool enough.

"The seafood is out of this world," Tala murmured quietly, her eyes on the red and white gingham tablecloth. "I'm dying to try the stuffed grilled squid." She dipped her fingers in the wooden water bowl beside her and wiped them off with a paper napkin. As if cooling off her fingers would do the same for the rest of her. Ha, fat chance of that. You could boil lobsters over my hoo-ha. With a cast iron pot. Yep. That hot down there.

"Hey, did I just scare you, Baylan?" Buhawi put a finger beneath Tala's chin and gently brought her face up so her eyes met his. "We're just enjoying a long lunch, you and I. Nothing spectacular, nothing to be afraid of. Go ahead and order the squid. I'm thinking of trying the snapper in lemon butter sauce."

An arc of electricity jumped between them like a closing circuit and it was all Tala could do not to squirm for the humming energy that seemed to shroud them.

Tala looked around her, noting that most of the couples in the eatery were beginning to fan themselves and look heatedly at their dates. Some couples had even begun surreptitiously touching each other under the scant cover of the gingham tablecloths. Possibly intimately, as some of the men and women's faces showed.

At least the restaurant was close enough to hotels and motels for the lucky ones to get a room. This was Sin City, after all. Hopefully they had cars, because, Sin City or not, public fucking was still against the law. Thank goodness the music was set on loud and they were playing some nonsensical K-pop music. That helped drown out some of Tala's broadcast of lust. But it didn't help that Buhawi was broadcasting his desire subconsciously, too. Oh, dear.

Whoa, no public sex. For anyone. The voyeurism wouldn't really be a bad thing, but you never know who's gonna capture you on cam and, bam! Hello internet pornstars. I have to get this libido under control or we'll have an outbreak of public indecency. This broadcast has to get taken off the air.

On that thought, Tala took a swift, long drink of her iced tea, held the drained glass to her neck to cool her staccato pulse and did calculus in her head until the sexual tension coiling through her was back inside her skin, where it belonged.

Then the rain began to pour in a vision-obliterating curtain around the Dampa's picture windows. Kind of like the liquid sluicing from Tala's vulva to the rattan chair seat even as she slid a handful of tissue paper under her to catch the flow while she ordered the chaos of her thoughts.

Buhawi signaled for a waiter and gave their orders, plus two papaya shakes before turning back to Tala. "Papaya. Great for getting the sexual urges under control, don't you think?"

They both began laughing at that one, the tension finally breaking into humor. "Yes," Tala answered between hearty guffaws that threw her head back and bared the graceful line of her neck to Buhawi's avid eyes. "Yes, I think we need to have lots of papaya. Lots and lots."

"Look," Buhawi said once they'd stopped laughing. "We kind of landed in a bind, you and I. We started off on the wrong foot and now we're struck neither here nor there."

Taking a deep breath, Tala nodded. "We did. All I wanted was to read that Bestiario written by my ancestor, you know. I didn't mean to drag you into this Baylan business."

"Maybe you should tell me why you went to that old house and got that book, anyhow," Buhawi said. "My father sent me to watch over that house, to guard that book, you know. He didn't want it in the wrong hands for a reason. It is a very powerful thing, that Bestiario. Or at least that is what my Itay says."

"Did your dad tell you why the book was dangerous?" Tala's eyes widened as she asked this question, searching Buhawi's face. "I saw it as a kid, in the attic, and when I told my grandmother it was glowing, she spanked me with a belt and forbade me to touch it again. She said it made her mother-in-law go crazy."

"Itay never told me why it was dangerous," Buhawi said, cocking his head to the side. "But if it can make people go crazy, well, there you have it, danger. Crazy people can be dangerous."

"True, that," Tala concurred, her brow furrowed in a little frown Buhawi found adorable, curse the brain-melting cuteness. "But I have this feeling that crazy isn't even the danger of which your father speaks. I had this weird dream where Bulan was your mom and she told me about Beatriz, my ancestor, the one who wrote the Bestiario."

Buhawi relaxed into his chair, settling down to listen to Tala's telling of the dream, his eyes focusing intently on her face as he raised them from the shadow of her most intriguing cleavage, which he'd silently decided to explore later, with his tongue and his fingers and other... sensitive parts.

"In the dream, Bulan said I was sort of the fulfillment of a reparation to my family," Tala continued, not noticing how Buhawi's lips turned up in a slight smile as he refocused his regard to her mouth. "She also told me that your father became king after he fought and killed another Tikbalang. That the king could only ascend the molave throne if he becomes immortal by binding to a Baylan. If someone else wanted that throne, would that not be dangerous, too?"

The question struck a chord in Buhawi as he remembered the murderous, determined look on Kidlat's face as he leapt to pummel Buhawi. Of course his brother wanted the molave throne. That's why he wanted to kill the Baylan.

Hopefully, he and Tala had bought themselves some time while Kidlat recuperated from the lightning strikes and beating he'd taken. And it was likely that their parents were applying their own brand of discipline to their younger son—but that would only give them a few weeks of peace, at most. If Kidlat was the only danger.

"You are the strongest Baylan I've ever met—not that there are many of you," Buhawi said, his forefinger tracing a light set of figure eights on the back of her left hand. "I don't think you have anything to fear in terms of danger. You commanded that hibiscus plant to hold my brother, gave it the strength of steel to do just that. You called lightning strikes with precision and power. If that isn't power, I don't know what is."

"Yeah, well, duh, I have to sleep," Tala countered with a worried rise of eyebrows as she pressed her mouth into a rosy, glossy moue. "I am still human. Which is why I've taken a two-month leave from work to go travel a bit, follow the path of Beatriz's journey and maybe, just maybe, find a bit more information that the Bestiario yields."

