Touch Me

© Louisa Trent, 2002.

Prologue

She came to him in delirium.

Wrapped in the silvery robes of moonlight and nothing more, she whispered, “Touch me.”

At the soft plea, John Hawk lifted his feverish head.

The husky female voice was low and soothing, melodious in tone, a siren’s song he would recognize anywhere. Instinctively. It didn’t matter that his mind’s image of her was indistinct, that her features were undefined by memory; his knowledge of her was primal. He knew her the same way an animalknows the scent of his mate.

Hawk pushed aside the fine mosquito netting that surrounded the cot and slid his naked body to the edge of the sweat-soaked mattress. He sat there, contemplating his precious hoard of matches.

The supply was dwindling.

Making up his mind, he reached for one and struck it against his nail. When it flared, he lighted the rusted kerosene lamp, turning the wick to low. By the faltering glow, he surveyed his squatter’s shack.

Only one wavering shadow appeared on the patched tarpaper wall.

Disappointment swamped him, though deep down inside he’d known she wouldn’t be waiting for him in the darkness.

He was so bloody tired! Tired of having only the noises of the jungle for companionship. Tired of sleeping with only the illusion of her. He needed more; he needed to fuck her—

Hawk untangled himself from the rumpled bedding, and carrying the lamp, dragged his feet across the tiny room. He collapsed a few steps later onto a surplus orange crate, his makeshift chair.

The writing materials were also improvised: his paper was a piece of cloth torn from a faded shirt; his ink, the blood that flowed freely from his slashed left forearm; a sharp stick served as his pen; his lap did double-duty as his desk.

He was aching. Trembling. Chilled to the bone. He didn’t know which was spiking more, his fever or his cock.

A toss up, he decided, impatiently swatting a lank of blue-black hair out of his burning eyes and willing his erection away; he couldn’t compose a letter with a hard-on.

But his brain, like his dick, refused to cooperate.

His thoughts were disjointed. Chaotic. A scattered obsession, a confused compulsion, going round and round inside his head, faster and faster, spinning out of control, the jumbled mess circling in an unending loop that led…

Nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.

Except to her.

The phantom half sentences, those ghostly phrases, wouldn’t take form. It was as though his brain’s circuitry was no longer connected to his hand—

Shit!Why couldn’t he concentrate? Why couldn’t he get it to together? Why couldn’t he write the damned message?

Because he was in tough shape, that’s why. His condition was worsening, he admitted to himself, no longer able to deny the truth. Since his escape from imprisonment, the episodes of illness were becoming progressively longer and closer together…

But always, when he was at his weakest, the green-eyed witch would come to him, whispering,Touch me …

He had no watch, no clock, but sometime between the darkness of a starless night and the hopelessness of an unforgiving dawn, his mind cleared. His thoughts converged and became orderly. Completely lucid, it came to him what he needed to say. Exactly. Precisely.

Clamping his left hand over his right wrist, he forced his once dexterous gun-hand to move. He refused to give in until the words, those slippery phrases, took shape.

The individual red letters were barely legible: Abrupt slashes. Twisted circles. Misshapen dots of ink-blood spilled across the scrap of cloth. Some words stuck to invisible lines; some hung suspended.

The result was grotesque. Obscene. Anyone reading the message would think a raving lunatic had given substance to the words.

And they’d be dead right.

Only a friggin’ nut would write this letter, since there was no way in this hell to post it:

Witchy-woman,

A wild raptor trembles on the branch, his plumage broken.

Flight is impossible; the sky is too far away.

Will you catch the bird before he falls?

SOSays, Accipiter

Exhausted, Hawk extinguished the small nub of brightness. He gave himself over to the darkness…and to the ungentle courtship of his hand.

He fisted his cock, his fingers jerking up and down the hard length. Just like the devil’s own magic, he saw her once again.

She was golden fair, as beautiful as any cherished dream he’d ever had and lost. When she opened her arms to him, she glowed pale and unadorned. And he knew she was his.

For once.

For always.

Catherine.

Chapter One

Catherine Covington hurried towards the Common, her long russet skirts whipping around her ankles.

This was the first day of dress rehearsals at Pilgrim Village, a historically accurate reproduction of an early seventeenth century farming community, and she didn’t want to be late.

Dressed in a plain but heavy English yeoman’s gown, her feet sturdily booted in black leather, she raced along the packed dirt lanes, shivering against the cold despite the warmth of her winter wool cape.

The opening season at The Village began the fifteenth of March. As this was the first of February, there were no curious stares, no tourists begging her to hold still while they snapped her photo, no million questions in search of an answer.

Catherine wasn’t very good at answering personal questions, but as the ‘first-person’ historical interpreter of midwife and healer, Euphremia Catherine Prim, she was take-no-prisoners kick ass…

Er…that is to say, she was most excellent.

As she recreated Mistress Prim’s daily life, Catherine was well used to questions and stares and photo ops. She could stay in character, maintaining her period accent as well as her dignified poise under the closest scrutiny, even when the rudest comments were made.

Head down, Catherine rushed through the Common’s main wooden gate, the heels of her leather boots crushing some ice under foot. She raised her arms, ever so subtly, and her cloak billowed in the breeze off the ocean like a black bird caught in the crosswinds of a deep blue sky.

Catherine shivered again, and this time her trembling had nothing to do with the frigid temperatures or first-day rehearsal nervousness. Her feet and fingers had gone to pins and needles, a precursor of a vision.

Surreptitiously, her tingling hand tunneled under the black cape. A prickly finger delved her laced bodice, tunneled under her boned corset and shift, until bare skin was reached.

She touched her unfettered left breast, plumped up by the stays.

Her birthmark was warm. Glowing. Pulsating.

Hawk was coming to her.

Soon, her awaited-one would be touching her bared breasts. Soon, her intended would be touching her all over. Her receptor would be hungry for sex, his appetite for her flesh, insatiable.

