Текст книги "Blood Warrior"

Автор книги: Lindsey Piper

Соавторы: Lindsey Piper
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CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

Tallis escorted Kavya up the rear steps and toward the check-in desk. A young clerk sat on a narrow stool reading a celebrity tabloid. Through the use of her gift and an extra bump, bump of her hips, Kavya seduced the clerk within moments.

“Key to the top floor.” Her voice was the essence of sweet innocence.

His reaction was as predictable as phases of the moon: the clerk nodded and retrieved the key. His eyes were unfocused, his jaw a little slack.

Kavya placed a finger on her lips. “Shhh. Don’t tell.”

Only when they were up the stairs and out of sight did Tallis level her with a questioning glare. “And if he does tell?”

She shook her head and wouldn’t meet his eyes. “He won’t remember us in a few moments. We’ll be nothing more substantial than a story he read in that paper.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you could do that in the first place?”

“You seemed so heroic in trying to find a back way in.”

“You’re teasing me. What’s the real reason?”

“I told you,” she said with quiet sobriety. “I don’t use it for personal gain. Two times now, both for a roof over our heads. It feels as wrong as prostitution.”

He gripped her shoulders until they stood face to face. “Then I won’t ask you to do it again. Promise.”

“You can do that?”

“I’ve made more promises in the last hour than I have in a decade.”

After a quiet intake of air, her eyes wide, Kavya keyed the lock. Tallis was equally taken aback by his words, but that didn’t make them less true. He followed her into a long room with narrow walls and a low ceiling. The bed would accommodate two people, and the sink had faucets. There was a mirror and a small padded chair, the upholstery of which was worn but serviceable. In all, he was pleased with his choice of hotel.

“How many guests?” he asked.

“Nine people in the building,” she said, her concentration plain. He liked the reassurance of being able to recognize when she used her gift. “That will probably change come evening.”

Tallis shut the door, caught her by the waist, and pressed her against the white-painted wood. Her sensual mouth was within inches of his. “You willsleep tonight, even if I have to stay awake until dawn with both seaxes in hand. We have a long way to go. And you’ll need it. I have plans for us.”

“Plans? Do tell.”

“Later. Right now we have better things to do.”

Tallis kissed her with a degree of feeling he’d never experienced. There was passion, the mating of mouths and the struggle to taste, feel, explore even more. There was tenderness, so that his gift didn’t overpower his higher-level thinking. He wanted to make love to Kavya with both halves of his nature.

Always in the past, that balance had been a struggle to maintain. He’d stay too cloistered in the logic of a thinking man, or he’d leave rationality behind in favor of easy, beastly impulses. Only upon emerging from one of his rages did he feel anything other than bloodlust—or in this case, the lust between a woman and a man. He compared himself to a junkie who lived for the high, when nothing else mattered, but who suffered the regret of again having given in.

Thiswas no struggle. Two halves blended in harmony, kissing Kavya.

He braced his palms flat against the door, on either side of her head. She had the freedom to touch him. He refrained. For now. Her touch was enough, as she skimmed her hands beneath the layers of his shirt and new coat. She was the most intriguing mix of eager and tentative, as if even now, after her wild initiation, she remained unsure of what to do next and how to get what she wanted. He was tempted to show her more, but not yet. How would she go about tackling the puzzle of her sexual inexperience?

This was . . . novel. Sweet. Intriguing.

Kavya pushed her tongue into his mouth, then made a frustrated noise. She pulled away, met his gaze. “I liked your teeth.”

“Then ask for them.”

“No. Bite my tongue.”

“So bossy,” he said quietly, smirking. “Fine. I’ll oblige.”

Taking her head in his hands, Tallis held her steady while he plundered her mouth, tasting. Savoring. She was hot enough to singe him to cinders. She pushed her tongue forward again. An offering. He nipped at the tip, scraped along the sides, then bit the meaty center. Her body stilled, as did the restless caresses under his shirt. Tallis’s heart thudded. They didn’t move. Together, they melted into the moment as he sank his teeth more deeply. How much could she take? Was there pleasure in her pain? The thought surged blood into his cock and made his lungs burn.

He moaned. She replied with a squeak of a gasp.

What seemed like an eternity later, bound in that dangerous test of wills, she scraped her nails down his spine before digging them into his sides. Tallis released his bite, then plunged again. They sucked each other into a vortex of passion that jacked up eight notches with a single act. Although he still kissed her deeply, he kept from touching her by drawing on an unknown source of control. This was her show to direct.

