She fell back on the bed, his weight on top of her. He took her face in his hands and kissed her deep and hard. She opened her mouth to his as his hands slid down and under her sweatshirt to find her breasts. Laine pulled back for just a moment to open the zipper on his jeans, then saw him look sharply away at something. Instinctively she closed in on herself. Was someone watching? Her heart was pounding even faster than before.
Her eyes followed his, and she knew what had distracted him. The damned ivory horse. Its presence on the windowsill was like a splinter in the back of her perception. Static in her brain. Was it in his too?
Arren jumped off the bed and pounced on it, but the magic thing evaded his grasp. Did she really just see that? With a tiny clatter of its tiny, broken-off legs, it jumped—or did it merely fall?—from the windowsill to the floor. Did it fear him? She felt a pulse of horror as the carving writhed on the carpet, as it had moved in the water back home.
Was it just a hunk of ivory, old, dry and dead for centuries, or was it a living part of the cabyll ushtey world? Unless she was imagining things, it truly was magical. Don’t try clinging to rationality, not now, not here. Whatever she thought she’d seen it do, it could do more.
Pity for it vanished. Arren swore and lunged for it with both hands. She heard him snarl as he grabbed it and stuffed it into the drawer of her bedside table. He slammed it shut and stood panting, staring at the closed drawer.
The splinter was gone from her brain, the static silenced. The tiny blood-red eyes were no longer watching them. Would it try to get out?
Arren sat on the bedside, rubbing his right hand with his left. “Where did you get that thing? I swear it bit me.” He displayed his palm and several minuscule pink marks on it. His short laugh was harsh with tension, his eyes gone such a dark blue that they looked black. In fact, his whole body looked black. Was she passing out? What the hell was happening here?
He loomed over her. Everything went white all around him like an outline, the reverse of what she’d seen before when the moon had etched him in darkness, and Laine suddenly found herself on her back, with the down-filled comforter puffing around her like a hen’s belly and his fingertips between her teeth.
She bit down and felt him jerk his hand away. “Jesus!” he yelped. A weird, hot urge to sink her teeth into his flesh—not hard, just enough—flooded her senses. She’d never been a biter before, but Arren’s smell got into her brain and made her want more.
Laine closed her eyes and sucked in the spice-grass smell of him. It was addling her brain, and she didn’t care. With both hands she pulled him down onto her again, relishing his weight.
He wound her hair around his wrist and bent her up into his chest, as if being on top of her wasn’t enough. He needed her closer. She needed to be closer. He was very strong. She ran the tip of her tongue along his neck where that pulse beat, fast and hard. The blood under the skin, so hot.
He angled his head to let her tongue run higher, and she felt his erection push against her thigh. She couldn’t stop herself from rolling her hips and rubbing against him. Damn, he still had his jeans on. She fumbled for the zipper. He made a rumbling noise deep in his throat, then bounded to his feet and stripped out of his clothes, not taking his eyes off her for a second. She wriggled out of hers as fast as she could, tossing jeans, shirt, and bra to the floor.
He stopped her before she could take off her panties.
“I’ll do that, Miss Summerhill,” he growled. “Lie still.”
She writhed.
“Lie still, I said.”
She surrendered to the tone of command in his voice and arched back, closing her eyes. Immediately her other senses heightened. The pounding of his pulse in tandem with hers, the salt-spicy tang of his sweat in her nostrils. The silken feel of his naked skin. She ran her hands down his back to the rise of his buttocks and felt smoothness become dense, velvety hair, short and thick. She sank her fingers in, gasping with pleasure, and felt it change back to skin. Did he realize what he was doing?
Before she could haul her mind together, his mouth was on her breast, pulling hard on her nipple.
She groaned. A trail of fire lit from breast to belly and down as his hand explored. Instead of slipping her panties off over her hips, he slid his fingers inside the white cotton, where her thigh met the small nest of crisp, short hair. The feel of his hand on her so intimately, each hair transmitting his touch directly to the center of her, was excruciatingly sweet. Almost like pain. Laine couldn’t stifle a sharp moan.
