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He came willingly, sliding into the water beside her without a sound, and the pool was deep enough that it reached his waist when he stood. She waded towards him, then gently pushed him back until he was sitting on the carved stone ledge that ran around the pool, the water lapping at his waist.

“Last night was your turn,” she told him. “This is mine.”

He looked up at her with dark, wary eyes. “Frrankie…”

“My turn,” she said firmly. “Hold still.”

His voice came out as a growl. “I do not know how.”

She laughed and kissed him, and then she started to explore. She had wanted to touch him for so long. Since the first moment she had seen him crouched on the rock beside the channel, if she were honest with herself. Now she let herself do it. She ran her hands over his shoulders and down his arms, and felt the fine scales give way to smoother skin at the inside of his elbows. She traced the line of scales along his jaw with her fingertips, and then with her lips, and felt him shiver. She found the healed place on his shoulder, where the gash had been, and pressed a kiss to it.

She reached behind him and ran her fingers down the two raised ridges on either side of his spine. He jerked as if she had shocked him, and a sharp, startled sound broke out of his throat.

“Sensitive?” she asked, delighted.

“Yes,” he said through his teeth.

She did it again, slowly, and watched his eyes roll closed. She kept going, learning him the way he had learned her, by listening. She found out that he liked her nails scraped lightly down his chest. The base of his tail, where it met his spine, made him groan when she stroked it. She found out that he couldn’t hold still at all, no matter how much she teased him about it. His hands kept reaching for her and then gripping the stone ledge instead, so hard she heard the rock crack.

And then she slid her hand down beneath the water, over the hard ridges of his stomach and lower. The scales were still smooth there, but a thick ridge beneath them bulged against her hand. Then she found the seam in the scales. She ran her finger along it and the sheath parted. He groaned and his cock slid out into her hand, thick and hot and hard. It was ridged along its length in a series of smooth raised bands and it flared wider at the base.

Her breath caught in her throat. Instead of being nervous, she was fascinated, and more turned on than she had been in her life.

“Oh, look at you,” she breathed.

He made a sound that was half a laugh and half a groan, and his head fell back against the edge of the pool. She stroked him slowly, exploring every ridge, watching his face. His jaw was clenched tightly and his chest was heaving. The glow of the lichen shone on the wet scales of his shoulders, and his hips lifted helplessly into her hand. She wanted more.

“Sit up on the edge,” she whispered.

He opened his eyes and looked at her, and she saw him understand. He pushed himself up onto the stone rim of the pool, with his legs still in the water and his tail curled on the rock behind him. She moved between his knees and bent her head and took as much of him as she could into her mouth.

He made a sound she had never heard from him before, a deep, raw cry that echoed around the domed chamber. He buried his hand in her hair, holding on as if she were all that kept him from falling.

She took her time, tasting him, warm and clean and faintly spicy, the same green scent she had noticed on his skin that first day. She explored the ridges with her tongue and felt him shudder at every one. She listened, the way he had listened to her, as he gasped and said her name in that rough, broken growl.

“Frrankie,” he groaned. “Frrankie, I cannot…”

She didn’t stop, because she didn’t want to.

He came with a roar that shook the water in the pool into trembling rings, his hand fisted in her hair and his whole body shuddering. She held him through it the way he had held her, until the shudders eased and his breathing slowed and his hand went slack against her head.

Then she climbed out of the water and slid into his lap, and wound her arms around his neck, and grinned at him.

He looked utterly stunned. His eyes were dazed and dark, and his scales were still flushed a deep, burning blue from his temples to his chest. He looked at her as if she had just rearranged the entire world around him.

“You told me you didn’t know how to hold still,” she said. “You were right.”

A low, helpless laugh rumbled out of him. He pulled her against his chest and buried his face in her wet hair, and held her so tightly she could barely breathe. She didn’t mind in the least.

Above them, the ancient rivers of Mars glowed softly on the domed ceiling. She lay in the arms of one of the race who had carved them, beside a pool of warm water at the bottom of the world. She had never been anywhere so completely right.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Korrak felt it in the water first. He was alone in the channels below the gardens, clearing the silt that the surge had left behind. It was the quiet time before the moss brightened, when Frankie was still curled asleep in the hollow he had made for her. He liked to work then so that he could be back beside her when she woke. He had been doing it every morning since the old channel flooded. There was far more silt than there used to be. The river had changed since that day, and he didn’t understand how, but he could feel it in every current.

He was standing waist-deep in the flow with his hands in the stream bed when the water trembled against his palms. It was very faint. He almost didn’t notice it. But it came again, and then again, a steady shiver that ran through the water and the stone beneath it in a slow, even rhythm. It was nothing like the rumble of the surge. It wasn’t the grinding of settling rock or the deep, slow pulse of the river itself. It was too regular for that, and too sharp. It came and went and came again, exactly the same every time, like something striking the stone over and over and never growing tired.

He pressed his hands to the wall of the channel, and then his cheek. Then he waded out of the water and lay down on the stone and put his ear against it. The rhythm was clearer there, and he could feel it traveling through the rock from somewhere far above him and far to the north, back towards the falls. Back towards the place where she had fallen.