Kavya was not a woman to disappoint.

She broke their kiss to look down and unzip his jacket in one clean sweep of metal. She pushed his hands away from the wall even as she continued to undress him. The jacket hit the floor. After quickly unbuttoning the neck of his henley, she pulled it over his head. His plain cotton undershirt followed.

He stood before her, naked from the waist up. Her breathing matched his—as if she was ready for another fuck against the wall, her cravings that intense.

She only looked at him, overwhelming him with a keen amber gleam. Nothing in Tallis’s life had felt so charged with potential. The next hour could take one of a thousand directions. For now, that direction was hers to dictate, although his mindless brutality was slowly amassing. His best intentions wouldn’t last.

She smoothed a fingertip along his left collarbone, then down between his pecs. “This is your fault.”

“What is?”

“It was a dare when you stripped for me, but it’s part of us now. You on display. Don’t move. I just want to touch and look.”

Tallis tipped his head to the ceiling and swallowed. He nodded.

“You see,” she continued, “my senses have never been as important as knowing people’s thoughts. That was my best defense. That was the best way I could assess if a person was a threat. This . . . this is my senses trying to keep up. A steep learning curve compared to you.”

Her gaze scorched him everywhere. Her hands followed. She teased down the trail of his chest hair to where it edged around his navel and arrowed toward the waistband of his cargos. The next slide of her hands was both palms up his ribs. She took her time, then grabbed both pecs and squeezed. Just once. She moved on to his shoulders and down the length of his arms. That was delicate, almost tickling. She clasped his hands briefly.

Her mouth took the place of her hungry gaze and questing fingertips. She placed openmouthed kisses on his biceps and tugged the far side of his neck so she could burn another against the cap of his shoulder. “So tall,” she said against damp skin. “I like that.”

Tallis shuddered. He was being seduced. He knew it and liked it and feared it at the same time. This was eerily reminiscent of some of his dreams, when the Sun would dominate him.

“What is it?” Kavya had stopped kissing him. She was looking at him with obvious concern.

“In my dreams of . . . of who I thought was you . . .” He shook his head, surprised by the suffocating embarrassment that crept up from his chest. Kavya’s hand kept him in the here and now. Perhaps she felt the flushing heat of his idiocy. “I was seduced, like you’re doing now. Only, she was more practiced. She was never unsure of herself, or unsure of what I wanted. She would edge me to such a frenzy. I . . . Dragon damn it, Kavya, I gave in to her demands but she never followed through. I spent two decades perched a half step away from satisfaction. It wasn’t a life, just a string of betrayals and waning faith. I should’ve realized . . .”

“You were manipulated by a force beyond your control. After so many years, how could you have known your own thoughts from the ones she gave you?” The press of the sari against his skin was cool, slightly rough. Grounding. “I’ve known those doubts. After each Mask. After living among too many people, too many minds for so long—there were times when I couldn’t sort through the basics of my own wants and needs.”

“How do you manage?”

“Indranan are taught from a young age how to keep thoughts in boxes. Mine go in one box, separated and memorized—the better to make sure they’re mine. Impressions from other people and old Masks have boxes of their own, like quarantined contagions. Sometimes they seep through. I get confused. I have to sort through the glimpses, remember who I am. Tallis, look at me.” They locked eyes, locked souls. “Whatever evil invaded your mind used sex as a weapon. That’s not me. No matter what happens between us, that will neverbe me.”

“Another promise so soon?” He masked his dizziness with a quip, then a quick kiss to the bridge of her nose. “Dangerous.”

“We’ve already been playing dangerously.” She nestled her mouth against his upper arm, talking directly against his skin. “I’ve made myself vulnerable. The Indranan are reserved for a reason: self-preservation. Before arriving here, I doubt you’ve met many on your travels.”

“I haven’t, actually. Those I’ve met have been crossbred, or in service of the cartels. The latter weren’t the kind I’d want to sit down with for a long chat. Twice-cursed, all of them.”

“See? You might not understand the full extent, but I’ve done what few of my people ever dare.”

He took her hand and led her to the bed. They sat side by side, fingers linked. “Tell me?”

“It’s all about senses, as I’ve said. When I’m with you, like this, or when we’re fighting and plotting—focused on each other, from those first moments in the camp . . . I’m me.”

With his free hand he unwrapped the blue linen that concealed her hair. “What does that feel like?”

