Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 45 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

She honestly did not know how to feel about that. He’d taken her by surprise (so to speak), but in the cold light of day, she knew she hadn’t tried very hard to fight him off. Hell, if he’d chosen to wake her up with his hand between her legs instead of hacking at her hair, she probably wouldn’t have fought him at all. It had all happened so fast and felt so inevitable that she’d just…given in.

All the same, this didn’t feel like her usual morning-after regrets. Part of her wanted to braid this hair and see him wearing it; it brought to mind those story-book pictures—Amber as the damsel bestowing her favor and Meoraq playing a dual role of knight and dragon. But that was only part of her. The rest of her remembered only too well looking up through a haze of cramping pleasure to see him working at her in unhurried rhythm with his eyes fixed on the wall above her head and no expression on his face. Yes, he said he wanted her and yes, he told her to make his little keepsake, but all the rest of the pillow-talk had been between him and God. She was just “this woman” in that little chat, like it didn’t even matter if it was Amber, like any warm squeeze would do. And after the bite that had branded her, he’d put out the light and gone to sleep, leaving her to pull her pants up and button her shirt in the dark. She’d had to lie awake a long time while the ghost of her drunken mother talked to her about men and whores. She didn’t believe it, not really, but it was hard not to listen.

Amber braided the hair.

It wasn’t easy. She’d worn her hair in braids as a very little kid, but only when her mom did the braiding. Messing around with hair was a girly thing to do, a Nicci-thing, the sort of thing Amber rolled her eyes at with lofty disdain. Who’d have ever thought that was going to come bite her in the ass on an alien planet?

She had managed to produce a mangled-looking snake of snarls and was working to tie off the end when Meoraq came prowling back with the big waterskin. He grunted at her as he passed by. It sure didn’t sound like a good-morning-radiant-woman-of-my-fantasies greeting. He checked the weight of the wrappings containing last night’s leftovers, gave her a disapproving glance, then noticed the clumsy braid in her hands. He grunted again and beckoned to her. “Come. You may tie it around—” He eyed the length critically. “—my arm.”

Amber frowned up at him for a moment, then got to her feet and went to him. He offered his arm. His bicep bulged. She could still remember the strength in those arms as he grappled with her, the power evident even in his gentlest touch. And there had been a few of those too, even though he was not a gentle man.

She tied the braid on just under his shoulder, where the bulk of his muscle would keep it from slipping down around his wrist. It stood out surprisingly bright against his dark scales. Every loose strand and ugly knot showed clearly, but he seemed pleased with it. Proud of it, like the look in his eye when he shifted his gaze to the bite on her shoulder. He even gave her a deeply unsettling yet probably playful lizardish grimace before moving past her to collect their things.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

He straightened up, gave that some obvious thought, then cautiously said, “Good…morning?”

“Not that. About last night!”

His spines snapped irritably flat. “What am I supposed to say?”

“Why don’t you start with why, after all this time, when you’ve never so much as crossed your eyes at me, you suddenly decided we had to have sex?”

“I had a vision,” he replied. “A true vision of God.”

It was not a shocker, as revelations went. Amber covered her eyes with both hands solely to keep them from turning into fists. In the dark behind her palms, she said, “God told you to have sex with me? Seriously? That’s what you’re going with?”

“Yes.” He shrugged into his pack and secured the straps. “We need to get moving. I see a hard rain coming and I want to put the spans behind us before it reaches us. No more arguments, woman. Let’s go.”

There was that word again. All of a sudden, the whole issue with her hair seemed a lot less important as making love took an ugly turn into fucking. “Did you just call me ‘woman’?!”

He shouldered the filled waterskin and gestured at her pack. “Yes.”

Absurdly, her first impulse was to snatch her hair back from him. She restrained it. “And just what in the hell makes you think you get to do that?” she demanded.

He looked at her, his expression tipping back and forth between annoyed and confused. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s rude! I don’t call you man!”

“Yes, you do. Lizardman, even,” he added with a glare.

“Not all the time. Only when we’re fighting.”

He threw out his arms, his head cocked hard and eyes snapping. “We appear to be fighting,” he told her, then pointed at her pack. “Get your things, woman, and let’s go.”

Her stomach clenched. “Stop calling me that.”

“You’re my woman now, I’ll call you whatever I want.”