Catherine had summoned Hawk to her, and as he had no choice in the matter, he would have to come. Their lovemaking was written in the stars, preordained in her womb. They were fated to come together on Valentine’s Day…

* * * * *

CIA Special Agent Williams placed his polished loafer squarely on the bottom rung of Catherine’s chair and glared down at her.

“What do you mean you know where operative John Hawk is? The Agency’s been trying to find him since his prison break last month. We’ve already combed every inch of the terrain within a ten-mile radius of the hellhole where he was kept. We came up empty-handed. And now you’re telling me you know where he is? Yeah, right, lady.”

“I know where John Hawk is because he sent me a message.”

Agent’s Williams’ palm was extended. “Hand it over.”

“I can’t,” she replied, shoulders squared against impending disbelief. “Hawk wasn’t able to use the usual overland method; there are no post offices in the jungle. The letter was sent by psychic delivery.”

Agent Williams’ expression was grim. “Is this some kind of twisted joke?”

She took a calming breath. “Do you, or do you not, want to find Agent Hawk?”

“The man’s a fuckin’ hero, Miss Covington. Before he got caught, Hawk infiltrated a major drug supplier to this country. Because of information we received from him, the CIA was able to close down a major South American drug cartel. This, on top of saving two fellow agents’ lives during an ambush. Those same CIA agents were later imprisoned with Hawk. And once again Hawk helped them escaped. They got out safely, and we were able to pick them up, but Hawk was not so fortunate. He’s still out there somewhere. During their exit debriefing, those agents told us what Hawk went through to free them and others. We want Hawk found, all right—”

“Then you will do as I say! You waste valuable time interrogating me!”

It was very apparent that Agent Williams was a cigar smoker; a stale tobacco odor wafted from his three-piece polyester suit. Combined with his toxic after-shave, she was beginning to feel quite nauseous.

Catherine fanned a hand in front of her nose.

Strong scents, over-exposure to sun, irritating sounds…a touch too rough—all her senses were inordinately acute. She suffered untold agony because of them…and because of closed-minded disbeliveers like this petty bureaucrat.

Agent Williams looked over his shoulder at the far wall and lowered his voice. “Go home, Miss Covington. Take your little pink crazy meds. In the future, stick to telling your tall tales to the kiddos, okay? “

Catherine’s patience was at an end, and counting all the stars in the galaxy would not help keep her temper. Hawk must be found soon or he would die.

She turned and waved at the one-way mirror.

“Yoo-hoo! Agent Olivera! I know you are in the viewing room. Would you come in here please? I need to speak to you directly.”

The door in the back wall opened and a swarthy gray-haired man entered the interrogation room. After a perfunctory nod was exchanged between the two men, CIA agent Williams left them alone.

Catherine smiled at the FBI administrator. “How nice to see you again, Phil. Why, we haven’t chatted since the Morris case. How is Mindy doing?”

“Mindy is doing fine, thanks to you.”

“I’m glad that in some small way my silly women’s intuition was able to help, Agent Olivera.” Catherine batted her eyes.

“Don’t patronize me, Miss Covington. I happen to believe in the existence of paranormal phenomena, and unlike CIA Agent Williams, I have never confused psychosis with psychic ability. You found little Mindy before that sadistic s.o.b. could kill her because of your ESP abilities, not because of your double X chromosomes.”

FBI Agent Olivera took a deep breath. “Miss Covington, let’s cut the crap. There is energy in the world that goes beyond natural occurrence. There’s a whole area of existence that can’t be quantified by scientific means. For the last twenty years, it has been my privilege to explore that area. Do us both a favor and don’t try to dumb it down for me.”

The FBI agent folded his tweed jacket sleeves over his portly body. “If I’m confused it’s only because you usually deal with missing children cases.”

For Hawk’s sake, Catherine dropped the cutesy act. Her lashes stopped batting and she looked the FBI agent right in the eye. “That’s correct: I do only work with children.”

“So, why are you here? Agent Hawk’s no kid.”

“I might ask the same of you, Phil. What areyou doing here? Agent Williams is CIA. You’re FBI. I thought you people were territorial when it came to the sharing of information…and power. ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet…”she quoted

“Don’t start throwing Kipling at me, Catherine. I know this circumstance is unusual, but it’s unusual because of you. Because I have worked with you in the past on child abduction cases, the CIA asked for my help. Frankly, the CIA doesn’t know how to handle you.”

“I see. Well, Agent Oliverahandle me. You call yourself a believer—prove to me that you are more enlightened than most governmental bureaucrats, prove that you don’t think I howl at the moon once a month or that I’m in need of a cushy psych facility somewhere.”

“Miss Covington, tell me this message you received from John Hawk and I’ll be happy to prove it.”

Catherine closed her eyes and recited the blood-soaked words; the message was committed to her heart:

Witchy-woman,

A wild raptor trembles on the branch, his plumage broken.

Flight is impossible; the sky is too far away.

Will you catch the bird before he falls?

SOSays Accipiter

“Now do you believe me?” she asked softly and opened her eyes.

Agent Olivera was obviously excited. “That’s his SOS, all right. The CIA told me the watchwords to look for when I spoke to you. Hawk’s CIA operative name is ‘Accipiter’, for the obvious reasons. That is something you would have no way of knowing because Hawk was instructed to only use the code in life or death situations.”

Because of professional ethics, it was her duty to remain emotionally detached, uninvolved, with those she sought to help. But her eyes filled with very unprofessional tears and her vocal cords were tight with emotion when she said: “Hawk is dying. He contracted malaria during his imprisonment. If he is to survive, he must be rescued from the jungle and taken immediately to a hospital for treatment.”

“Miss Covington—Catherine—do you and Hawk have some connection? Have you ever met?”

“We have never met, but yes there is a connection. I cannot speak of it—”

“Williams told me that the CIA learned from their rescued operatives that John Hawk went through hell during his imprisonment. Months of torture. They think he might be dangerous. If he finds you, he could pose a serious threat.”

“You needn’t tell me that, Phil. Iknow he is dangerous. And disturbed.”

The FBI administrator nodded. “According to everything I’ve heard from the CIA, John’s also a good man and a fine operative. Naturally, the CIA will pull out all stops to recover him. You have nothing to worry about on that score.”