“Terrifying.”

“Should we stop?”

“No.” Her eyes were slick with a sheen of moisture. Tallis wanted to shut his own eyes, to shut off the source of the ache that made his pulse pick up an odd rhythm. “I want this, because it’s the freest I’ve been in my life.”

“Terrifying,” he repeated. “That feels just about right. I’ve been half convinced everything I do is still based on another person’s dictates. That hasn’t been the case for these last few days, even when you’re bossing me around.”

“I don’t boss. I delegate.” Kavya took a deep breath. “But if what I’m doing is too much like your dreams, what now? I can’t avoid being what she imitated.”

His mind made up, Tallis turned their bodies so that they faced each other on the bed. He unbound her hair. No matter how difficult it was to wrap a sari around a woman’s body, unwrapping one was like opening a gift. He released the linen pleats and tucks until the fabric pooled at her waist. A matching blue bodice, which resembled an elaborately decorated yet concealing bra with wide straps, covered her breasts.

“It’s like you said.” His voice was rough, but he was surprisingly in control. Again . . . he had that sense of having been able to do with Kavya what he’d never done before: join his two natures in common purpose. “Our senses. Talk to me. Touch me. Let me hear you with my ears and feel you with my skin. I want to keep tasting you until I’ve memorized it beyond anyone’s ability to fake. Ground me in what she couldn’t know. Be the free woman you described. Be Kavya. Be my real woman.”

–

His words were too much like an endearment for Kavya to bear. There was nothing to be gained from this man other than the physical: safety and gratification. Yet she couldn’t help a new, unfamiliar affinity adding weight to her soul while lifting her shoulders—as if he’d used that same physical prowess to alleviate unseen burdens.

“You know I’m real,” she said matter-of-factly. “You know the difference now.”

A glimmer of his usual humor returned. “Then by all means.” He stretched back on the bed, hands pillowed behind his head. “Continue.”

Kavya didn’t know where to start. At the start of each new encounter, she repeated the same phrase. I don’t know where to start.That was the glory of leading with instinct rather than thought. She simply reached out for the buttons of his fly.

He was already firming beneath her hands as she loosened the fabric. The bulge of his erection shaped his briefs, tempting her to reveal him to her greedy eyes and curious touch. But it was too soon. She had bared so much of his beautiful body. Time to return the favor. She stood and unwrapped the rest of her sari’s overlapping layers, not to tease him but to keep it from tangling as she crawled atop him. Wearing only her undergarments, she forged a path of discovery from the waistband of his briefs to his throat, using only her mouth. Then her fingernails. She licked and kissed and scratched, absorbing as many details as she could. Salt. Silk. Musk. Sleek hair and firm—Dragon damn, such firm muscles.

He watched her perusal with little remaining of his dark suspicion. Instead he smirked with a knowing expression. He knew that she wanted him, so she shot the same knowing expression right back. Had she been able to talk to his thoughts, she would’ve told him, You can’t wait to be inside me again.

She stopped mid-lick along a ridge of muscle bisecting his abdomen. Why wish for what she couldn’t do? She couldn’t communicate with him that way, and he’d specifically asked for speech. Her voice. Something he could hear with his ears and know was real.

She swallowed thickly. “You can’t wait to be inside me again.”

Tallis flinched. “Yes.”

He grabbed her head with both hands. The flare of fire in his deep topaz blue eyes turned nuclear. “And since we’re in the mood to try new things, take off the rest of my clothes.”

Tipping her head, Kavya frowned. “You’re in charge now?”

“New territory to explore.”

She held his gaze a little longer—an abject dare. “Lift your hips.”

Within a minute, she’d dropped the cargos and his briefs to the floor, revealing his impressive body to the late afternoon sunlight that slanted through the room’s small window. Slats of wood over the window lit stripes across his stomach and down his legs. His thick cock lay heavily on his low abdomen, with the head reaching for his navel. That massive organ had filled her. She didn’t know exactly how, because the physical dimensions didn’t make logical sense. But she remembered the fullness, the completeness of having taken that length deep inside. She wanted that as much as he did.

“Come here with that curious mouth.” His voice was dark and low again, but without the worrying suspicion. He was entirely aroused, which reflected so plainly in his tense ligaments, his stiff limbs, and the heavy power of his ravenous stare. “I want your lips here.”

