He chuckled, hugged her exuberantly. “What a coincidence, since it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”

She sighed, knowing he meant it, nuzzled back into his embrace, soaking up his feel, assimilating it into her being along with his scent, mingled with those of the pristine nature.

Then she teased, “Do you think it’s possible I’ll get to ride my own horse one day?”

“I have issues with seeing you in danger.”

“What danger? Horses here, like the rest of the inhabitants, human or otherwise, are wonderfully understanding of inept foreigners.”

“Then I have issues about keeping you in my arms for as long as possible….” He stopped, groaned, amended. “Having you in my arms at every opportunity.”

She knew he must be kicking himself for phrasing it that way, for even hinting that their time together would come to an end.

She swerved from the subject, turned lips tingling with the numbness of fear into his neck. “A noble cause.”

She felt a ragged breath empty his lungs as he gave her a tighter squeeze, as if to thank her for circumventing the emotional landmine. “None higher. I got addicted to holding you like this, ever since I rode back to the oasis with you.”

“Buttuli.” She tilted her head back to smile up into his eyes and caught the bleakness there.

Tenderness replaced it, making her wonder if she’d even seen it. But she had. And she wouldn’t bring it up.

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What was the point of worrying about the future but to taint the purity of happiness they shared in the present?

She rubbed the hair he’d told her he adored, called spun gold milled from sunshine, against his bare chest. Now that he no longer wore a bandage but a local dressing over his fast-healing wound, she’d been wallowing in the sensory nirvana of touching his sculptured perfection at every opportunity. Which was almost always.

“Harres…”

“Yes, Talia, say my name like that, like you can’t draw another breath if you don’t have me inside you. As I will be, here and now.”

The blow of arousal at the thought of him carrying out his intention, here, was paralyzing. And not just because it was a fantasy she’d thought would forever go unfulfilled. They were out in the open, with the oasis people in the distance.

She thought he was only stimulating her, that he’d wait until they were by the ain, where they’d shared more than one explosive if hurried mating, but then he lifted her, dragged her voluminous dress from beneath her, let it flow over his lap.

Then, as one hand held the bridle, the other slid around to dip below the folds of the neckline, seeking her breasts. Fire forked to her core as his fingers manipulated her nipples. It burst into flames when he sank his teeth in her nape, like a lion securing his mate.

She swooned back, her already open thighs falling apart wider, moisture dampening her panties.

“Do you know what scenting your arousal does to me?” He growled in her ear as his hand slid inside her panties, his palm gently squeezing her for a moment, winding the rhythm of the throbbing there into a frantic pounding. “I want to taste you again, but I’ll have to settle for feeling your heat and your satiny flesh as it softens and melts for me. Show me how much you crave my touch, ya talyeti.”

Beyond caring that they might be seen, she bucked back against him, widening her thighs, giving him full access. “I’m out of my mind craving anything you do to me, all the time. Touch me, feel for yourself, do everything to me.”

With a groan of male possession, he dipped a finger along the molten lips of her sex, sliding its thickness and power on a mind-numbing path to and fro, each pass tightening the coil of agonizing pleasure inside her. She writhed, whimpered, turned her face up to his. He thrust his tongue inside her mouth as he replaced his finger with his thumb and plunged his middle finger inside her. The coil snapped, and she unraveled around him, in his arms on bucking keens. He stroked her inner trigger, stoked it until the climax drained her of the frenzy he’d built inside her.

“Having you lost to pleasure is the most magnificent thing I’ve ever experienced,” he rumbled against her mouth as his fingers still stroked her, avoiding her sensitive bud, until he soothed her, then he changed direction and rhythm, had her climbing to mindlessness again.

Once she was begging, she felt him release himself, his hard length slamming against her buttocks. He whispered in her ear, “Rise up with your thigh muscles like I taught you in the trot.”

He was really going to take her here. Like this. The idea almost drove her over another edge.

She rose up and he positioned himself at her opening.

He was saying, “Settle down on me,” when her muscles jellified. She crashed down on him.

He forged through her inner folds like a hot lance. She thought she’d gotten used to his length and girth, but it seemed that every time felt like the first time, felt as if he filled her more.

Now the pressure reached an edge of pain, of domination that redefined all her concepts of physical intimacy and pleasure. She was addicted to the impossible fullness, the feeling of total occupation, of trapping such a vital part of him so inescapably inside her and drawing both their pleasure from depths she—and he insisted he, too—hadn’t known existed.

By the fourth or fifth buck and fall of the trot she was a mass of tremors, fully at his power, breached to her core, invaded, occupied, pleasured, taken, maddened.

“Ride me…ride me…” was all she could say anymore, all that was left in her mind. She was enervated with an overload of sensation, the pressure becoming beyond her endurance. She needed him to thrust her to release. Before anyone passed.

He only lay back into the trot, let its rhythm layer even more sensation. All the time, he said things that drove her deeper into bondage. “Filling you this way, invading you, being captured by you is all I can think of, I want to be home, inside you, pleasuring you, always….”

And she found another word. “Please.”

She felt him jerk inside her, grow bigger. She keened, writhed, and he growled, nudged Reeh, pounded into her with all the fury of the gallop. Just when she thought her heart would stop and she would dissolve around him and be no more, his fingers massaged her bud in escalating circles, his teeth sinking into her neck again, his growls a carnal current knotting her heart and core. And she detonated.

A scream welled from her depths, too frenzied to form. The next one would have but he caught it in his palm, gave her his flesh to vent her agonized pleasure on.




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