“Very well. I believe you. But before I tell you Hawk’s location, I must remind you that the same conditions I hold the FBI to in my child abduction cases apply here as well.”

Catherine gained her feet. “It is imperative that I remain anonymous. I cannot work under a microscope.”

“If you’re so hot to protect your anonymity, then why dress up like you do? Why the TV show? You’re a damn witch celebrity in this town. Why don’t you hide, go underground with your talents?”

“The best place to hide is out in the open,” Catherine explained. “There is no underground when it comes to the media. I learned that sad lesson at a very young age. The more a person tries to be secretive, the more things tend to be brought to light. I prefer to control the spotlight. I prefer to control the media attention I receive, not the other way around. I’m so open about being a story-telling-psychic-witch that no one would ever suspect that I actually—”

“That you actually are all three,” he finished for her.

“Your words, not mine.”

“The CIA believes that Hawk and the others could never have escaped imprisonment without outside intervention of some sort. Now, we don’t need to discuss particulars of that intervention if you don’t want to, but I know he had help and I happen to think that help came from you.”

Catherine licked her suddenly dry lips. “I want you to understand that I have not claimed, nor will I claim, ownership of psychic activities. If I am asked, I will vehemently deny possession of any paranormal powers. We will continue to chalk up my assistance to women’s intuition. Yes?”

“I’ll see what I can do—”

“No, you will ensure it, Agent Olivera,” she said succinctly. “I will not be intimidated. Am I making myself clear?”

“Yes ma’am.”

Catherine swept her cape over her shoulders, then handed FBI Agent Olivera the coordinates the CIA would need to find John Hawk.

“Since childhood, the FBI has kept a running dossier on me. Presumably, now the CIA will cross reference that file and add juicy tidbits of their own to it. I understand paperwork makes everything nice and neat, and for my own reasons, I have allowed the record keeping to continue. In this last year, however, the FBI has also begun to watch me. Surveillance hinders my work. I cannot permit anything to get in the way of my work. Am I making myself clear?”

Catherine held up her hand when the agent started to defend his agency. “Tell your superiors to call off the watchdogs. Advise them to stop asking questions about me. Inform them that they must leave my coven alone. If the CIA or the FBI harasses me or mine, I will disappear like fog in sunlight and you will never hear from me again.”

Chapter Two

After dress rehearsal at the Village, Catherine climbed the stairs to her bedroom. She was about to remove her period costume before starting dinner when her toes started to tingle, then her fingers. A dark-haired man appeared before her unfocused eyes.

The vision was shadowy, but she knew that Hawk was the bronzed-skinned warrior who was touching her, kissing her, placing her on a bed of green moss beside the river, dipping his firm mouth to her ear…

“Are you virgin, little pilgrim?” he asked slowly, carefully, as a man unused to speaking English would speak.

She was afraid, but she refused to cower from the half-naked savage. “I am not wed! Of course, I am virgin,” she spat into his painted face.

He laughed at her naïve answer.

His laughter died, as did her pretense of bravery, when he pushed her plain gray gown and single petticoat up to her waist, then placed his enormous hand on her bare belly, spanning her from hipbone to hipbone. “Your skin is as white as winter snow—”

“Get away from me, you Godless heathen,” she shrieked.

“Ah,” he gloated, ignoring her plaintive wail, and cupping the curls on her privates. “And your woman’s thatch! Surely, it is as fair as the fairest of honeysuckle.”

Her skin heated at the unseemly observation, and at the frenzied shouts of the ten or so warriors who surrounded them.

Every member of the raiding party could see her naked limbs and belly. They were close enough to see the notch of her secret place too.

Dear God! No one, save her mother, had ever seen her bare limbs and belly! Even she tried not to look where these uncivilized animals were looking now.

Mortified, she clamped her legs firmly together. Frightened as she had never been frightened before, she tried to pull away from the painted-faced beast holding her down on the ground.

The wretched swine yanked her back. Smiling broadly, and to the delight of his friends, he ripped her bodice from collar to waist, exposing the upper region of her bosom.

The savage smacked his lips. “Mmm. These are as big as ripe gourds. I wonder how they taste?”

More lusty shouts burst from the raiding party when her bosom was fondled over her shift.

She squealed, swatting ineffectually at the raiding party’s leader as he tugged impatiently at her corset. He was trying to get at her. Did he really intend to put his mouth on her paps?

Her breasts were her greatest shame, not only because of their immodest size, but because there was a birthmark on the left-hand side, a mark that might wrongly be interpreted as the sign of the devil. Her mother had warned her that no one must ever see it, not even her husband if and when she married, and that she must always—as a modest wife should—wear a nightgown to bed. Otherwise, it would be her husband’s duty to report her to council and she would be burned at the stake as a witch!

“Stay away from me…you…you…repulsive, dung-smelling Indian!”

“Call me what you will, but you can not wear white woman’s vestments into my village. If you wish to live, little pilgrim, you must be stripped naked. Then you will be chosen by a buck and taken to his sleeping mat.”

Her best chance of survival lay with the raiding party’s leader, with this powerful pniese.

Oh, she knew all about pnieses! It was said thatthey were men of great courage and wisdom, so highly esteemed that they were members of the sachim’s council. War, or any weighty business, could not be undertaken without their guidance. Of the greatest stature and strength, they endured the most trying hardships, and yet were discreet, courteous and humane. Theft and lying were beneath them, as they were the most reputable of men

Where were this pniese’s fine virtues? Where was the courtesy of this man of great courage and wisdom?

She saw none of the good and all of the bad! But because she wanted to live, to survive this day, as the savage plucked at her covered nipple, she said, “Do you have a wife who waits for you on your sleeping mat?”

“No wife.” He grinned. “But because I am hung like a stallion, many females beg to pass a night or two in my wetus—”

At his vulgar boast, Catherine licked her dry lips; fear had dried out her mouth.

“You are the bravest warrior here,” she said, appealing to his obvious vanity. “As the leader, you should be the one who takes me to his wet-wetus.”