Kavya looked on in shock as he took his prick in hand and smoothed the head with his palm. The rhythm was just as she remembered, how he’d loved to grip her fist in his, setting a pace that should’ve been painful. She knew better now. It was glorious.

She’d accepted his dares and challenges from the beginning. No way would she stop now, especially when he was right—new territory.

She straddled his naked body, with her knees bracketing his calves.

“Hold your hair out of the way,” he said. “I want to watch.”

A shudder of desire shook up her spine and out across her shoulders. With deliberate care, she twined her hair and handed it to him as she leaned into place. “You hold it. I’ll be busy.”

The first touch of her tongue was the most pure. The most shocking. He jerked. She flinched back. His salty spice lingered in her mouth. She bent down for another taste. He was hotter there than anywhere else on his body. In fact, the only heat that matched the throbbing head of his cock was the sweet ache between her legs. They matched in that fiery impatience.

She did everything by instinct. Tongue swirling. Mouth sucking. Lips moving up and down his steel-hard length with a light mimic of the rhythm she’d already learned to be his preference. Tallis tightened his hand in her hair and added his encouragement with whispered curses, endearments, and raunchy commands.

“Just . . . Shit, just like that. Ah, Kavya. Yes. Yes, suck me.”

Kavya become bolder as her awkwardness melted away. There was no time for awkwardness when presented with such an unexpected thrill. She took him in hand and matched the pulse of her mouth to the pulse of her strokes.

“See?” His taunting word was said with a smile and a gasp. “I’m back inside you.”

As if to punish him for being insolent, she tucked her teeth behind her lips and nipped at his sensitive head. He moaned, thrust, twisted her hair.

“Again?” she asked innocently.

“Yes. Again and again.”

She indulged him because he wanted it and, more powerfully, because it pleased her. She was ready to straddle higher up his body and sink onto that magnificent length, but she lingered. The deliberate prolonging of pleasure was the most beautiful torture. Not teasing. Not promising something she wouldn’t deliver. This would make fusing their bodies even more powerful. She was still a novice, but that much she knew.

A drop of fluid slicked across her tongue. She tested the potent essence with closed eyes. Her breasts grew heavy and full, aching, needing the urgency of his hands. Her thighs trembled.

“Enough,” he said with a growl.

An honest, soul-rending growl.

Kavya’s world spun when she found herself on her back with the ceiling above her. Then Tallis’s face. He was half-crazed. How had he hidden that so well, with his body nearly motionless during her exploration? However he’d managed, he held nothing back now.

“You.” That one word was a sharp burst from her lungs. “ You, Tallis. Talk to me. I don’t care what you say, but I need to know you’re in there.”

His jaw bunched. His nostrils flared. His blue eyes were lost to the commanding authority of his gift. He still held her hair in a tight fist, whereas his other hand gripped her hip with equal ferocity. He’d paused at the most provocative moment, with his cock poised to enter her with one unrelenting thrust.

“Hold on,” he gritted out. “This is going to get rough.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR

Tallis let himself go. He let himself become what they both wanted, wild yet contained. His goal was not to hurt Kavya of Indranan, but to pleasure her in a way that satisfied his deepest, most brutal instincts. The gift that gave him power as a warrior gave him prowess as a lover.

With a precise stroke, he angled into her body and buried his cock until their abdomens pressed flush. He groaned in the ecstatic relief of having his urges appeased. Her wide-eyed surprise fueled a second groan. She was a wild creature beneath layers of restraint. Why isn’t she mine?He couldn’t catch his logic long enough to remember the reasons.

Kavya clenched the muscles of his ass and whispered, “Perfect, my gorgeous beast.”

He tucked his head beside hers on the pillow, where he could kiss and suckle her neck as he set their pace. He used long, plunging thrusts that seemed almost languorous. Only the force he put behind each return to her slick channel said he wasn’t being kind—not to either of them. She was a freshly tested woman, whose body wasn’t used to such treatment. He was a man holding on to civility by threads as thin as a spider’s silk.

She would come first. That wasn’t up for debate. He needed to hold on a little longer. Read her cues. Listen to her gasps. Feel when the clench of her deep muscles signaled his turn for bliss.

Bowing lower, he palmed one of her breasts and shaped it toward his mouth. He caught the nipple in his mouth, swirled his tongue, grazed it gently as she’d done when going down on him. Kavya arched into his erotic touch and tunneled her fingers into his hair, as she seemed wont to do when sensation took her words and sense.