"And here I thought I was going to have to convince you to take a vacation with me. I've been optimistic enough to book a few places where we can stay and transport is easy enough to arrange," Buhawi's smile was broad and dazzling as one of Paoay's pristine white sand beaches. "I was going to ask you to come with me to, ahem, tap your powers better."

Tala blinked in surprise as Buhawi's warm hand closed over hers. She cocked her head to the side to look up at him, her gaze pinning him in place. She didn't know whether to be happy he'd gone on to make travel plans for both of them without her or be pissed about it. But his waggling eyebrows and broad, naughty smile swung the decision in his favor. Not that she'd make it an easy thing for him to get a yes.

"Oh, really? And if I had to work, what then?" Sarcasm laced Tala's voice, but only lightly. "You sound so sure I'd say yes to your plans."

"Baylan, you need this," Buhawi was getting exasperated, his tone was slipping into sharpness. "You took one of my golden hairs and paid the toll. You need to take the other two as well. You wouldn't want to be among a crowd of Taga-Lupa when you do that, surely? Imagine the pandemonium, the amateur internet porn videos that will follow. All the arrests for public indecency."

He ran a hand through his obsidian hair. "Think of how much your energies with throw everything in the metropolis out of whack. Think of that and tell me you won't come with me—in all the ways that you should." Buhawi curbed the sharpness from his voice with effort and slid into the much more comfortable role of seducer, his words going from acid to honey in the snap of a finger.

The people around the Baylan and Tikbalang began to moan, vocalizing what the two could only hold within their skins. But barely. When the moans began to override the music and the frazzled manager appeared and picked up a landline phone, perhaps to call the police, Tala decided it was time to get out while the getting was good.

"You have a good point there," Tala conceded, her eyes falling demurely to her lap. She looked around at the couples already openly kissing (tongues were definitely involved and, in some cases, hands on body parts better left unmentioned) right there, shrouded by a curtain of rain. "Perhaps we need to get out of here before an orgy starts."

"Let's go to my place, first, then," Buhawi said as he called a waiter to pay the bill, bidding the young man to keep the change to the handful of thousand-peso notes he'd handed over so they could leave without too much fuss. "We're going to need privacy for... further discussion of this matter."

*** Ha, discussion shmiscussion. What happened after they pulled into Buhawi's garage was car sex. Intense, unbridled car sex. With their clothes still on.

Woman superior with Buhawi's fingers teasing nipples and clit in the front seat. Doggy-style with her bracing her hands on the passenger door in the back seat. Savage fucking while their tongues sparred on the hood. Her thrust up against the garage wall as he drove into her over and over again. An amazing standing sixty-nine in the hall on the way to the bedroom, but no coming. Yet.

"I should be sore as all hell," Tala said as she gasped for breath and tore Buhawi's shirt open to her searching hands as she lay on the Range Rover's hood. "If you stop now I will kill you. I don't care if tikbalang are hard to kill. I will kill you. Painfully. Get that cock back in me!" She tweaked his nipples hard to get her point across, drawing a pleasured groan of pain from Buhawi's red, red lips.

"By the Old Gods, I just keep wanting to fuck you," Buhawi's voice was hoarse, probably from all the vocalization he'd been doing throughout sexathon part two. "I've had you how many times in the last hour and I still can't stop."

They resumed the sixty-nine, giving oral pleasure side by side to mutual completion, on the black shag carpet between the loveseat and glass-topped coffee-table that sat betwixt dining room and bedroom—he licking her and fingering her until she squirted and she deep-throating and swallowing him and fisting him in turns until she swallowed every jet of tamod he had to feed her for that round.

They'd left their shoes in the vehicle and a trail of discarded clothing marked the erratic path the Baylan and Tikbalang made to the master suite and the massive bed.

Pausing for breath, Buhawi gently set Tala's naked, shaking, sweaty body on the mattress and pinned her wrists up against her head as he kissed her again, deeply, hungrily and with primal carnality.

"I have a few more things to show you," he said when he finally released her lips and came up for air. "I do believe you will like them. Let's get the edge off this lust and then we'll talk seriously, I promise."

Tala had been so well eaten, fingered and fucked en route to the venue of their "discussion" that she'd thought eight massive orgasms and the little ones she'd lost count of was excessive. There was so much sex they hadn't the time to talk, let alone discuss the matter of danger and the Bestiario.

As much as she would have wanted to protest his fervor in fucking her into the next decade, she was too busy recovering from the sheer exquisiteness of the pleasure her now acute senses were overloaded with. She also hadn't the words to speak just yet and she still wanted more, overload or no.

Buhawi opened the massive coffee table/steamer trunk made of tooled ironwood with a mother of pearl inlay depicting an orgy of Taga Lupa and mythical creatures. Inside this erotically-decorated box lay the naughtiest of human-made sex toys, the nastiest looking shackles and tools for sexual torment of the best kind. Beside them lay feathers that looked as if they were made of actual flames and strange, flowering vines that writhed with life, and smooth gem-like orbs that hummed with varying pitches.

Now, what would Buhawi do with all those things? Would he do them tonight? Would she still be able to walk after all that? Before she could bring herself to ask these questions, he picked up the vines, the orbs and the feathers, a wicked light flickering in his black coffee eyes.

"First, we will test just how much more endurance your very, very sensistive body has," he said as he strode back to the bed. "I do think you are going to find out just how much better we of the Other World are when it comes to fucking someone's brains out."