“You’ll tell me what you want?” Her voice was quiet as the softest snowfall, not like the fire raging between them as fiercely as the blizzard they’d escaped.
“I’m lying on a bed, completely naked. Vulnerable. You’re bare, straddling my hips, both of us bathed in light. My cock stands away from my body, aching for you. I’m cupping your breasts, exploring your sensitive nipples. You beg for more. You sound so desperate—until you demand more. My hands tighter. My touch rougher. You say you want me thrusting deep, but you never sink down. You never give me the release you promised time and again. No, you only want me violent and mindless, and you tease the fuck out of me until I’m the desperate one.”
He swallowed tightly, breathing in ragged gulps. That particular dream left him furious and feeling violated all over again. He’d tried to remain distanced from the recitation, but he couldn’t help drawing new passion from Kavya’s reactions. She was panting against his temple, then against his neck when he straightened. He forced her chin up. Her eyes were wide, dilated, filled with delicious cravings.
“Now give him what you think of yourself.” His voice was gruff, still affected by his agitated bitterness.
“I’m no enticement,” she said quietly.
They’d only washed that morning, but they were both haggard from the most recent leg of their journey. Tallis would’ve given a good ten years of his life to kiss clean, pure skin and for her to kiss his scrubbed skin in return. Instead he closed his eyes and enjoyed the primitive scent of woman, mud, snow, even blood and the tang of fear. Beneath the brutal notes of that fragrance was Kavya, and she was aroused. Pheromones might as well have been 80-proof liquor.
She had the power to ease the sting of having opened himself so completely, so foolishly to a manipulative figment.
“Forget reality.” He was so near to her cheek that the damp warmth of his words petted back against his lips. “Show him how you’d like to appear for me.”
By the downturned lashes framing her eyes, he didn’t need to be a telepath to read Kavya’s embarrassment. “I know the facts. I’ve seen details in others’ minds—too many, really—out of my own curiosity. But for myself? I wouldn’t know where to begin.” She shuddered and gripped his waist, as if the wind threatened to knock her down. “I’ve never had a lover.”
Tallis wouldn’t have heard her soft words had he been any farther from her neck, her jaw, her mouth. As it was, that lone sentenced rocketed through his body and pooled where his erection was losing patience.
“A virgin?” he breathed.
“Yes.”
Old images of having been left continuously unfulfilled by a skillful, seductive dreamtime version of the Sun finally cleaved truth from fiction. Whatever entity had invaded his dreams, whatever had made him wild with the need to take, whatever had left him howling his frustration come morning—it hadn’t been Kavya. She couldn’t meet his eyes, let alone force erotic fantasies into his unconscious mind.
Outrage surged back to the fore. He’d been played the fool so often. Kavya wasn’t to blame, but she was all he had. She was his only link to discovering the real culprit.
“Then give it your best shot,” he said tersely, pushing her back against the wall. “Use what I told you, if that’s all you have. We stay here or we don’t. We sleep upstairs or we find a corner by the fireplace. I don’t care. I’m done playing toy to an Indranan woman.”
Kavya jerked her chin to level. Her expression was . . . agonized. “Do you have any idea what it’s like trying to say something so personal out loud? We don’t have to. Ever. Fantasies are whispers and glimpses at the back of a willing mind. Then when I actually speak a secret I’ve kept close for years, you ridicule my honesty? How is that fair?”
She aligned her knuckles in that peculiar way, pushed past him with a backward glance, and went to speak with the man behind the bar.
Tallis was left chastened. Nothing much about his time in India made sense. He couldn’t imagine communicating as she described, but that didn’t make him a complete idiot. She had given him something special—a confidence that didn’t seem to be common knowledge. He’d fallen back on the familiar anger she didn’t deserve, which meant he’d given her no reason to trust him with another secret in the future.
But what a secret. He pushed the heels of his hands against gritty eye sockets, where erotic visions changed. Making love to her would have nothing in common with being tempted and teased by the Sun. Instead he would lie over Kavya, lavishing her tense body with attention until she relaxed. Until she gasped, writhed, opened. For him.
A virgin.
As if she needed to be more intriguing, more compelling. He was an idiot with a mission. Suddenly that mission wasn’t nearly as important as making sure no one but Tallis ever touched Kavya of Indranan.
—
While speaking with the innkeeper, Kavya felt the moment when he gave in to her request. It was the same moment her thoughts flashed back to Tallis’s description, as hot as a red-tipped branding iron. Almost against her will, she gave the innkeeper the story she would never forget—the erotic story Tallis had tersely whispered against her throat. His apparent anger hadn’t lessened Kavya’s arousal. Instead she was intrigued by the potential for a pleasurable sort of brutality. He had her turned inside out with wanting and curiosity.
She gave that curiosity to the heavyset man with stiff black hair that stood on end. Knowing she shared something so intensely personal and new as a means of barter made her ill. Her stomach crushed into a pebble filled with bile and acid.
“Your anklets,” he said simply, although his eyes were voracious and his mind begging for more. He crossed from behind the bar, pushing into her space. “I’ll take them.”
Tallis placed a hand on her shoulder. She jumped, then turned toward the thick shelter of his chest. “Your anklets aren’t much to part with. One night’s boarding and a meal for us each?”
The innkeeper’s greedy gaze flipped between them both. Maybe erotic thoughts and a bauble of jewelry was the right mix, because the innkeeper nodded. His heavy jowls nodded after him. He was human, and ready to make concessions she wouldn’t have thought possible.
Soon she and Tallis carried plates of rice and palak paneer up to a room with a single bed and a washbasin. Stark, cold, with one window, it was the closest thing to sleeping outdoors in the flash blizzard. But the food was warm and smelled delicious, and they were safe for the night.
As if the conversation about sex and Kavya’s virginity hadn’t taken place, Tallis shed his weapons and his pack. He kept the filthy leather coat on. Kavya shivered all the more for remembering how that coat had felt when wrapped around their bodies. He’d held her and carried her and made her feel small, sheltered, cared for.
The smallness didn’t offend her, despite that irrationality. Had she needed to portray Tallis by telepathy, she would’ve used her gift to transform him into a living god. One touch handsome man. One touch skilled warrior. One touch raging beast with a pulse-pounding undercurrent of violence.
A protector.
But Tallis only sat cross-legged on the bare wooden floor and started eating.
“Not going to wash up?” she asked.
He cocked an eyebrow while inhaling another bite. His throat tightened over a swallow. So many new responses to how he behaved, and she didn’t understand any of them—not truly, not physically, not in person. The perceptions she’d collected through the years were like a child’s primer. The basics. Tallis could teach her so much more.
“Your food will get cold,” he said. “Then when you’re ready, there’s a change of clothes for you in my pack.”