And then I was moving, without even telling my body to do it. I snatched my bow and quiver from where they’d been strung all day across my chest, letting them clatter forgotten to the ground as I forged forward into the water.
I did not need to dive or truly swim. The area that was deep enough for Nazreen to tread water, which she did now, watchingme, still left me head and shoulders above the surface. I was close enough to reach for her if I so wanted.
And I so desperately wanted. There seemed to be no way to staunch the wanting. Her eyes were on my face, alight with energy as her arms and legs moved rhythmically in the water. Her hair was saturated, black now where it usually held some slight warmth of deep brown when it was dry. Water beaded and dripped down her cheeks, her nose, caught like small gems in her eyelashes.
“I can’t stay for long,” she said on a choking gasp. For a moment, I thought she meant the fact that she was returning to Gahn Errok’s mountain at the end of her human week. “It’s freezing!”
The lake. She meant the lake.
I barely felt the water. The sight of her, sun-dappled on the shore, peeling away her human clothing, had kindled something that had been only an ember until now. But even embers had the power to burn, and it had been burning a hot, slow hole inside me ever since I first saw her face.
Now, it blazed.Lust,I realized, my head swimming as Nazreen did before me. This was lust. There was little relief in recognizing it, in naming it. Only a boundless, fiery hunger I did not now know how to leash. The temperature of the water did nothing to soothe the savage throbbing of my cock. The throb of my own heart was nearly as violent.
“Nasrin!” Tilly called from the shallows. “Arton and Zaria are just about ready to go back!”
“I have to go,” Nazreen said.
“Let me fly you back on my braxilk,” I said on a low, rough voice. Cursed peaks, it sounded like I was begging her.
Maybe I was.
She glanced beyond me, then shook her head.
“I don’t want to leave my friends.”
“You are loyal.” It was a trait I admired deeply. That loyalty seemed to run right through her, as bright and clear as a mountain stream. What would a man give, to have that loyalty include him?
“Yeah. Well. I love them.”
“All of them?” I demanded, wondering if she included the Sea Sand males on the shore in that statement. But she was already swimming away from me, moving with clean, strong strokes. I came so very close to closing my claws around one of her kicking ankles and dragging her back to me that it left me breathless. Speechless.
I stood there alone in the water as she reached the shallows and walked out. Her loincloth was so wet it made my throat tighten with the need to take my cock in my hand and stroke it. When she turned my way, smiling as she retrieved her clothing and chatted with Tilly and Fiona, I swallowed a growl at the shockingly erotic sight of her small breasts, the tips hard and visible through her clinging tunic. She made a comment – a joke, I was fairly certain – about taking off her wet loincloth before putting her dry leg coverings back on. Oxriel looked like he might simply keel over and die at the thought.
I was scarcely better off.
She did not do it, and after her leg coverings were on for a moment, a dampness began to spread from the soaked loincloth beneath. I stared at the dark triangle, the wet stain between her legs, and, surrounded by water, found myself more thirsty than I’d ever been in my entire life.
Soon, they were all ready to depart. Tilly said something. It sounded like, “Is he coming?”
Nazreen craned her neck to look back at me, the question echoing in her eyes.
I remained in the water, unwilling to reveal the evidence of my pulsing arousal. An oddly craven instinct. I’d never considered myself a coward before.
Nazreen made me into many things. I was entirely unfamiliar to myself.
“No,” Nazreen finally said.
And then she left.
12
NASRIN
Icouldn’t stop thinking about Gahn Thaleo. About how he’d looked, so close to me in that cold lake. Standing firm in the deep place where I’d had to tread water.
When I’d stripped out of my clothes on the shore, I really had wanted to swim.
But I’d also wanted to see if I could shock him. To crack that scarred mask of his, and see what lay beneath. And when he’d followed me, his eyes so mercilessly trained on me, my body had buzzed with a near-giddy sort of excitement. When he’d stood before me, so still and so stable in that deep stretch of water, I’d been seized by the nonsensical urge to climb him like a fucking tree. I tried to blame it on my limbs getting tired in the cold water, but that wasn’t true. No, I’d wanted to grasp his rock-like shoulders. I’d wanted to wrap my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist. I’d wanted to touch him. Him! Gahn Thaleo! The cold bastard who offended me – I’d said so myself. And much worse than that, the man who’d nearly killed one of my best friend’s mates right in front of her after we’d worked so hard to hammer out the alliance between them. What the hell was wrong with me?