“The hell you say! I’m not ‘your’ anything. Just because I slept with you once doesn’t mean I belong to you.”

“You slept in my camp. That means you belong to me. You have been mine from the day—” He stopped there, then rolled his eyes and heaved a hard sigh. “Fine. How many times do humans mate before the woman considers herself conquered?”

She stared at him for a long time before she was finally able to say, “That’s not how it works with us,” biting off each word and spitting it like a bullet.

“More pity for you,” he said with a careless shrug of his spines, “because that’s how it works with us. No more talk. We’re leaving.”

She put her pack on, snatched up her spear and started walking, too angry to even look at him anymore. “Well, clearly last night was a huge mistake.”

On the horizon, thunder muttered, attracting his immediate attention. “You don’t mean that,” he said, frowning back over his shoulder at the sky.

“Don’t tell me what I mean. I don’t care what God told you, I don’t belong to you.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, not in a romantic way, but just another argument in his favor. “You are mine as much as my own skin. God Himself has married you to me.”

“No, he didn’t,” she snapped, slapping at her forehead.

“Yes. He did.”

His matter-of-fact tone finally pierced all the way in and made everything else she was feeling fade to an uneasy black. She looked at him, feeling her brows draw in. “Yeah, but we’re not really married.”

His head tipped, as if he were very, very slightly puzzled. He caught her by the sleeve to make her stop walking, leaned close, and said, clearly and distinctly, “Married.”

“What, just because we had sex? That’s ridiculous!”

“It would be, if that were the only reason. We are bound by God’s will, Soft-Skin, and what He has joined, no force on Gann may sunder. You are mine. My woman.” He raised his hands and clasped them together with a sound of impressive finality. “My wife.”

The wind blew between them.

“You don’t mean that,” Amber said, but her voice rose at the end, making it almost a question.

“Don’t tell me what I mean.” But his spines lowered and he brushed his knuckles across her brow, then along the shorn half of her head. “How can you say you’re not mine when you gave everything you had to me? Everything you are…” His fingers scraped lightly down her cheek, along her throat and under the neck of her shirt, peeling it back from her skin so that he exposed her bitten shoulder.

And did she roll her eyes? Shrug off his hand? Take even one step  back out of his reach? No. She just stood there with her mouth slightly open and her girly heart fluttering and a hot glow way down deep in her belly and let him do it.

“God gave you to me,” he murmured, nuzzling under her jaw. “Even when I did not know how to ask. He found you anyway and put you in my path. You are the woman I was born into this world to find.”

“To own,” Amber whispered.

“Do I own my skin? My bones? I possess them.” He moved to the other side of her neck and roughly nuzzled her some more. “It’s not the same, when you think about it.”

“I don’t want to think about it.”

“Please yourself. Fortunately—” He straightened with an air of reluctance, checking the fit of his belt before adjusting her shirt and covering her up again. “—you don’t have to. We’ll walk now. We’ll talk later, if you still want to. All right?”

She looked at the sky, which dropped a blob of rain in her eye, then gave up and nodded. He turned around and started walking. She leaned on her spear for a moment, thumping her head on it until the urge to run after him and hold his stupid hand was gone. Then she shrugged her pack up higher, put her head down and followed.

* * *

They walked all day, like any other normal day. They stopped twice—once to ford a rain-swollen ravine and fill their flasks, and once just to stop—and they were normal rests. They made camp in the late afternoon on the top of a stony bluff next to a patch of champagne-colored berries which smelled light and sweet, but tasted so fantastically bitter that Meoraq had to threaten her in his normal way to eat them. He put up his tent, had a nice normal argument with her when she picked up her spear, then took her hunting. They killed a saoq together, and he stood over her with a critical but approving eye while she butchered it, and then they went back to his camp and cooked it up. They ate a normal dinner, having normal conversation, and when he’d finished wrapping up the leftover meat for tomorrow’s hike, he unbuckled all his buckles, shrugged out of his harness and zzzzzupped off his belt, tossed his metal panty-panel carelessly to one side, and said, “Do you want to lie on your belly or your back?” in a perfectly normal tone of voice.

“Uh…my back,” was her somewhat dumbfounded answer (but only somewhat), and with an approving grunt and a playful nip to her shoulder, he pushed her down and climbed on top of her.

