Page 51

“You came back,” he said hoarsely.

“I told you I would.”

He took her face in his hands. He touched her cheeks and her eyes and her mouth, very carefully, the way he had touched the stone she left him. His hands were shaking badly. She was warm and solid, and she was leaning into his touch with her eyes closed, and her tears were running over his fingers.

“Frrankie,” he whispered.

She opened her eyes slowly. Then she dropped the lamp on the moss, grabbed his face, and dragged his mouth down to hers.

It wasn’t gentle, because he couldn’t be gentle. He had been alone in the dark for too long, and he had wanted her for too long. When her mouth met his, it all broke loose at once. He kissed her like a starving male. He kissed her with his hand in her hair and his arm hard around her waist, lifting her off her feet. She kissed him back just as fiercely, just as desperately, her fingers digging into his shoulders and her legs wrapping around his hips.

He didn’t know how they reached the wall. Suddenly her back was against the smooth, wet stone where the river ran out of the gardens, in the place he loved most. The current was swirling around his legs, and she was frantically tearing at the fastening of her covering.

“Hurry,” she gasped against his mouth. “Korrak, please, hurry.”

He tried to help her, but he was clumsy with urgency, and the fastening stuck. He growled at it until she laughed breathlessly and pulled it open herself. He pushed the rough cloth down over her shoulders and her hips and away. She kicked it off into the shallows along with her boots, until there was nothing between them. He pressed her back against the wall and felt her bare skin against his from her breasts to her thighs.

His cock slid free, hard and aching, and she reached down and wrapped her hand around him and made a sound of pure need.

“Now,” she whispered. “Please. I need you now.”

He lifted her, and she wrapped her legs around him and held on. He braced one hand against the stone beside her head and looked into her eyes, and then he pushed inside her.

She cried out. Her head fell back against the wall and her nails dug into his shoulders, and he felt her close around him, hot and tight and trembling. He sank into her slowly, every ridge of him, until there was nothing left of him to give her. He held there, shaking, his forehead against hers, their breath tangling.

“You’re here,” he said roughly. “You’re really here.”

“I’m here.” She kissed him, hard. “I’m here. Move, Korrak. Please.”

He moved, and he took her hard and deep against the wall, with the river rushing around them and her cries echoing off the stone. He couldn’t hold back, and he didn’t try. Every stroke held all the nights he had lain alone behind the falls, and all the songs that no one had answered. It held the rock coming down and the dust settling and the certainty that she was gone. And every stroke was the fact that she was here, now, holding onto him as if she would never let go.

She met every thrust eagerly. She clung to him and moaned his name and begged him for more, and he gave her more, until she was sobbing with it. The low rumble poured out of his chest in an unbroken growl, and the water churned white around his legs.

He felt her tighten and tremble on the edge. He drove into her deeper and harder, and she came in his arms with a cry that rang through the gardens. Her body clenched around him in long, shuddering pulses. He held her through it, shaking with the effort of holding back, and watched her face as she shattered.

Then she opened her eyes and looked at him, dazed and fierce and glowing, and she pulled his mouth down to hers again.

He let go completely, and the pleasure took him so violently that his vision went white. He buried his face in the curve of her neck and roared against her skin. The word came from the deepest part of him, the same word as before, but truer now than it had ever been.

“Mine,” he groaned. “Mine, mine, mine.”

Her arms tightened around his neck, and she pressed her lips to his ear.

“Always,” she whispered.

Afterwards, he carried her into the warm pool beneath the crack where she had come in. They lay together in the shallows while the water ran over them and the moss glowed overhead.

He couldn’t stop touching her. He stroked her hair and her back and the curve of her hip. He ran his fingers over her face again and again, as if he was learning it for the first time. She didn’t mind in the least. She lay across his chest with her cheek against his heart and her fingers tracing slow, idle patterns on his scales. Every so often she laughed softly to herself for no reason at all.

The wildness inside him was gone.

He felt for it carefully, the way he would feel for a loose stone in a channel wall, but it wasn’t there. There was no prowling restlessness under his skin, no snarl waiting at the back of his throat. There was only warmth, and her weight on his chest, and the slow, steady beat of her heart against his.

He understood, then, what his people had meant. He had sung alone for so long, and it had never touched him. The danger had come when he heard an answer and then lost it. And now she had answered him again.

She lifted her head from his chest and looked at him steadily. Her fingers had stopped moving on his scales.

“You didn’t know me,” she said quietly. “When I first saw you. You looked at me as if I was something to be driven off.”