He pinched her very erect nipple. “Hawk likes to play with big gourds on the mat. Perhaps I will choose you—”

The savage’s name was Hawk!

Catherine thought quickly. Now that he had granted her his name, perhaps he would grant her more concessions.

“All I ask in return is to be given some measure of respect, some dignity. Please,” she begged, “permit me to wear my clothes until we are back in your village.” Her birthmark must stay hidden until she had his protection!

He said nothing, but a disgusting series of unsatisfied male grunts went up in their audience when the tatters of her gown were left in place.

But no further allowances for propriety were made.

Her arms were forced above her head, held there by one of the savage’s huge hands, while he yanked his leather breechclout aside with the other.

Catherine quickly averted her gaze when his male part sprang out from behind the apron, but not nearly fast enough.

Just as he’d boasted, the warrior was hung like a stallion: His organ was as long as an arrow, as thick as a club, the end was easily the size of her hand when she made a fist. And something bubbled out from the blunt top. She was quite sure that no pious pilgrim man owned such a heathen member.

“Do not fight me in this, little pilgrim. There must be witnesses to our mating or you will be taken by all. As is their right, these warriors will wait their turn to get on you.”

“Tell them to go away—”

“It is their right to see the trophy.”

“Have pity. These men are swine—”

“They have never seen a naked white woman before. Naturally, they are curious.”

“No please. Don’t do this to me—”

He heeded her not.

Her legs were folded up to her belly. Whispering words of encouragement, the savage opened her thighs.

“Oh, God.” She cringed at her immodest positioning. He was actually looking inside her!

“I see no difference here. You are made like Native women are made,” he offered.

Catherine started to cry when the male members of the savage’s tribe closed ranks, gathering around them in a tight circle, looking on, their hostile eyes concentrating on that most private part of herself.

While they gawked and babbled, the pniese tenderly petted her fleece.

She was sobbing now. “Oh, no. Please, no.

“Hush,” the leader soothed, and taking two fingers of his free hand gently opened her vagina. “This must be done.”

She wanted to die when he drew back the moist folds.

She thought she certainly would die when he fell back on his haunches to give the warriors a wider berth to stare at her genitals.

The males were exchanging guttural remarks amongst themselves, pointing, and gesturing, excitedly exclaiming, as they surveyed her privates.

“They want to see your pleasure bud,” the pniese explained, uncovering the hood of her sex.

The warrior said something to them in their native dialect and an argument ensued.

“They are saying that because we are all members of the raiding party that stole you, it is every man’s right to have you. I told them you are mine.”

She wept at the reprieve; at least, she need only submit to one man, to this man.

A man who was hung like a stallion—

And then she could think no more; she was arching to meet the delicate strokes the leader made on the scrap of flesh that he had called her ‘pleasure bud’.

He was touching her intimately, but he wasn’t hurting her. And that made everything so much worse. Tears rolled down her cheeks when her body lifted to his touch as the members of his tribe made complimentary noises.

“Shh, little pilgrim. There is no need for tears. You are very pretty and this is a natural part of your womanhood. There is no shame in this.”

She sobbed all the harder.

“Surely this is better than death?” he asked quietly.

She wasn’t so certain. She was trembling, shuddering, writhing, and as a horrible pressure built up inside her that knotted her muscles and made her moan, the males of the tribe fell back.

A signal?

It must have been, for the pniese stopped his strokes and came over her, mounting her, his hardness rooting for her woman’s opening.

He was penetrating her, his heathen male part pushing into what had just been exposed for all the men to see.

He was hard, so very hard.

“Oh, God,” she whimpered at the heavy prod.

And then he was ramming past her virginal membrane, tearing it, as she cried out.

He filled her gradually, after that.

His length was formidable. There seemed to be no end to his male part. It went on and on, up into her passage, touching her womb, and while she sobbed on the damp ground in a woman’s shamed pain, he pushed it higher still.

“It hurts so,” she keened. “Make the hurting stop.”

“Shh, little pilgrim. You must take all of it and then I will make the hurting stop.”

The warrior’s muscular body was much too large for her soft, much smaller female body, but taking him at his word that the hurting would stop, she relaxed her muscles and accepted what was unacceptable.

He took more from her, all from her, and though she thought for sure she would be rendered in two.

Once he was buried as deep as he could go inside her passage, he started to move, to rock, to make her feel what she had no wish to feel.

Shamefully, after a few deep thrusts, she forgot her partial nudity, forgot that they were being watched, forgot the rough violence of the coupling, forgot everything but the seeds of pleasure he was sowing within her as he possessed her there on the ground for all to see…

“The light is beautiful,” the brash warrior said in awe, his tight buttocks pumping between her bloodied thighs…

* * * * *

In the vision, their climax ended in light. Explosions of light. Catherine felt the white luminosity in every cell of her physical being; it was more compelling than even the shimmering lights of her visions. They rushed headlong into the glow, convulsing together in the bright illumination.

In the bedroom, Catherine’s grabbed hold of the corner of her bedroom bureau, her breathing coming in shallow pants, her throat clutching. The room was spinning, the beige walls taking on a cacophony of hues, blending and mixing until all the colors melted together in one slash of heliotrope, the purple so dark, it was almost black.

“Oh! Oh!” she panted, aloud. “Yes!”

Her heart pounded in anticipation: fulfillment was teasingly close, radiating like stars from that central dark slash of color. If she just grabbed it, that light would be hers.

She reached out.

Before the illumination could explode inside her, the brightness dimmed. The man’s presence receded.

“Wait,” she cried.

Catherine blinked as the dream broke up, evaporating like vapor.

“No. Not yet. Don’t go!”

But he wouldn’t wait and she had only just begun to crest.

Sensation had her locked in a state of consciousness that was neither here not there. Betwixt and between. The man she envisioned existed in a magical place of lavender shadows where a delicate balance of reality and dreams merged. Everything she desired was there on that plane, not here in her bedroom.

Catherine raised her leg atop the bed.

