Chapter 2

"Mmmmmmm ... do you really need to get up and go work out so soon? The sun isn't even up yet. You really should come back to bed. I need you. I mean I really need you. You could just as easily work out with me instead you know," said Suzan softly but in her deep raspy voice.

Even with just barely opening her eyes, she knew that she had her husband's complete attention.

They had gone to bed the previous night in the buff and she could see his response to her request instantly. He was just pulling up his pants when she did that, and suddenly he had to push his now aching manhood back in his pants so he could zip them up.

She had a lazy smile that grew larger as she saw that.

He took a seat on the edge of the bed so that he could pull on his socks and light boots.

"No, I better not. I can't believe I just said that. If I don't get up now I won't get my physical training out of the way before Melkin swings by for my testing. He's going to do all 5 schools of the seventh circle today for both Lori and I, and he said we'll be really busy.

"Besides I know how tired you are and I really need to flush out my mouth before I kiss you, it tastes like something died in it. My personal hygiene needs some attention first," said Dusty with a smile as he looked over at her.

Suzan slowly sat up using only her stomach muscles as balance, with her arms trailing behind her, letting the blankets slowly fall away from her, all while she seductively smiled as she let Dusty take in her full naked beauty.

Dusty couldn't have missed her well defined abs as she rose, her large well developed breasts with their pink capped nipples, and her long blonde hair that was "sleep tussled" and wild looking as she looked at him with only one eye from underneath it with heated desire. She had been letting it grow long and it was now well past her shoulders.

Dusty's Aunt when he had lived with her years ago had been a fan of old movies and he remembered seeing that look on Veronica Lake and how that look of hers drove men wild. Suzan also had that look now as she pursed her lips and watched her husband dress.

She imagined that she heard him swallow hard a couple times, but then again she thought it might have just been wishful thinking on her part as well.

"Ok, if you have to go, I'll stop trying to tempt you," said Suzan softly without a hint of remorse as she still sat there topless facing her husband.

She didn't even try to cover up. She just sat and watched him to see what he was going to do.

Dusty was trying to hold the wavering smile on his face, but she could see it was a hard battle because even in this faint light she was sure she could see him sweating as he furiously debated what to do. She could see his mind warring with itself to make him go back to bed.

She smiled a little inside knowing his desire to join her back in bed was causing him to debate blowing off the very important test he had been working so hard for, just because she asked. While she wouldn't let him be late even if they did enjoy each other, it did reinforce that she was just as important to him as anything else in his life.

It let her know that he placed a lot of emphasis on her and her happiness.

Finally he tore his eyes away with a sigh, as he stood up to pull on his light shirt. Suzan was torn on what she wanted to happen, but she knew he really needed to go. She couldn't take his hard work away from him. As Dusty reached the door he turned back to face her before he left.

"You know I keep telling you that you'll have to better teach me that thing called "massage" that you did again to me last night so I can do it to you without hurting you. And I'll also need to repay you for the oral favors as well.

"You wouldn't let me do anything to you at all as you pampered me last night and I really want to make that up to you soon as well," said Suzan softly while holding his gaze with her deep wood brown eyes.

Dusty only smiled and nodded and quickly said "I love you" as the last thing he did while backing out the door.

He didn't trust himself to get any closer to her. Her look right now was driving him completely crazy, and he was sure that they would wind up back in bed for several hours if he did get any closer. He wanted her so bad it felt like an itch that he couldn't scratch.

As he closed the door, he was sure he heard Suzan giggle a little as she got back under the covers to go back to sleep. She would need to get up soon herself and take a bath, and she liked to do that before the rest of the guild awoke.

Since they didn't have their own shower or facilities, she traveled to the female side of the guild and used what was there. She always wore her travel cloak over her towel so that no could see her wrapped up in a towel.

She flashed on the time that she caught Lori backing out of this room after she tried to tempt Dusty and all she had on was a towel and the cloak with her, and that thought still angered her, but Lori didn't succeed and she was now married to Mark.

It was an area of jealousy Suzan realized that she would really need to work hard at getting over.

Making what could be conceived to be a "purring" noise Suzan snuggled up and soon was fast asleep again.

As Dusty worked through his stretches he did every disengaging trick he knew to try and get Suzan's large chest, body, and how she looked in bed early this morning off his mind.

They had only been married just shy of a year, but she still got to him like no one else ever had, and that totally included Lori and Lindsey.

One other thing that still amazed him in this world was the fact that while this was a different world he had no idea where they got some of their designs. He found out early that Suzan wore bras and panties in a similar style to what was available in his world and as such he found she was 38 DD but offset with a 26 inched waistline.

Dusty felt he would forever be adjusting to this world and its strange quirks. Where did the ideas for things like that come from? He wouldn't have thought that a post industrial world wouldn't have advanced like his world since any history he could find didn't suggest that they had a similar development cycle.

But try as he might, Dusty was trying hard to not let his mind wander back to Suzan as he stretched, but while he was setting up to work out on the speed bag he couldn't help having it drift back to the way she looked in bed from time to time.

Eventually he found a way to focus on current events.

Suzan had returned from a mission with Lori, Marie, and Mark since he had been accepted as a novice member of their guild. He was still on probation, but Lori said she wouldn't let anything prevent him becoming a full member because that was what he really wanted, and any who heard her believed it.

It wasn't a hard mission; they just needed to solve the problem of why a few wild animals had been attacking a village a few weeks travel away. The town was having problems both dealing with them all and finding the source of why they were attacking.

With Rachel's tracking skills they eventually found that the problem was small creatures called "goblins" that had been driving them out of their homes as the moved in and someone needed to deal with them. Goblins were not nice neighbors and would soon be attacking livestock among other things.

