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Unbidden, he glanced toward Divina, catching her looking at him again.
Their gazes clashed and held, and all of Andros’ muscles tightened. His heartbeat accelerated, and his pulse thrummed like hummingbird wings beneath his too-tight skin.
Her eyes were round and unblinking, with an edge of reluctance and indecision in them. As if she wanted to look away but couldn’t.
Absently, she licked her lips.
Andros’ nostrils flared as his body suddenly became an inferno, hotter than the flames dancing before his eyes.
“Eh…” Ere coughed to regain his attention.
Right.
He’d asked a question. What was it again?
Andros breathed deeply in and out to recenter himself and calm these strange physical urges. It reminded him of how the heavy scent of the mare in heat had made him feel.
Except this was exponentially worse.
He was glad that he was kneeling on the ground, his male parts hidden from view.
“The beginning?” Ere prompted.
“Aye,” Andros replied, taking a deep breath to search his memories and organize his thoughts.
It was strange to use his human voice and speak out loud. The vibrations through his vocal cords seemed odd; his tongue, foreign in his mouth. And yet, it was also as natural as breathing.
He missed being a man. Though he didn’t recall ever taking human form, perhaps only as a babe, he missed it. It was the other half of him, after all.
“Not all centaurs hail from the same origins,” he began. “Apollo and my mother had two other children hundreds of years before me. Their names were Centaurus and Lapithes. They were twins.”
“Your brothers, then,” Ere said.
Andros nodded.
“I have never met them, but I remember the stories mother told me as a babe. They were the ancestors of the centaurs in the Pelion Mountains and the Lapiths people of Thessaly.”
“Umm… so… lots of inbreeding?” Ere injected.
Andros tilted his head in consideration.
“We are all children and creations of the gods, are we not?”
“Good point. Continue.”
“Though the brothers were twins, Centaurus was said to favor the wild, animal side, while Lapithes was more human, calm and rational. Centaurus mated with as many Magnesian mares in the mountains and by the sea as he did with human females.”
Divina suddenly cleared her throat, as if she were choking a little.
He looked over to see that she was hastily guzzling some water from a wineskin. Why did she seem so uncomfortable? She’d been ill at ease ever since they emerged from the lake.
She draped the blanket that she rode him on across her shoulders, over her drying tunic. It gaped a little in the middle, showing the tops of her breasts. The fabric clung to her skin, still damp from the lake.
Andros found that he was helpless to look away from those soft, inviting curves and the intriguing valley between them. He never noticed her body before this.
Not in the way that he noticed her now.
“Eh…” Ere’s voice drew Andros’ attention reluctantly back to the man.