Fortunately, her period costume didn’t call for panties or pantyhose; she was wearing only a shift and petticoats and boned corset under the severe, gray pilgrim attire. Hot, tense, and unfulfilled, she parted her thighs and touched her labia.

The folds were damp.

Did pilgrim ladies pleasure themselves? Catherine wondered as she touched her dewy vulva.

Catherine knew that Euphremia Prim didn’t self-gratify back in 1644.

Then again, she had no need to; the pious pilgrim had had Hawk pumping between her thighs morning, noon, and night. For one glorious summer.

* * * * *

Hawk, just released from the hospital the day before, headed immediately to find Catherine Covington, the woman whose face had been haunting him for over a year.

The CIA operative, whose specialty was covert drug operations, had no problem tracing his quarry to the circa 1700 farmhouse on the outskirts of town.

Ringing her bell and explaining what had brought him to her was out of the question; he couldn’t explain since he didn’t understand his desperate sense of urgency himself. Driven by a force beyond his control to be inside her, he knew he would resort to rape if she didn’t give him what he wanted.

Like a damned thief, he climbed in through an unlocked window at the back of the house.

From reading Catherine Covington’s CIA dossier, Hawk knew she lived alone; those were her feet moving around up on the second floor, probably in her bedroom.

As stealthy as a bobcat, he stalked across the wide pine floor and climbed the stairs, his footsteps on the treads silent.

Hawk peered inside her open bedroom door.

Eyes closed tight and facing the threshold where he stood, Catherine raised one long, pale leg onto the bed.

Hawk’s big hands closed into fists. He was no voyeur, but he couldn’t pull his eyes away from her parted legs.

Catherine’s ash-blond triangle of curls revealed more than it covered, showcased more than it obscured. When she parted her sweet folds, and began to rub the top of her sex,Hawk stepped into the room, his only thought to get his dick inside her.

“Don’t move,” he spoke the order quietly. “Don’t scream. And don’t be frightened. I’m not here to hurt you. Just give me what I want and I’ll leave. Got that?”

She nodded.

“Now listen, I don’t want you to come just yet; I want to be inside you when you climax. Right now, I just want to look at it.”

Her green eyes widened with fear, but not surprise; her leg remained posed just as it was so he could look his full.

Except as a hallucination, he had never seen this woman before. As far as he knew, she had never seen him either. So, why did he feel as though he had every right to be there, as if her body already belonged to him, as though he was no stranger to her? Why did he feel as if he was there not so much to stake his claim, but tore- stake it?

Gaze fixed on her exposed loins, he muttered grudgingly: “You’re beautiful. I knew you would be.”

“Oh, Hawk—”

She knew his name! And the sound of his name on her lips sent a heated shudder through him. He’d known that she must have access to his name. But there was a big difference between knowing andknowing, between reading his name in her CIA dossier and hearing her speak his name aloud, between seeing her in a hallucination…a delusion…and seeing her in the flesh and blood.

He knew but he couldn’t accept. This microcosm of altered reality was just way too eerie for his blood. He was hard-nosed CIA; he needed some clearly defined perimeters in place before he got into this any deeper, before he got deeply into her.

“Start talking,” he growled. “Who the hell are you, lady? And why the fuck have you been messing with my head?”

Chapter Three

Catherine told herself that she shouldn’t be afraid of Hawk. That this was meant to be. But she was only human, and this tall, powerfully built man did frighten her.

Hawk’s scarred brown leather bomber jacket had to stretch to accommodate his wide shoulders. His dark, chocolate khakis molded his muscled thighs and exactly matched his eyes. He looked fit and bronzed and very, very, confident. And he was going to hurt her.

The pain could not be avoided, and though she accepted the inevitability of her fate, the woman in her trembled at the prospect of losing her virginity to a man she’d never seen outside her visions.

“Are you a witch?” Hawk sneered at her.

That simple question exacerbated a lifetime of ambivalence in Catherine.

If Hawk had asked her to explain the changing relevancy of witchcraft through the ages she’d be able to give an intelligent answer. Or, if he had asked her to define, in five hundred words or less, the historical significance of women as witches, she’d be able to do it quite easily. But when the question involved her personally, well, that was a different matter entirely.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t proud of her heritage. She was. She believed in the power of herbs in healing, and the calmative properties of crystals. She believed in the power of good over evil, and she felt a moral responsibility to help people in need—

But, she’d never admit to possessing paranormal powers, not to a layperson, and certainly not to a skeptical CIA agent.

“I have a degree in English Literature with a minor concentration in Theatre Arts,” she began. “Do you have any idea how unqualified that makes me to find employment in the current job market?”

The agent shrugged. “I wouldn’t know anything about that. I come from a long line of military men.”

“Well, I come from a long line of women who considered themselves to be witches. You might even say witchcraft is the family business the same way plumbers usually spring from the loins of plumbers, and military personnel spring from the loins of other military personnel, and so on and so on. Currently, I work several part-time jobs.” She counted on her fingers. “Let’s see, there’s my retail job at The Herbal Emporium. There’s my seasonal job at The Village as a ‘first person’ interpreter—”

“You have a damned show on cable,” he accused.

“If you’ve discovered that, then you must also know that I tell stories at the library, at all the local schools, and at churches on a contractual basis. It’s not exactly steady work, but I go wherever I’m invited. If I’m requested to come in historical costume, I do. If not, I wear my civvies.”

“That historical woman you represent at The Village had ties to witchcraft—what’s her name?”

Catherine started to gradually ease her gown down over her belly. “I am the first person interpreter of Mistress Euphremia Prim. She was an ancestor of mine and also a healer and a midwife. Mistress Prim performed countless good works in the community during the seventeenth century. There are documented accounts of how this woman used various herbal remedies to help her friends and neighbors. “

“She was a witchy-woman,” he accused. “Just like you.”

Catherine sighed at the finality of Hawk’s condemnation.

“You must understand, that I grew up in a coven, raised by my great-aunts Caprice and Constance. They ran séances out of their old Victorian home. As a child, I felt more comfortable around Tarot cards and crystal balls than I ever did around dolls—unless, of course they were voodoo dolls, but that’s a whole other discussion. Does that make me a witch?” She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You lead a coven, don’t you?”

