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She doesn’t know your name,his brain argued, stopping his thoughts.

She disappeared through the tent’s entrance in only her tunic.

“Where are you going?” He got up, grabbing his trousers and shoving his legs inside. “It’s raining!” He scrambled after her, pulling the pants over his hips as he hopped from the tent.

Tarley turned to look at him, her loose hair getting wet along with the gauzy linen of her tunic, which then stuck to her skin, making it even more see through. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath, so he could see her the dusky outline of her nipples and the shadow of hair between her legs.

Lachlan’s breath caught. She was one of their stories about these woods come to life. A wood nymph there to bewitch him. Mission accomplished. When his breath seeped out of his chest, everything he’d ever decided about what it meant to feel for someone else escaped. It was the vision of this woman standing in the rain refilling him with what was honest. She was the destination, the treaty, the very thing he wanted to claim for himself.

Only she didn’t want him.

Her arms came out to her sides, and she tilted her face up toward the sky. The rain fell with a gentle rhythm that wasn’t oppressive but rather fulfilled a need of sorts.

“What are you doing?” he asked, needing to clear his throat to say it.

“I’m going to the river.”

“In this? It’s raining.”

She turned her head and regarded him with a rare upturn of her lips. “I’m already wet.”

“But it won’t be warm. There isn’t a fire.”

Instead of answering him, she gave him one last look and disappeared into the brambles toward the river.

Lachlan wasn’t sure what had just happened. He spun to the tent, then spun back to where Tarley had disappeared. Rationalizing he was worried about her safety, he rushed after her.

“Tarley?” he called, following the trail from the camp, calling after her, his clothes soaked through. When he came to the clearing between the forest and the river, he stopped short. She stood in the river, submerged to the waist, naked, her tunic discarded on the shore.

It was at that moment Lachlan knew that no matter what she said, what they’d shared that morning hadn’t been a mistake, and there was no way in the underworld that it wasn’t going to happen again.

15

“Tarley,” Ollie’s voice called from behind her, collapsing her resolve to get away from him. The experience with him in the tent had been an earthquake, fracturing the very foundation of all the things she thought about herself, about men, about partnership, about sex.

Her perception was fixed in the beliefs reinforced by her usual experiences that men were selfish creatures who used and abused women. Only that wasn’t what had happened at all. She didn’t feel used or abused. She’d felt worshipped. It upended everything she thought she knew. And somehow amid all the sensation, she’d fixated on it. On how wrong she’d been as Ollie’s mouth and hands made her feel… so much. As she’d slid toward being undone, she’d dug in her proverbial heels, afraid—and hated admitting that even to herself. Afraid of giving that power to Ollie, even if she trusted him to keep her safe. But instead of doing what might have been easy, he’d centered her pleasure.

She hadn’t felt used or weak doing what she had with him. In fact, she’d felt powerful somehow despite giving away a piece of herself. Wanted. Necessary. Her preconceptions crumbled, leaving her a shell of awareness and insecurity about what to do with the newness of it. Did it make her weak to continue wanting Ollie?

The easiest thing to do was to run.

She hadn’t expected him to follow.

Now, Ollie stalked from the tree line toward her, his face dark with whatever emotion she was witnessing, though she didn’t know him well enough to discern it. The vision he provided was a punch to her core, pushing sensation out toward the furthest reaches of her fingers and toes. He was shirtless. His brown hair, darker when wet, hung in his eyes, his scruff adding to the wild look. She wanted to run her hands from the slope of his neck to the rounded definition of his shoulders. When he got close enough to the water’s edge, he waded into the river, his trousers open and a trail of dark hair from his navel disappearing underneath.

She thought about him holding his erection earlier. Thought about how much she’d wanted all of him. As he moved toward her, power evident in his stride, tension in his body, she swallowed and backed up, the current tugging at her legs, even more aware of him, of the way his look seemed to stake a claim.

Ollie didn’t slow. “It wasn’t a mistake,” he said, and grabbed her face and pressed his mouth to hers with an animalistic growl. His tongue didn’t meander, it claimed just as his hands grabbed her ass and tugged her roughly against him, her bare skin slick against his.

And she loved it, grabbing onto him so she wouldn’t float away.

He lifted her, and she wrapped her legs around him. “This doesn’t–”

“Hush.”

She listened, unable to resist. There was something altogether commanding about his order, as if the forest would bow to it, would listen, and obey.

He waded back to the shore, carrying her with him. “This isn’t over,” he said against her mouth, his hands gripping her thighs. The rain continued to fall. The roar of the river drowned out any noise she might have had in her head. She listened for it, but it was empty. All of her was filled with the sensations Ollie had awoken. But her mind grasped onto her doubts, and she went to war with it. Allowing herself to be driven by this desire wasn’t safe.