The sex was much as she’d remembered it from the confusion of the previous night’s battle and as before, she could not summon any defense against that spined, hooked, alien weapon that he fought with. He stabbed her once and it might as well have been over.

There was no petting, no caresses, no pillow-talk. He stared straight ahead while she thrashed and clawed at his back, his neck arched so that all she could see when she tried to look at him was the yellow stripes glowing out from the black scales on his throat. He moved nothing but his hips the whole time, kept breathing in the same slow rhythm, and ignored every effort she made to pull him closer. Amber had never had the kind of flowery romantic sex that people had in movies, but it still bothered her. Even so she came first and came again and came until she was actually screaming with pleasure for the first time in her life, something she’d always thought only happened in the made-up letters in men’s magazines. By the time he trotted out the, “Make this woman worthy,” part of his prayer and came to his own hissing climax, she had begun to feel dangerously close to losing consciousness.

If he noticed, he didn’t think it necessary to remark. He merely licked again at his bite-mark on her shoulder and got off her. While she struggled to recover, he adjusted himself to let his penis retract, scooped up his harness and his panty-plate, and said, “I will have the first watch. You will sleep in my tent. Rest well.” And off he went. Just another normal night.

He was giving her permission to use his tent? Where the hell else did he think she was going to sleep after all that sex, curled up at his feet? And rest well? What the hell did that mean?

She put her clothes back—not back on, they’d never been all the way off, just back to where they were supposed to be—snatched her blanket out of her pack and her own bedroll, scooted over to a less sexed-up patch of grass, and shut her eyes in a haze of defiance and misery.

Footsteps woke her in the middle of the night. She raised her head and watched Meoraq drop an armload of grass-and-dung bundles by the fire. He simply tapped a knuckle to his brow when he saw that she was awake and went on in to his tent.

It was a long night. She ate a few more of the bitter berries, made herself some tea, and entertained herself by tying the bundles together into little lizardman shapes and burning them. She didn’t mean to stay up, but her stupid brain wouldn’t shut up and the more she listened to it, the more upset her stomach got, and before she knew it, the sky was turning grey.

She was still staring at it in the first blush of astonishment when Meoraq’s tent flaps jerked and opened. He emerged with a skyward glance and a scowl, his tunic hanging open and his half-fastened harness dangling at his knees, and stomped off into the underbrush.

Christ, she’d pulled an all-nighter. And now she had to walk all day and she was already exhausted. She could ask him for a little time to sleep before they set out, but she was pretty sure she’d just get another of his ‘let this be a lesson to you, insufferable human’ lectures instead. Or worse, he’d agree and be pissed off about it, and she’d know he was pissed off and be too upset to actually sleep, so she’d be even more tired when they finally left and they’d have to stop early as well as leave late.

He came back as Amber was sitting and rubbing her churning stomach, buckling the last buckle on his harness and muttering to himself. “Is there tea?” he asked.

“A little. It’s probably gone cold. I didn’t think it was this close to morning.”

He grunted and glanced at her. “Is that an apology or an excuse? I can’t tell.”

She’d been trying for an apology, but if that was how he was going to be… “Neither, it’s just me whining at you again, you jerk. I can stay up as long as I want.”

He didn’t rise for the bait, just took the stewing pouch off its tripod and dumped out the cold tea. “You look tired.”

Oh, he was good at fighting.

“I’m fine,” Amber said tightly.

He moved off into the berry bushes. “We could pass another day here.”

Amber scrambled to her feet, dismayed. “The whole day? Come on, can’t you just slap me?”

“This is not a punishment.”

“The hell it isn’t! We’ve got to catch up, Meoraq! I can walk!”

He eyed her as he steadily filled the pouch with berries. He didn’t say anything.

“You do what you want, then,” she told him, rolling up her blanket and stuffing it into her pack. “But I’m going, with or without you.”

He snorted, but put the last handful of berries in the pouch and came out of the bushes. “This is my camp, woman, and I decide when we leave it.”

“Have fun bossing yourself around all day, lizardman.” ‘And screwing yourself all night,’ she thought, but couldn’t bring herself to say that.