No, she had one word left. One word that meant her thinking mind was offering her body wholeheartedly. “More,” she rasped. “More, more, more.”

Tallis intended to ask what she meant. Which more? But that wasn’t the result. With her chant in his ears, he bared his teeth and scraped them across her nipple. She arched toward him. More of that. Yes. She revealed herself more than perhaps she knew, craving pain and pleasure intertwined.

Dragon damn, he wanted to claim her.

How?

How much more?

There were steps he could take. The traditional ways of the Pendray—ways that would bind them forever. He . . .

Can’t stop.

“Don’t want you to stop,” she whispered.

“Witch.”

Withdrawing from her sleek heat was nearly impossible. Kavya clawed his ass and back, trying to keep him close, which made it even more difficult. Only his goal made the brief absence bearable.

He shoved her down so roughly that the bedsprings creaked and the headboard smacked against the outer wall. “Over,” was all he managed to say.

When Kavya didn’t comply fast enough—so new to this, so untested—he shoved his arms beneath her lower back and flipped her onto her stomach. She squealed and fought. Tallis grinned tightly against the rush of power that came from being able to grab her wrists and keep her from slipping free. “Going somewhere?”

With his free hand, he lifted her pelvis to create the perfect angle for his return. He pulsed inside her, looming over her, his back an arch around her squirming body.

“Because this,” he gasped against her nape, “this is where I want you. Where else would you go?”

“Nowhere.” The word was more breath than sound. That was new. That was welcome. Kavya wasn’t perfect, and neither was her seduction. She was artless. The studied calm of her cultured voice slipped away in favor of animalistic sounds that matched his inner tumult, stoking them to greater heights, bathed them in hotter fires. “Nowhere but here. What do I do?”

He made the mistake of letting go of her wrists. She caught his hand in one of hers and bit the fleshy pad at the base of his thumb. Tallis thrust harder, but she kept her primal hold on two inches of his flesh. He liked it, too, that blend of possessive pain and the utter pleasure of knowing he’d taken her down this road toward sexual madness.

“Keep that,” he said. “Yours. Show me what you do with things that are yours. How you own them.”

She tightened her jaw. Tallis felt as if she’d break skin with her sharp little teeth, but he knew what his skin could take. He could take anything she wanted to give. She let up and licked, sucked, started again.

He dragged her up to all fours. Only briefly did he remove his hand from the vicinity of her mouth, so that he could hook that arm under her body. He supported her torso, with his forearm between her breasts—and put his hand back where she needed him. She kissed his palm, his fingertips, and the twin crescents of teeth marks she’d embedded in the lower stretch of his thumb.

She was the most unexpected woman. Erotic. Needy. Fearless.

With a last pull toward restraint, Tallis pushed her hair away and nuzzled his mouth at the base of her hairline. “I want to bite you here,” he said against her skin. “How much could you take?”

“Anything you can give.”

His mind was splitting in two: good sense on one side, greed on the other. If he sank his teeth into her flesh, right there . . .

He’d claim her. By Pendray tradition she would be his, and she wouldn’t even know it.

Tallis groaned, tossing her hair so that it covered that temptation. He returned to mating their bodies in a fierce dance. No more foreplay, even if that foreplay had involved some of the roughest sex he’d ever indulged. At that moment, he’d tear her open and live inside her skin, burrow into her bones, swim in her veins along with the blood that powered her heart.

He gasped in relief and surprise when she thrust her hips back to meet his, twice, three times, and thrashed her head. Chin toward the ceiling, she cried out her release. Every ligament and joint tightened. She was frozen in the grasp of the orgasm that washed over her and through her and up into Tallis.

It was the permission he’d waited for.

Pulling her up to a kneeling position, he crossed both arms around her torso. Big hands. Full breasts. Tight hold. He was all body and force of motion. One hand crept up to her throat and held her chin to the ceiling in a mimic of how she’d arched when she came. Tallis pressed his lips against her throat and took, took, took. The brilliant colors that danced behind his eyes were almost distracting, until there was nothing left but a blaze of red so strong that it rivaled the burst of his orgasm. Sensation shot from his balls and the base of his shaft, until nothing was spared—no nerve centers, no hidden places. He was blasted open by pleasure as potent as moonshine and as pure as his rage.

Only he wasn’t a Pendray in the midst of a berserker rage.

He was a devastated man.