“Coven. Commune. Sisterhood. Social club. Religious affiliation. What does it matter what our organization is called? It’s only a name. What’s in a name?” she asked, inching her gown lower; at least she could be covered during his interrogation!

“Put that gown back where you had it,” he commanded. “Up around your waist, thighs open like before. Don’t bother trying to hide it, baby. I know everything about you, including that you’re a natural blond with a very sweet pussy.”

Their coupling was a forgone conclusion, but as a virgin, she was naturally apprehensive. Hawk was such a large man. He was cocky, aggressive, disturbed…and yes, angry too. She didn’t blame him for his anger. Not really. She had, after all, taken away his free choice when she’d summoned him to her.

Having grown up in a matriarchal society, she wasn’t accustomed to men, never mind angry men. She didn’t know how to diffuse Hawk’s anger, to soften his aggression, to temper his cockiness…to save herself.

“I’m sorry,” she said, taking a stab at placating him out of his foul temper. “I won’t try to hide anything from you again.”

“Good attitude. So keep talking. Tell me about how you own and operate a damned witch store where you sell homemade black magic candles and all the rest of that occult hocus pocus.”

“The Herbal Emporium on River Street is hardly a witch store,” she protested. “And all I do is tell stories—”

“You’ve been leading law enforcement officials to kidnapped kids for years,” he accused. “You’re more than an ordinary storyteller.”

Catherine’s shoulders ached with tension. “You’re absolutely right.”

“Now we’re getting someplace.”

“Iam more than a storyteller; like my ancestor, Euphremia Prim, I am also a healer. I help people find their mind-body connection. And I assure you, there is no hocus-pocus involved in the process. Many fine medical doctors have come to espouse hug therapy and accept the power of human contact. Hospitals use massage in the treatment of premature infants. I offer myself as a conduit to my clients so that they might self-actualize and become more centered and focused. I use meditation, touch, and herbs. Aromatherapy, as well. And I can heal you. I know that you’re suffering. I know what those animals did to you. I can help you. You have only to touch me, Hawk.”

“Oh, I intend to do more than touch you.” His smile was ominous. “Get undressed. Take it nice and slow. I’m an infinitely patient man, Catherine. I’ve dreamt of this moment for over a year. Thinking about you naked is the only thing that kept me alive.”

Oh, yes, Catherineknew . But appearing as a vision and appearing in the flesh were two different things entirely.

Hawk had been tortured in prison by the criminal forces that had taken him hostage. He hadn’t broken, no matter what had been done to him, but he had not come away unscathed from the experience.

Any softness inside Hawk had been killed. Lines of suffering now etched the skin around his black eyes. The planes of his jutting cheekbones reminded her of cracked granite. Or marred stone. He was only thirty years old but pain had forever marked his face, marked the man.

No, Hawk would not be gentle when he came into her body. In his anger, in his pain, he would hurt her.

Arms folded over his beat-up leather jacket, he watched, scowling, when she removed her leg from the top of the bed where it had been perched.

“I cannot undress with my leg raised,” she explained, proud that her vocal cords didn’t tremble.

She feared him, and still she’d still do anything to make all traces of Hawk’s pain disappear, to ease the furrows in his brow, to assuage his angry tension. If she could have chanted some witch incantation to make him the carefree man he once was, she would have done so in a heartbeat. But some things are just not possible.

But this was possible. This was something she could do for Hawk.

Sex is what Hawk wanted from her; sex is what Hawk would have from her.

She unlaced her gown and pulled the separate bodice over her head. Next, she removed the skirt, which left her in petticoat, plain linen shift, and corset. When they too were dropped to the floor, Catherine turned her back.

“I didn’t say you could do that,” he muttered, thickly. “Turn back around.”

She shook her head.

“It’s going to happen,” he apprised her. “Nothing you say or do or conjure up will prevent me from getting inside you.”

And she almost cried, because in the ultimate irony, she would not be the one who resisted their relationship.

Although their lovemaking was written in the stars, preordained in her womb, their destiny to have a body as well as a mind connection, Hawk would fight the pull, deny the attraction they both felt.

She was cursed to walk a different road in this life. It would take a special man, a blended man, a man not easily intimidated by things he couldn’t fully understand, to walk that road beside her.

That man was John Hawk.

Unfortunately, the CIA agent believed their attraction was a cruel hoax, a trick of smoky mirrors. He believed they were a million star-thoughts away from each other. He had already decided that a man who lived in a world of certainty could never walk beside her in the valley of the grays. He would fight their fate and he would fight her. He would try to break the awful pull between them.

And he might just win.

Their coming together this time was inalterably fixed, but that was as far as her magic extended; any subsequent occasions were beyond her power to manipulate.

As a witch.

But not as a woman.

It was up to Catherine, the woman, to convince Hawk to come back to her. It was up to her to seduce him with her body so that he wouldn’t be able to give her up.

Nude, arms crossed in front to protect her birthmark, Catherine said softly, “The penetration cannot be done face to face until it is completely dark outside. Until then, you may not touch me above the waist. These are the only requests I will make of you, the only time I will deny you anything.”

“Lady, where do you get off negotiating with me?”

Her voice was dignified. “It’s only a small concession, Hawk.”

She took two steps back.

Catherine wanted to brush her bottom against Hawk’s erection, to entice him, to tempt him…to temper his male anger with her female softness. But making the first move was not ethical. And so she whispered once again, “Touch me.”

She took another step back.

Finally, thankfully, he placed his palm on the curve of her bottom.

Catherine’s eyes closed as a current of psychic energy passed from Hawk’s body to hers.

Oh, God! Hawk was more troubled than she’d originally thought. The sights he’d seen, the things he’d had to do to save others! No wonder he’d been calling out to her!

Hard fingers hurtfully gripped her naked flesh.

She didn’t pull away.