“I can’t deal with you before I’ve had something to drink,” Meoraq said, kneeling by the fire. “And there are days, woman, when tea is not enough. Go to sleep before I—”

He stopped. His spines flared all the way forward and slowly lowered again, not quite all the way flat. He put the berries down and picked up a dung-and-grass lizardman.

Amber smacked her palm into her face. She thought she’d burned them all.

He stared at it, very still, for a long time. Then he looked at her and while she was hunting for a way to simultaneously apologize and explain that she hadn’t really meant anything by it and not to get his metal panties in a bunch, he got up.

“Meoraq—” she began, holding her hands up in surrender.

He took them, pulled her to her feet, and put his arms around her.

“We will walk, Soft-Skin,” he said in an oddly-subdued voice. His hand moved from her back to cup her head, then her shoulder, then back to her head, as if he wasn’t sure what to touch. “Sleep a short time. I will wake you and we will walk.”

“I don’t need to sleep! I can go now, damn it! I’m fine!”

He drew back, frowning as he searched her eyes. He opened his mouth several times as if he wanted to argue, but in the end, he set the grass-and-dung lizardman gently in her hands. “Then we will go now.”

Amber stared at him while he started taking his tent down, then at the doll which had given her such an easy and baffling win. Not knowing what else to do with it, she put it on the fire. When she straightened up, Meoraq was watching her, his hands still gripping at the tent-poles but motionless. His eyes met hers briefly, troubled, and then he went back to dismantling his tent.

She supposed she could just ask him what he thought the stupid little doll meant, but it would inevitably lead to her telling him why she’d really made it and she couldn’t see how any conversation that included the words, “I was burning you in effigy all night,” could end well. And she didn’t want to fight.

Well, she kind of did. But she shouldn’t and she could admit that much at least.

Amber poked at the burning doll, breaking it back into the three bundles it had been before she’d tied them together. Flames leapt up at once and she watched them instead of Meoraq, knowing he’d be ready in just a few minutes more and then they’d be on the move again. And that was great.

The fire burned, strands of grass turning black and curling, one by one, before falling apart into white powder.

She wished she’d at least let him finish making his tea first.

* * *

They walked in silence most of the morning. Meoraq couldn’t be certain of Amber’s thoughts; whenever he glanced back at her, she always seemed to be wholly fixed on just not falling over. He wished she would say something, even if it was to call him an insensitive brunt (or more likely, a scaly son of a bitch), because his own thoughts were a torment. He carried them like stones in his belly, each one with the name and face of a human he had been ready to forget, and the largest and heaviest belonged to Nicci.

He hated Nicci. He’d hated her when he’d been forced to feed and tend her and he hated her ghost once she was gone, but no fire burns without fuel, and in her absence, hate had cooled to coals. In truth, he hadn’t spared her even an idle thought in days.

But she had never left Amber. She was there still, silent, invisible, clinging on to Amber’s hand and doubtless streaming water out of her empty eyes. Amber, who still spoke of ‘catching’ the others, just as though there were anything left of them to reach out and hold in her hand.

Because they were dead. He knew it and had known it ever since he had seen their broad trail end at a crumbling canal and realized that they had chosen to walk inside it. Why? Because it would be covered against the rain. Because it would be flat and easily traveled. Because no one was there to tell them not to walk in a storm canal in the rainy season and those idiots would need to be told. No, Meoraq could see it clearly: Scott had led them into the tunnel and some hours hence, some ancient reservoir had overfilled, prompting some unthinking machine to open a ventway and empty a few hundred thousand meti-weights of water into Scott’s safe, dry, level road. They were dead.

But even in death, their souls would never be freed from their clay unless they were burnt. Meoraq knew that. He knew it, but he’d never once thought of them and the hell their undying clay must be now enduring. If he felt anything at all, it was only a grim satisfaction that he would never have to see them again. He had his Amber, now his wife, without the thorn of her annoying kind and especially her whining little blood-kin, and he had been content.

And Amber had said nothing, because she, as his obedient wife, must be content also. Content with nothing to burn but dolls in the shape of the one she loved enough to call ‘sister’.

Self-disgust reached a sudden, jarring pinnacle throughout his mind and body, like Gann’s own orgasm. Meoraq halted—Amber bumped up hard against his back—and began yanking at his harness-fastens. “We are stopping,” he spat, throwing his tent to the ground. “I have to pray.”