–

Kavya didn’t sleep, and neither did Tallis. They lay together in the near-darkness of twilight, as the city’s electric rainbows played over their bed. The room was cold. Wrapped with Tallis beneath the covers, Kavya idly caressed the varied textures of his skin. Smooth shoulders. Rough cheeks. Silky hair down the length of his chest, the hair changing texture around his sex. She touched him because they both needed her to, just as she needed to be touched. Connection.

The frustration of being unable to read his thoughts had given way to fascination. So many other ways to communicate. Some were inept by comparison to the streamlined sharing of knowledge between one mind and another, but she was known as the Sun. Her speeches were all delivered orally. She’d long since learned the value of intonation and hesitation and cadence.

Now she was communicating with Tallis in a way that was so intimate that she reminded herself to breathe. She was pressed flush against him from the calves on up, with her head pillowed by the hollow below his shoulder. She was fatigued and felt utterly pampered. What a strange thing to find in the arms of a Pendray.

“Are you sore?”

It was the first he’d spoken since having finished what had been . . . astonishing. Kavya hadn’t known that ferocity lived within her. What the Sun gave her followers was an insipid, limp thing compared to how she and Tallis had become as mighty as lava hitting cold ocean water—gusts of steam and fire that wouldn’t die.

“I think I will be,” she said quietly. The darkness made for a reliable confidant. She could talk to him without too much latent embarrassment. She didn’t feelembarrassed, but her throat closed and her face heated on a wash of memories. Talking to him within night’s shadows was nearly as private as being able to speak into his mind. She kissed the outer curve of his chest muscle. “We didn’t hold much back. Unless . . . Did you?”

He chuckled softly. The amusement rumbled in a low hum that infused her bones. “Hold much back?”

“Yes. Was that a leisurely stroll for you?”

“I wouldn’t say a stroll, no.” Tallis tightened his arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. “But yes. I did.”

Kavya searched her memories for any sense of hesitation. Only one came to mind. “You wanted to bite the back of my neck. I even dared you.”

He took a deep breath. “That would’ve been more than sex, Kavya. For a Pendray, anyway. Had we done that after the blessing of my family, we’d be married.”

A shot of adrenaline threatened to burst her skin with that single word. Married?

To this man?

To anyman?

No, not just anyone. Tallis was unique in that.

“How . . .?” She needed to swallow. “How do you mean?”

“My clan’s tradition.”

His voice sounded trapped between affection and resignation. It was the tone people used when speaking about family, religion, and cultural differences. Sometimes there was no denying that even the most treasured customs could appear ridiculous. Kavya had felt it—that urge to apologize for aspects of Indranan life that flummoxed outsiders.

“The man and woman are blessed by an elder,” he said. “That person could be anyone of standing in a community, even a senior member of a household. A trusted guarantor acknowledges the union on behalf of the clan.” His fingers climbed her spine and settled at the base of her skull. Her nape tingled. “After that, the deed is consummated. There’s no ceremony. No structure. Nothing witnessed by anyone else.”

“Just sex?”

“I know you didn’t have experience, but did that feel like ‘just sex’ to you?”

Kavya shook her head. He continued to stroke the back of her neck, which had suddenly taken on more significance. He seemed to catch himself doing so, but he didn’t stop. He pulled back loose strands to bare her skin completely.

“No, not casual. It was . . . intense. Concentrated? A thousand things distilled into one moment.”

“Which moment?”

His chest had stilled. He wasn’t breathing, awaiting her answer. She didn’t know what he wanted to hear, or whether knowing would change what she said.

Truth or lie. Both held separate dangers.

The truth was all that mattered.

“When you could’ve bit my nape,” she whispered.

A shudder worked up his long body, with its elegant bones and lithe, taut muscles. “It would’ve been . . . uneven. I can’t explain it any more eloquently. For you it would’ve been just another part of the experience. For me . . .”

Kavya pushed onto her elbow and found an angle where the lights from the slatted window shone across his face. Just his mouth. She would’ve liked to see his eyes, but his lips were so expressive. Everything about him was expressive. Were all the Pendray this way? So open? Not so constantly guarded? She envied them, if that was true.

She cupped his cheek, feeling for truth. “It would’ve been the act of joining without the meaning. That significance must be woven through every fiber of your ancient soul.” She softly kissed his mouth. “You stopped to protect yourself, didn’t you?”

“Yes. A life ritual with nothing behind it. I couldn’t do that. I would’ve thought I had more claim to you than I do.”