His voice was fraught with tension: “Listen, I know that you’ve been feeding the FBI, the CIA, and local police department’s information for years. I broke into your folder. Inside is an account of every child abduction and murder case you’ve been involved with since you were a young girl. Your success rate in finding lost kids is nearly one hundred percent accurate. You’re a psychic. Why can’t you admit to that?”

“Because I know what the CIA thinks of psychics.”

“What? That you’re all a bunch of soothsaying, horoscope-predicting, tea-leaf reading, mumbo-jumbo, talking fruit cakes? Quacks, who are as nutty as bed bugs?”

“I’ve been called worse. I’ve been called a charlatan, a heretic, and a conniver. And I know agents only believe in what they can see with their own two eyes. Cold, hard facts. Evidence. So I will say that women’s intuition led me to know where you were,” she replied, giving the usual stock answer.

“Nothing cold and hard here. Your skin is as soft and warm as sun-heated silk. Now, tell me, dammit, how you knew where to find me in the jungles of South America. Tell me how you got the exact coordinates of that shack where I was staying. Tell me, and I’ll leave you alone.”

“Oh, Hawk—we both know that there’s no way you’ll leave me alone tonight.”

Chapter Four

Hawk’s gaze glinted at Catherine’s rounded curves.

It took all his willpower to remove his hand from her sweet ass; if not for his military training, he might not have been able to do it at all.

In his world, discipline was God. He gave orders and he expected those directives would be obeyed without question. If a direct command was ignored or disobeyed or defied, there would be consequences proportionate to the transgression.

Catherine was ignoring him, disobeying him, defying him. She was not answering his questions!

“I could end your life in under sixty seconds,” he said, two hands already at her neck, wrapped around the slender column, four fingers pressed together at her throat, his thumbs meeting at her nape under the cap she wore.

“In the same amount of time you could be moving between my parted thighs. You need what I can give you, Hawk.”

“What are you a sex therapist too?” he asked, his cock bulging against his zipper even as he tried to ward her off with sarcasm. “Take off that hat thing you’ve got on over your hair.”

“My coif?” she asked coolly.

“Yeah, your coif.”

Hawk made men twice Catherine’s size tremble in fear, and here she was issuing ultimatums, standing up to him, questioning his authority, not a tremble to be heard on her vocal cords. He didn’t like it.

Catherine removed hercoif, and her thick mane toppled down her bare back like a blond waterfall.

Amazed by its length, its color, how silky it felt against the back of his hands, he asked, “Have you ever cut it?”

“Never.”

From out of nowhere came an image of her above him, riding his cock, her hair enclosing them in a spun-gold tent. Hawk broke into a cold sweat and it wasn’t his malaria returning.

The rolling landscape of Catherine’s body was too overtly lush to be strictly fashionable, too flagrantly sensual for today’s unisex look. The witchy-woman had been built for earlier times, when earthy bodies were celebrated, when women were built as women should be built.

As his erection showed his appreciation, Hawk let go of his chokehold on her neck and smoothed his knuckles over the gold fan of hair. When he fisted it into a thick ponytail, once again he had a clear, unobstructed view of her straight spine, her luminous skin, her admirable bottom.

There wasn’t a sign on her curvaceous body of sun exposure. Not a freckle. Not a tan line on her moonwitch skin.

Catherine was his wet dream, and he was tired of sleeping on the soggy spot alone. The green-eyed witch had been tormenting his thoughts for a year, and the only way he was going to get her out of his head was to put his cock inside her and leave it there for a good long time.

Hawk sucked in his breath as the atmosphere became charged with expectancy. White-hot current electrified the air, man-to-woman awareness flying back and forth between them. He was suffocating, smothering on his own lust, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to fill his lungs again until he had filled her with him.

“Get up on top of the bed,” he said, appalled and aroused all at the same time, and reluctantly released her.

Blood humming, pulses racing, gaze smoldering, nostrils flaring at the trail of her old-fashioned, rose-petal perfume, he watched her body undulate as she walked to the bed. Catherine was a provocative barefoot courtesan from the pages of a dangerously hot, tantalizingly explicit, adult novel.

Her loose blond hair rippled around her bottom as she did what she was told to do. Raising a knee to the coverlet, her arms extended in front, revealing her lush femininity in a way even Penthouse wouldn’t print, she started to get atop the bed.

He hadn’t gotten laid in almost two years, andfuck , he was horny. No doubt about it, he needed some bad.

“Hold it right there,” he growled, as his cock led him to her; he had to sample her honey.

Her slit was wet, dripping wet, and he was dangerously angry for the conditions she’d imposed.

“Bend over,” he rasped.

She did without question.

“You don’t want it face to face, huh?” he growled. “Is this how you want it?”

Gasping for life-sustaining oxygen, he unsnapped the waist of his trousers, ripped the zipper down its tracks, and got her blond mane out of his way.

He loved her hair, but mercy, did he want to fuck her ass.

Holding her in place, lest she try to escape, he let his cock do what cocks do best.

The blunt head, already moistened with pre-come, rubbed its lubricated way inside the seductive crevice of Catherine’s inviting ass. He hadn’t even kissed her, and here he was partnering her in the backdoor tango.

And she was letting him.

Christ,but she felt good.

She spoke up when things got a little too randy. “The first time cannot be an anal penetration. The first time must be vaginal.”

More conditions!

And without being told she could, Catherine shook off his hold and knelt on the bed faced away, arms crossed over her chest.

He felt his heart fission. He didn’t want it to be like this! What was going on? Why couldn’t it be sweet and tender? Dammit! He wanted to go the missionary route the first time with her!

He considered himself to be your average testosterone driven male. But within him lurked this horrible, overwhelming, embarrassinglysentimental urgency to see Catherine’s face, to commit every nuance of her expression to memory when he entered her body, to feel her heart beat against his chest as they moved together as one.

At least he could get naked with her, he supposed.

Hawk took off his boots and stripped to the skin.

At least he could feel her flesh on his flesh.

Unless she had conditions about that too.

Naked, he got up on bed behind her, towering over her, his big bronze hands bracketing her flared hips, her round bottom softly yielding to his hard need as she swayed against him.

