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“Mine,” I said it aloud, savoring the sound of it. His beast growled in approval.

With his body bare before me, I leaned down and touched the tip of my tongue to the northernmost tip of his tattoo. He’d told me only the bare facts when I’d asked—how old he’d been when he received the Talisman, whether it had hurt. I knew the rest. That the terrestrials considered it an important rite of passage, to receive the Talisman—a tattoo that reflected whatever power the individual bore.

I didn’t know what it meant to him, precisely. But from the story he’d told me in the water gardens, and the way his chest had trembled when I first saw that personal part of him… I could hazard some guesses.

Tonight, I wanted all of him.

So I dragged my tongue down the branch to the first split, then back up again. Then down, down, nearly to the trunk just above his belly button. I curled my tongue around the knot etched into the wood, then back up over his granite-hewn pectoral muscles to where the outermost branches reached.

I teased him again and again, each time I traveled down the trunk of the tree towards where the roots splayed across his navel, my tongue ventured a bit lower. But then always upward again. Until the time I got so low, his cock rubbed against my throat. I couldn’t resist darting out my tongue to lick the top as if it were the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted.

“Fuccckkkkk,” ripped from Arran’s throat.

His hand in my hair became a demand, and then he was dragging me back up his body.

He didn’t wait, didn’t give me a chance to tease. One hand in my hair, tight enough to send sharp pinpricks of pain through my scalp. The other on my hip, centering me. Then he slammed me down and buried his cock inside of me.

It was fucking glorious, the massive length of him pounding up into me. I rode his cock like I’d ridden his face, grinding my clit into the dark curled hairs above the base until I was burning and climaxing and a flood of my pleasure covered us and the bed around us.

My legs were shaking so hard, I could barely keep myself upright.

Arran noticed immediately that I was flagging, that the force of my orgasm had me trembling. In a breath, I was beneath him again. His strokes stretched out—longer, harder.

“Arran, Arran, Arran,” I chanted his name like a prayer.

“Veyka, I can’t…”

A hysterical laugh bubbled up in my chest. I managed to rally enough strength to grab his shoulders and drag him down to me, catching his mouth in a scorching kiss.

“Yes, you can,” I murmured, sure I was grinning wickedly as I pressed our foreheads together. “Come, Arran.”

He did, and the heated force of him spilling himself inside of me, thrust after thrust giving me all that he had, pushed me there one last time as well. Until finally, my soul left my body and I was nothing more than thought and pleasure and bliss.

60

ARRAN

She came apart in waves, letting go of another piece of herself. For each new layer of her soul, I gave her something of me in return. So that by the time we were done, our bodies aching from release after release, I felt like a new being entirely. And curved against my side, drifting to sleep, Veyka shined like a beacon of holy light.

It was a trick of the light, I was sure. But her hair, always the color of moonlight, seemed to actually shine. Her skin, so pale and delicate, stretched over a warrior’s body, was softer than velvet. I’d felt the weight of her in my arms, on my face, as I licked and fucked her to oblivion. But she’d turned strangely weightless, as if she might drift away on the breeze that snaked through from the veranda.

I pulled her closer, so her soft stomach molded around my muscular hip and her breasts pillowed out against my chest. I held her tight and told myself that I would never allow anyone to take her from me. Ever.

That thread I’d felt in the center of my chest, pulling me toward her again and again, had transformed into something new. Stronger. Tenuous, still, but more. More than I’d ever imagined was possible.

61

VEYKA

Warmth suffused every limb, right down to the tips of my toes and the rounds of my fingertips.

How can my toes be relaxed?

Hours upon hours of sexual satisfaction, climax after climax, followed by a dreamless sleep—that was how. When I woke, Arran was gone. But I was glad of it. We’d shared so much… almost too much.

Enough that we both needed to come up for air.

I tried reading the book Parys had given me. I was already more than halfway through the fictional epic—at least I hoped it was fiction, given how gruesome it was—set in the terrestrial kingdom before the Great War. While I’d been enjoying it earlier, I couldn’t read more than a page before my mind drifted off. Setting the book aside for later, I called for a bath instead.