Amber made a sound of spiritless assent and staggered a few steps away, dropping her pack and collapsing on top of it. Seeing that made him feel even worse, but it had been her insistence that they travel. He would have been happy to give her a day’s rest this morning if she had not been—

If she had not been burning Nicci.

Now he looked at her, even though he should be on his knees, palms to clay and deep in prayer. He looked at the woman Sheul had given him, married to him, and realized with a sinking belly that the dual burden of grief and illness were simply too much for even his stubborn Amber to carry.

He began to clear the earth and gather what tinder there was for a fire. She did not move to help him. A second glance showed him she was lost in sleep already, mired in it, despite the pain that yet twisted her soft features. He tried not to wake her, but she startled when he struck the fire, moaned, and finally dragged her eyes open. She stared without recognition at the growing flames for several seconds before her eyes went wide and filled with dismay.

She tried to sit up, fell, and tried again even as she protested, pleading with him not to make her stay, she could walk, she was fine.

He put his heat-stones in the fire and filled the stewing pouch with water.

She caught at his arm, cursing and apologizing, vowing that she would never stay up all night again, only please please not to do this. They had to catch up. They had to keep going.

He opened his pack and brought out his fine inlaid tea box. He put all he had left of the dawnslight blend in the steeper and dropped it in the water. He put away the tea box and brought out some of yesterday’s saoq, tepid and greasy in its wrappings. He held it out to her.

She glared at him, lightly trembling, then snatched up her spear. She had to climb it as a crutch to gain her feet, but once gained, she set off into the prairie, limping and swearing at him. She fought when he brought her bodily back, but she was too tired to fight for long. She collapsed again on top of her pack, weeping furiously behind her hands, and fell asleep as soon as the storm lagged, tears still wet on her skin.

Meoraq sat and watched his tea heat. He did not pray, exactly. Certainly, he did not pray as he probably should have done, back bent and with all the ritual words in place, but any man’s heart can be an altar if it is open and any man’s words can reach God’s ear if they are sincerely spoken.

“Father,” said Meoraq at last, and knew that he was heard. He looked up into the sky, not to see Sheul’s face among the rolling clouds but to show Him his own, naked and troubled, here on Gann. “Father, I cry out to You from the darkness. Lift up Your lamp and show me how to find them. Let me give them their last prayers and release them to Your judgment.”

Sheul listened, but did not speak.

“I do not ask for myself,” Meoraq admitted. “I should. They are Your children also and deserve the care all children of Sheul may expect in passing from this mortal life. I should love them, as the Word tells me to do, and seek them for myself, but I don’t. I can’t. Were it not for my woman’s pain, I know I would not be calling to You now. Forgive Your son his failings,” he said, touching his palm to Gann and taking away small daubs of mud to rub over his mortal heart. “But do not punish his wife because of them. I beseech You, Father, set me on their last path and let me find where they lie so I can give them true death.”

Sheul’s hand was heavy upon his shoulder, but His great voice still remained silent and Meoraq knew why. Finding where Scott and his humans had washed up would mean turning around. It would mean five days of walking back to the canal and who knew how many days more to search. The bodies might be spans and spans away; if he were lucky, the canal might have fallen in at some point, allowing the bodies to be vomited out on the street where they were visible, but if not, they had surely finished up in some ancient cistern. Or several cisterns, spans apart. Either way, a search could easily eat up the rest of the season, with no guarantee of ever finding even one body. And any body he did find…after so many days soaking in the stormways, he would never know which of them it had been.

Meoraq knew very little about women and even less about humans, but as much as he wished to make some grand romantic gesture to his grieving wife, the reality was that the other humans were gone. The clay of their flesh would crumble; the spark that had once warmed it, lost forever. This was truth, and as Master Tsazr had once said, truth does not care if it comforts you.

The fire was failing already. He would have to go find real fuel or let it die. The tea was not very dark yet, but drinkable and hot. Lost in his own brooding thoughts, torn between the realities of this camp and the intangibilities that lay beyond it, Meoraq reached into his pack and felt about for his cup.

His fingers touched something cup-like wrapped in his spare breeches, but with an odd protrusion he couldn’t quite—

Oh. Oh no.

