That was the moment I should have told him. There was no reason not to now, except for how much it would hurt him to know I’d held the full truth back. But I wished so much that what he imagined could be the truth. I wished there was someone else who would go and fight and die so that for once I could justlive. If mortal dreams could build the Summerlands, if mortal devotion gave the gods their power, why couldn’t I want so much to be with Taran that the world would reshape itself to permit it?
“Ilovedyou,” I said, wrapping my arms around his neck. “How could I not have?”
He grinned in amazement, then kissed me hard enough that I gasped for air when he broke away.
“Tell me it always should have been me,” he said.
“It always should have been you.” I grabbed the fabric of his shirt and pulled it free, struggling with it until he tossed it aside. I sighed in satisfaction when I got my palms splayed against the hot, bare skin of his chest. “It always should have been like this.”
“You thought about it?” Taran asked, fingers stroking my jaw as I explored the swells and hollows of his body.
“From about ten minutes after I met you. Not that I ever said anything.”
His smile was triumphant. “Even after you were betrothed?”
“Especiallyafter I was betrothed. But I was trying to be the perfect priestess of Wesha, even as we were burning down the temples.”
“What idiots we were,” he said with a laugh. “You must have felt guilty.”
“Very guilty.” So needlessly. Too afraid of disappointing him to ever ask honestly for what I wanted—what he must have wanted too.
He wasn’t afraid of asking now, dipping his head and kissing me more deeply. He caught one of my bare legs between his thighs and pulled me against him, close enough that I could feel his racing heartbeat.
“We wasted so much time,” I said, desire beginning to make me dizzy. “I used to stare at you across the fire at night and imagine—it felt impossible, but I’d imagine you suddenly looking at me and saying that you’d die if you couldn’t touch me that night. And I’d say I felt the same.”
His hands slipped up farther, until his thumbs brushed the undersides of my breasts through the fabric of my nightgown. It was thin enough to carry the warmth of his hands to my skin, which blazed up under his touch, heated even when his hands moved on.
“What did you imagine? Let’s do all of it. Tonight. I would have done anything you asked.”
“Oh, I—” I blushed at the idea I was going to have to say anything out loud. “I imaginedeverything.”
Taran chuckled softly and rubbed his lips along my earlobe. “I doubt the perfect priestess of Wesha imaginedeverything. Though I would be delighted if you did.” His hands trailed back down to my waist, then farther, and this time he slipped his hands under the hem of the dress and repeated the same broad caress with his palms against my skin.
“So, when I was sixteen, I was seconded to the high temple of Genna to assist in the burn ward,” I confessed, daring enough to drop my own hands to his stomach and trace the hard lines of his hipbones where they disappeared into the drawstring waist of his trousers. “And it turned out that there were some very, ah, educational scrolls in their library.”
Taran’s breath was hot on my neck as his hands continued their gentle exploration of my body. “Something inappropriate for acolytes of Wesha, I take it?”
“Veryinappropriate. And mostly…diagrams,” I said, cheeks heating when he caught the tip of one breast between a thumb and a knuckle and rolled it in his fingers. “About twenty of them.”
Taran laughed harder at my confession. “Maybe you’ll teach me something, then. I’m not sure I know twenty different things off the top of my head. Maybe ten or so that I’ve been thinking about.”
When he put his hands on the bottom hem of my dress and prepared to pull it over my head though, I kept my arms down, not quite struggling.
“This part probably looked better in your imagination,” I warned him. I looked better with my clothes on, where tailoring could suggest curves. Maybe I should keep them on.
Taran snorted and slid my fingers from my hem to ease it up, inchby inch. “I have a very accurate imagination.” I closed my eyes when he pulled it off and settled back down next to me with a couple of fingertips trailing between my breasts and across my stomach. “And there is not a single inch of you that I didn’t imagine touching.”
His fingers hooked in the waistband of my underwear and pulled my last scrap of clothing down over my hips. Completely bared to him for the first time, I held my breath as he silently looked me over. I waited for him to touch me, cover my body with his, break the moment. People liked the idea of me best, followed by the sound of me, and I hoped very much that Taran would like the feel of me too, but the sight of me didn’t have much to recommend it beyond my hair.
But Taran’s knuckles traced tenderly along the lines of my breasts, my stomach, the dips of my hips. “If I thought the Allmother cared for me at all, I’d think she made every part of you just to please me,” he said, voice dropping and roughening.
“I want to,” I said, my voice shivering when his hand briefly slid across my thigh, a tingling line of heat that burned even when he lifted it to my waist again. “I’ll try.”
“Darling, you already do,” he whispered. “You’re perfect for me. Your mouth fits against mine like it was made for me.”
He kissed me then, sweet and drugging, and for the first time neither of us was pulling away to deny ourselves. I let my hands explore the sharp, familiar contours of his face and the new, exhilarating ones of his body, the downy hair low on his stomach and the tight muscles of his chest while his hands pressed against the mattress and suspended his body over mine.
My skin was already tingling with the pleasure of touching him when Taran broke the kiss to lower his mouth to my neck.