The sound she made turned a switch in him. He froze for just a moment. Then the bed bounced, his warmth and weight vanished and she opened her eyes. He was kneeling on the floor beside the bed, clutching his temples.
“Arren, what is it? Are you all right?”
“I’m . . . fine.” His face twisted into what he probably thought was a smile. “Just . . . something I . . . remembered.”
She curled up, pulling the comforter around her. She was shivering. Had she done something wrong? “What was it?”
He rocked back on his knees and let his hands drop. The hot lust in his eyes had been replaced by something cold and dead. “It’s what I did once, to a girl I loved. Or thought I loved.” His voice was flat, and he had calmed a bit, but she could still see the pulse in his neck. The light around him strobed—black, white, black—and she blinked the effect away.
He said, “I was only sixteen. It was nothing more than puppy love.”
Yet the memory, whatever had happened years ago, had stopped him in his tracks. “Arren, please get back in bed with me. You look ridiculous kneeling on all those pink roses.”
He looked at the floor, paused, then shook his head. “Damn it, you’re right.” She’d got a real smile. Laine stuck a hand out from under the covers and crooked her finger in a come-here motion.
“There are just as many roses on that comforter, you know,” he stated maddeningly. He hooked his index finger in hers for a sweet moment, tugging, then climbed in bed beside her and stretched out, looking exhausted.
She unwound half the big, flowery comforter from her shoulders to drape across his body. Whether it was to warm him or simply to hide the view she didn’t know or care. She did know that this would be a bad time to succumb to instinct and fling herself on top of his naked body. “Tell me about it. Tell me what happened.”
“Her name was Patricia McCowan. Tricia. I was sixteen. She was a year older than me, but I had recently had a growth spurt and managed to catch her interest.”
“An older woman,” she said hollowly. “Irresistible.”
“I certainly found her so.” He cast her a rueful glance. “I asked her out, she accepted, we went to a movie. No idea what it was, then or now—all my cognitive powers were devoted to getting inside her jumper.”
Laine didn’t even bother searching inside herself for a twinge of jealousy. She felt none, and none was needed. The thought of Arren as a gawky teen charmed her. “So far, sounds like situation normal.”
“Yes. Except that after the movie she invited me home and up to her room. Her parents asleep, et cetera. I do remember feeling immensely privileged, extremely excited, and rather sick to my stomach.”
Laine gnawed her lip and smiled slightly. Though Arren’s tone of voice was light and ironic, laughing at the clumsy, horny boy he’d been, if she laughed with him this delicate moment would break. “So, this sophisticated older woman was seducing you?”
“Apparently she was. Things were progressing well, I thought—hadn’t thrown up or tripped over my tongue—until we both ended up on her bed, most of our clothes off, and I started to shift.”
Her hand flew to her mouth. “But . . . there was no water, no river, no other cabyll ushtey!” A thought struck. “She was a normal human, right?”
“Oh yes. Not a drop of magic in that one. The change caught me—both of us—completely unaware. I had no inkling anything like that was going to happen.”
“You knew nothing of what you were?”
“I’d gleaned only the barest hints about legendary water horses, and those mostly from the village lads.” His look soured, and he sighed deeply. “No idea I might be one.” His voice turned introspective. “Children often believe they’ve been stolen from their rightful families, don’t they? How does a kid know if he’s normal or not?” Unconsciously he drew closer to her. She allowed herself to settle beside him companionably under the cover, a safe few inches between their naked bodies. A few inches that stretched like miles right now.
“What did it feel like? The . . . the shift?”
“Bloody odd, as you might imagine. A kind of twisting or stretching inside me, pain that was somehow pleasure in my limbs. Weird as all hell.” His body twisted awkwardly beside her as if to demonstrate. “It’s been almost fifteen years, and I still feel it like an itch that can’t be scratched, a drug that can’t be taken. It was the excitement of being alone with a female that did it—and the fact that I was born to cabyll parents—and it got out of control very quickly. I could feel myself losing it, my brain just shutting down, my body changing. I tried to run, and got out of her bed at least.”
