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Ela’s communicator lit up. Groping in the dark, she grasped it from the bedside cabinet and silenced its squawk. She read the message and sat up.

“They’re on their way back. I must make preparations.”

“They won’t be back for hours yet. Come here.”

A serpetrus snaked round her waist and she made a half-hearted attempt to bat it away.

“Vahn says he’s sent you some instructions on an urgent matter that needs handling with delicacy. Have you received it?”

“I’ve turned my communicator off. There’s something else I need to handle first.”

Rhyn smiled up at her sleepily. “Come here.”

“I can’t. We have work to do.”

“And we’ll get to it shortly. Now lie down and spread your legs, soldier. That’s an order.”

“Lord Davorrian, my first duty is to the Emperor.”

Rhyn pulled her down next to him.

“May the gods damn me if I get in the way of your duty. But we have plenty of time. Permission to ravish you, general?”

Ela cursed the sudden heat that flooded through her loins. She wondered when her craving for him would lessen. It had been more than a week now and she still wanted him with a passion that bordered on frenzy.

“I can spare a few minutes,”

she said reluctantly. “If you’re quick.”

Her grey hair, free of its usual braid, fanned over her shoulders and Rhyn thought again how fiercely beautiful she was.

“When will you accept that with you, I will never be quick?”

He trailed his lips along her throat, inhaling her scent. “With you, I will always take my time. You’re my kalehsha. My fated mate. Or do you doubt the evidence of your own heart?”

She didn’t. She’d known it the moment he’d had the temerity to kiss her, on that first date, after he’d beaten her at bakra.

That pulse-pounding, heart-clenching, breath-stealing kiss.

Kalehsh had come as no particular surprise to Rhyn. He’d been smitten for months and he already suspected that if he was to find kalehsh, it would be with her.

But for Ela, it had been overwhelming. The complexity of her reaction to his kiss, the physical response, the whiplash of emotion that ricocheted through the essence of her being - it was like being shot with a pulse rifle at point blank range.

She had clung to him like an adolescent hatchling until he’d taken her to bed and shown her what it was to be completely possessed.

They’d been inseparable ever since. And though she hated to admit it, she knew she was deeply, undeniably, irrevocably in love with Rhyn.

When he promised at the Summer Palace that he’d win her over, she’d vowed to prove him wrong. Instead he’d taken her heart with the same flirtatious ease with which he did everything else.

It was drek’aa annoying.

She didn’t know why fate had brought them together. As personalities, they were poles apart. But she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if anyone tried to take him from her, she’d disembowel them in the blink of an eye.

Galling as it was, she – the toughest soldier in the Vraxian Empire – was helpless to resist his charms.

It didn’t help that he was spectacularly good in bed. He could make her reach jarna like no-one else. And she was insatiable for him. She took his serpetrus and guided it between her legs.

“You’ve got half an hour,”

she told him, arching as his appendage squirmed inside her and stroked her vieris. “And then I have to go whether you’ve finished or not.”

He saluted.

“Yes, ma’am.”

He made her come twice for good measure.