Dusty wasn't sure what the goblins looked like since he had never seen one, but he was surprised to know they had them here. It was like something out of a fairy tale to hear them discuss as if it was an everyday occurrence.

It took the three women and Mark two weeks to clear them all out by having Rachel track down where they were all staying. After they finished the other animals stopped running wild. It was also getting Mark the much needed experience he required and that he so much sought after.

When they returned back home to their guild they were all bone tired after pushing so hard to get back. Dusty and Lori hadn't gone because Melkin was putting Lori and himself through some intensive training to quickly master their powers faster.

Dusty was finding that over the last year he was getting the hang of understanding magic and he was advancing quickly. The trick was to not try to translate it into something he knew, but to learn it like it was a whole different language that he knew nothing about.

Approaching it that way made all the difference in the world.

His working with those children the year before and his discussion with his future self really helped him get a feeling for the flow of how magic was supposed to work.

Even though he could remember any spell he came across, understanding the characteristic of it and how it interacted within its environment and with other spells was still part of the learning process.

Just like memorizing a new language didn't teach you all the situations, slang, and social situations where things could be said or used. Only time and experience taught you that.

One thing he had been practicing, without Melkin's knowledge, was a way of compiling of all of a spells components and using the power word only to cast it.

While he could easily remember all the components required to cast a spell one thing always bothered him. It was that even a poor warrior who was quick enough could take out a caster no matter how powerful the caster was.

Dusty knew that while he could cast as he fought, it took up a lot of his concentration to make that happen and in some close fights he had to either give up fighting to concentrate on casting the spell or give up casting.

But this solved that problem to a degree.

He found that he could visualize the spell, like an internal interface, where he gave the spell its own mental value and icon and used English instead of what passed for Latin used in this world. Then he assembled them in his mind and then just memorized it as a complete spell. Like a program from when he used to work with computer programming in college.

The only problem was that he couldn't right now store too many, he could do about 10 spells easily, 15 if he pushed, but each upper level spell took a lot of power to cast. A lot more than either it's lower level counterpart or if he just cast it like normal.

But the one thing he noticed as he paid attention was that while the higher level spells cost more than the lower level ones, each compiled spell took just a little less power each time he cast it. That was something that was a bonus.

So over time some of the more easily used spells or combinations of spells that he wanted to retain could conceivably cost almost nothing to cast, but that was years away before he could manage that.

Lori caught him at work while he was perfecting it.

But when she first heard him cast the fireball by just the word "Fireball" instead of "Incendere Flamma Sphera" she then insisted that he teach her how he did it.

Even without using seduction Lori could be a force to be reckoned with, and now that she had Mark seduction as something to be used on anyone by her was off the table. Dusty never did figure out why, but she said she couldn't do anything to ever hurt Mark.

She was now constantly pleasant to everyone since she met him and she no longer seemed surly to anyone for any reason. There was something underlying in their relationship that he just couldn't put his finger on.

Even so, Lori and he never worked as peers before.

When he first met her she didn't trust him and thought he was a liar. Then she was attracted to him and only wanted to get him in bed while she taught him in an informal student teacher relationship.

Now that they were on the same level, and she clearly seemed to have as much power as he had as a Battlemage, she was determined to not let him outdo her.

Not to mention that once aware of it Melkin found it surprising how quickly and how much power she suddenly had out of no where. Neither Dusty nor the others told him where she got all of her new power from, and they weren't planning on it.

She just told Melkin she was doing more private training on her own, and he had no reason to discount or really question it, even though it was surprising to him.

Dusty felt that at least some good came out of the accident he caused when she tried to help him with the children.

Dusty was surprised by her level of intelligence because that was never something that had come up before.

Even without knowing anything about his world and how interfaces worked she easily grasped the principles and within the month and a half that the others were gone she had completely mastered his style of power word casting. Theory seemed to be a strong suit of hers.

It also didn't hurt that Lori now had enough power to now pull it off, ever since the accident with the kids. Before that mission Lori would have been struggling to cast just a single spell in her primary school of affinity at her current level, but now she could memorize almost as many as he could.

With practice her number of memorized spells would only go up as well.

One thing that she realized early on, and pointed out to him was that the words they used to cast could be called anything by his method of creation, and to use words that had no tie to what the spell did, while it might confuse them for a bit, it would surely confuse an opponent much more as well.

Dusty was amazed she figured that out so easily. While he figured that she would change the wording around to suit her, he also knew that for now he would stick to what he knew so as to not screw up any spells he was working with. But in time he might do the same as what she was planning.

The only thing Dusty set as a non-negotiable condition to teaching her was that she wasn't to ever teach anyone else without talking to him first and getting approval no matter who or when. And for now telling any member of the Mage's council was out!

While both of them knew the Mage's council wanted this skill badly, something bothered the two of them about their motives and how they treated Dusty and how they didn't try to work with him as much as demand that he do various things that they wanted, and Dusty wasn't sure he quite trusted them yet. So Lori honored his request.

But try as he might today to keep his mind from thinking about anything else so he could train, any other thought that he could possibly think of to keep it away from thoughts of his wife's naked body, it kept on insisting on going back to how she looked in the early morning's light.

How her hair fell across her face and body and caused her breasts to almost play peek-a-boo with it. He couldn't stop the shiver that ran up his spine.

He also couldn't help but remember how when she eventually stumbled into their room bone tired last night on her return, that she was still insisting that because she had been away for awhile she wanted to take care of him as the first thing she did. While she admitted she was pretty horny from such an extended time away from him she said that she wanted to please him and keep him happy.