“Did you shift to horse form?” Her voice was incredulous.
He rubbed his eyes. “Not . . . exactly.” He managed a hollow laugh. “I must have looked awful, sort of a hybrid man-animal there in her home, crashing around like a rabid beast. I remember hearing her scream. She bolted for her door, and I managed to make things even worse by trying to stop her. I found out later I’d dislocated her shoulder and broken a couple of her ribs.”
Laine watched the memories lay age across his features, like a leaden brush painting helpless regret and pain. She could picture the girl, hysterical and shrieking, fighting the monster she’d invited into her bed.
“Then her parents ran in, in their pajamas. Things went downhill from there.”
She couldn’t help it. She rolled to him and took him in her arms, wrapping her legs around him too, in an embrace that was entirely non-sexual. Almost entirely. He embraced her back as if starved for touch and let out a heavy sigh. Laine felt tears prickle the back of her eyes, and squeezed them back. He needed her to listen, not weep for his past pain.
Into her shoulder he said, “Her father chased me out with a fireplace poker, getting in a few good whacks, and I found myself stumbling along the road, naked, mostly back in human form, till I ended up in a ditch, hiding like a bloody felon. The McCowans called my parents, fortunately, and not the police. I imagine they were thinking of their daughter’s reputation, not mine. When I saw Mum and Dad’s car, I didn’t know what to do. I was a freak, a monster, a creature out of nightmares. I honestly wished I were dead.”
She stroked his hair, murmuring words of comfort into his ear. At least she hoped her sympathy would comfort him, suspecting that it would not. Could not. Distraction was all she could offer. The horror, and the sheer teenage humiliation, Arren must have felt took her heart and wrung it hard.
He let himself be wrapped in her, and managed to draw her even closer, his warm breath stirring her hair as he lightly kissed her forehead. It was so like that first innocent kiss, in the garden, that she felt a helpless flood of sadness.
Selfishly Laine calculated the chances of taming this suffering beast, loving him into comfort and salvation . . . could she hope to do it? She was only a woman, more ignorant even than he in the ways of the cabyll ushtey.
A thought popped into her head. She had to ask. “So . . . since then, you, uh, that is, have you had . . . ”
“Lovers?” He gave a gentle rasp of a chuckle. “Yes. Being a proper gentleman, I won’t go into any details, but as time passed, I managed to get over the . . . trauma, I guess you’d call it, and let myself get interested in the fairer sex again.”
“Fairer sex, give me a break. I won’t share my details if you won’t share yours.”
“Deal. I made sure, though, that the women I spent time with were nobody I found terribly exciting. No one I’d risk falling in love with. Respected friends, companions for a while, but nothing more than that.”
Which made another thought pop insidiously into Laine’s head. Don’t ask . . .
Don’t ask Arren, but ask herself. She was falling in love with him, but it was more than that. She was stepping across a line—hell, she was galloping across it as fast as he’d allow—and that line was the barrier between the ordinary world and the world of the water horses.
Without love, being cabyll ushtey meant dominance or submission, acceptance or expulsion, life or death. Was she willing to risk that life, without love?
No. Not even for a man like Arren.
Could this man—this creature—love her? Would he risk his changeable body and suffering heart for her? Or was she a woman who got respect but nothing more? She heard herself growl. She said, “Arren . . . I don’t want respect.” Wait, yes, she did. She was a woman, not an animal. “I don’t want just respect. What I mean is . . . ”
He cupped her chin and drew her face up to meet his, silencing her. He kissed her slowly, his lips lingering against hers until that electric hum grew and clamored in her blood, almost deafening her.
“Oh, Laine. And I want more than companionship. A lot more. But I must know . . . Do you think you could love me, despite what I am?”
“I think I’m already halfway there.”