But yes, and soon he was holding them—one garish human cup in each hand—and asking himself how by Gann’s wicked whim he had managed to forget the stupid things so completely? Damn him, all this time, Amber had thought them lost forever. All this time, he’d made her come to him in her embarrassed way to beg for his cup when he was done with it, and there were days when he had made damned sure she knew she was inconveniencing him. All this time, but like the humans themselves, as soon as they were out of sight, he’d simply never given them another thought.

“Great Sheul, take Your hand from my shoulder,” he groaned, dipping out some tea, “and send it against my stupid snout. Wake up, Soft-Skin. Come, wife. Wake and hear me.”

She muttered thickly and curled closer around herself, rolling away from him when he nudged the cup against her shoulder. “No. We’re fighting. That means I don’t have to deal with you if I don’t want to. Leave me alone.”

Sheul’s hand stayed gentle where it rested on him. Meoraq simply leaned further over and set the cup down in front of her.

She made him wait a very long time before she opened her eyes, but he knew when she’d done it by the stiffening of her turned back. After several shaking breaths, she pushed herself up and looked at him.

There were many things he wanted to say, and some he did not want to say but knew he had to, but when her green eyes came to him, it all fell away.

“We are done walking for the day,” he told her.

She picked up the cup and held it loosely between her hands, staring at the tea.

“Tomorrow, we will walk again, but we stop when I give that command and you will not defy me.”

She stirred at the tea with her finger, but did not drink.

“All things are possible with Sheul, but I cannot promise you that we will ever find them.”

Her eyes closed. “I know.”

“I will not allow you to kill yourself searching.”

“Meoraq—”

“No,” he said forcefully. “It is not your life to give. It is mine.”

She said nothing. A single tear welled beneath the tightly-shut lid of her left eye, but it never grew fat enough to fall.

He hoped the matter was settled now because he really did not know what else to say. He took up her second human cup, filled it, and arranged himself beside her. After a moment, determined to prove that he was not a scaly son of a bitch, or at least, not always, he put his arm around her.

“I’m tired,” she said.

“I know. As soon as I have the tent together, I want you inside it. From now on, that is where you sleep.” He put the hammer to that with an authoritative grunt and drank some tea. It was cold and overwatered. He drank it anyway.

“Then what?”

“Eh?”

“What happens next?”

“We travel on to Xi’Matezh,” he said, surprised that she felt this had somehow changed.

“No, I meant tonight.”

“Tonight?” His mind, wonderfully blank, suddenly lit with Sheul’s own exasperated slap of illumination. He uttered a little laugh, surprised as much by her coyness as by this unexpected drift in the conversation. “You don’t have to wait up for me, Soft-Skin. If the fires come, I’ll wake you.”

Her brows drew together. Her eyes flicked in a bewildered way toward the coals where his tea had warmed.

“Sheul’s fires,” he amplified.

Her confusion did not appear to clear. A troubling thought occurred to him. “How much do you know about sex?”

She snorted. “I know God doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“So you…don’t know anything.” He thought about that, a little stymied by the enormity of the task now before him, and decided that, just like trying to teach something new to his brother Salkith, it would be best to start with gentle compliments. He reached out to pat her thigh. “You did very well during first conquest.”

Her furry brows rose in peaks and then crashed thunderously down. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

It didn’t always work with Salkith either.

“I enjoyed your struggles. I would permit you to fight again, if you like.”

“Oh believe me, lizardman, I will.”

He smiled. “It pleases me that you want to be my well-mannered woman,” he said, peeling back the neck of her shirt. Ignoring her playful slaps, he licked at the mark he’d left in her soft skin. “But I would rather have the insufferable she-warrior I was given. So if you want me, put your hands on me and tell me so.”

“What if I don’t want you?”

“Ah, my wife, is that what’s bothering you?” He licked her again, slowly this time, tasting the strange, rich bitters of her blood, and felt it when she shivered. “We have only been married two days. Surely that is too early for you to start worrying that I might set you aside, especially since you have burned for me so readily thus far.”

“It wasn’t like that!” she said, fetchingly embarrassed, as women often were, by this public acknowledgement of her pleasure. “I was lonely and…and scared! That’s all!”

He could guess how much it cost his proud woman to make such an admission. He tipped his head to run the side of his snout gently along the curve of her shoulder, following it up to her slender neck in spite of her efforts to shrug him off. “And you needed me.”