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My core dampens, permeated by heat and additional moisture. The fantasy unravels, so that I picture the satyr’s face, had he been awake. That contagious grin. That predatory gaze. I imagine what his features look like while clenched with lust, his head thrown back, his mouth split wide and hollering. I picture him gripping himself, stroking himself.

I picture him thinking about me.

Embarrassment and guilt transcend into the very opposite. My touch becomes greedy, yearning. My fingers move of their own volition, plying into the heated channel of my body. They find a rhythm, probing the drenched cleft and pushing disjointed moans from my lips.

With every shove of my fingers, fluttery, rigorous sensations accumulate. I withdraw, my digits slick, and etch the pulsating kernel at the nexus of my body. At the slightest brush, the crest sparks, the stimulation erotic, overwhelming. My limbs fall wider apart, my heels grinding into the blanket.

I tease myself, circling my wrist on that spot, the result so intense my thoughts levitate. By the time my hand burrows back into the passage, I’m splayed and melting freely. I touch, and touch, and touch.

I see him, hear him. His hands become my hands, delving into the private space and extinguishing all sense of right and wrong. The tempo turns me into a wet mess, my hand pitching, striking a place that causes my eyes to roll back.

It builds, chases, and catches. I go still, my back snapping off the ground and my walls combusting, bursting. The orgasm hits. A blinding, hot flood releases from that intimate slot and courses from my head to my toes.

His name teeters there, on the tip of my tongue. A gritty, uncivilized noise threatens to spring from my throat. Yet somehow, I have the presence of mind to climax silently.

And instead of draining me, the onslaught feels powerful. A new type of strength.

I recall every time he’s challenged me, all thosehave-you-everscompiling. Whether or not he’d known it, the satyr had been planting his words like seeds. To have an impact, he hadn’t needed to lay a finger on me.

All he’d needed to do was open his mouth.

19

I can’t lie. I had enjoyed what I’d done to myself, hadn’t imagined it could be like that. However, I try not to dwell on what had inspired it—whose words had probed me to the core.

Concentration both rescues and torments my mind. I study through the following night and into the next morning, after the centaurs have retired. I should prioritize my rest, but the answer to this game might be in the scribe’s book, sequestered within the pages.

All of us win—or none of us win.

Perspiration beads behind my earlobes. I read the same line a dozen times before thrusting the tome shut.

My forehead plops onto the cover. I instruct myself to breathe, breathe, breathe.

Hooves clomp into the copse, slenderer than an equine’s. My head shoots up. Sylvan trots into the camp, the willow vines swaying around her, shamrocks encrusting her crown.

Perhaps she’d been expecting to find Puck?

She has shifted to her normal size. Cautious, I rise and tiptoe across the grass. When Sylvan remains passive, I reach out, thinking of the doe back home and every animal I’ve rescued. I let those memories overwhelm my being, hoping Sylvan will sense it.

The verdant shamrocks flare with color. Flecks of teal swim in those mineral black eyes.

Finally, I make contact, stroking her muzzle. And finally, she inches her head closer.

My eyes sting. An awed laugh bubbles from my lips.

The deer bumps my hand. She turns and lowers her rump. My chuckles amplify, proud, honored, because I know what she’s offering.

I swing my leg over Sylvan and land astride her back. Without preamble, she takes off, springing through the willow trees. And now my laughter is a full-blown horn blasting from my throat.

My ponytail flies loose, my hair a flag whisking behind me. A button pops open in my blouse, the collars flapping. We race around trees and pass the bridge, surging into a wild chase across this land, from one end of The Heart of Willows to the other.

As the doe returns me to my camp, she eases to a halt. I pat her cheek and say, “Thank you.”

“Never thank a Fae,” a male advises.

The sun lacquers the area in tangerine and powdery blue. Puck stands at the hub of it, idling outside my yurt.

My face implodes with heat, wrought with images of him sleeping naked and how my fingers had reacted afterward. Moreover, I’m straddling his friend, my legs spread, my hair a riot of tangles, and my blouse undone below my collarbones. I’m flushed, panting from the gallop.