In suspended animation, the ache in his testicles growing more insistent, more compelling, he mouthed the side of her neck.

Catherine of the pearl white body and spun gold hair be mine tonight., he thought with a sigh. Sex as communion. Sex as sustenance. Sex on a higher level than physical release…

Looks like they’d both be settling for a whole lot less.

Catherine looked over the slope of her shoulder at him, her cat-green eyes crossing the silvery silence to look inside his heart.

The moment seemed to stretch into forever…

It ended when he penetrated her vagina, back to front.

Catherine whimpered, but she didn’t scream.

She should have screamed. He sure as hell wanted to.

In his own defense, whoever heard of a virgin witch?

Hell! His own defense! He had no defense! There was no excuse for what he’d just done. He’d just ripped through Catherine’s virginal membrane. No tenderness. No consideration. No idea why. And he didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, not to ask if she was okay, not to inquire why she’d let him have her virginity. He kept pushing, thrusting…punishing her.

For what?

Yeah, he was pissed that she’d been leading him around by the nose, interfering in his life, forcing him to keep on living when he would’ve just as soon died, but the rational part of him didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to hurt her.

He was never ungentle with a woman, never brutish. He knew his own strength and what that strength could do to a female. This felt like ancient history to him, like he had done this ignoble act before, like he was repeating the same bad mistake, like he was forever doomed to repeat a past sin.

And though he wanted to, with everything that was still decent inside him, he couldn’t bring it to an end. He was powerless, and he hated being powerless.

Without losing a beat, he eased her down to her hands and knees, crawling over her, mounting her, still driving into her, every muscle in his body working at making her pay—

For what? Why was he extracting payment from her tender flesh?

He didn’t know.

Nor could he stop.

Adrenaline pumping, he kept up his retribution for what felt like hours. When he could no longer hold back his climax, he exploded inside her in an angry stream of curses and hot semen.

He pulled out, and gasping for breath, watched in fascination as a trickle of blood and seed rolled down the insides of her splayed legs.

He hadn’t used a condom and he’d brutalized a virgin.

Hawk had not a clue why.

Chapter Five

Hawk ground his thumbs into his eye sockets. The pain cleared his mind. While he wrestled with self-loathing, Catherine scooted away from him, her pupils glazed in terror.

It was a look Hawk was very familiar with; he’d seen it often enough on the faces of the enemy forces whose lives he’d ended with one slash of his knife. It killed him to see that kind of fear in her eyes too.

Grabbing a corner of her quilt, she held it up to her front. A single tear rolled down her face.

“Just give me a moment, Hawk, t-t-to get myself together,” she stammered. “Oh-oh-kay? And then…and then I’ll do whatever you want. Just tell me—”

“Shit,” he snarled, watching the tears spill. “Don’t you do that! Don’t you dare cry!”

“I-I’m sorry.”

“And don’t you fucking apologize either.”

Like the wrath of vengeance, he pointed his finger at her. The digit was trembling. “Damn you, Catherine! You’re a witch! You could have stopped this! Why didn’t you?”

The solitary tear rolled freely over her lips, down her chin, to drop into space.

The salty drop never reached the bed covering.

Hawk reached out a finger and captured the glistening droplet. “Donot fucking cry.”

“I can’t seem to help myself.”

“That makes two of us,” he answered, staring at the teardrop that sparkled in the moonlight that now spilt in the window.

Hawk placed his finger to his mouth, shut his eyes and tasted Catherine’s tear. “I didn’t know witches cried.”

“These are the tears of a woman,” she said, and in one fluid motion of acceptance, rolled to her knees.

Stretching her arms out voluptuously before her, she yielded her body fully to his. “You want me again, Hawk.”

“No! I can’t do this. Not again.” He was weeping now too. “How can you want me after what I’ve just done?”

“Doesn’t that prove I’m a woman? A woman loves, despite the pain. Touch me, Hawk. I can make you want to live again. I can make you whole again.”

“No!” But even as he denied his terrible need, he was moving in behind her, rising up on his knees, ready to mount her a second time.

He ran his big hand along the sleek column of her spine, feeling her tearful purr vibrate under his palm. “No Catherine, I don’t want this.”

“You do,” she contradicted.

Pushing her hair aside, he mouthed her nape, rasped her neck with his teeth, finally bit her neck, as he pulled her solidly against his thighs, the extent of his urgency grinding into her as he positioned her to take him.

“Do witches feel pain?” He groaned like a feral animal. “Or is this thing between us only supposed to destroy me?”

* * * * *

Catherine’s heart broke into a million fragments when Hawk flipped her over onto her back and thumbed the moisture that ran like a sea channel from the corner of her eyes.

“Hush Catherine,” he soothed, and dammed the progress of her tears. “For both our sakes make me stop. Lay a curse on my head, cast a spell, do whatever it takes to prevent me from taking you. I don’t want to hurt you again.”

“I can’t prevent this. Don’t you see? I’m powerless when it comes to you.”

Hawk couldn’t know, couldn’t understand, that he was asking her to help him when her paranormal abilities were at their lowest ebb.

She hadn’t expected Hawk to be a gentle lover. But when the breath was squeezed from her lungs by the heaviness of his body, by the violent way he was holding her down, she couldn’t pretend not to be shocked. If she was taken aback, what must this be doing to him? She at least understood that he didn’t want it to be this way between them; Hawk must think he was going insane!

He one-handed her wrists and held them captive above her head as he looked out the window. “Is it dark enough for you now?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

Despite her fear, she melted against him, wanting to feel his hands on her body, ready for his passion no matter what form it took.

Turning her head, she kissed the side of his face. Once. Then again. Softly. Tenderly.

His face tilted.

Would he capture her lips? Would he kiss her now? Would he take her in his arms and somehow make it all right?

He went rigid. “Don’t.”

With her lips against the roughness of his cheek she said, “I want to kiss you. I need to.”

“And I need to see your body.”

She was too weak to fight, to protect herself.

She’d been doing her best to conceal what made her different, with her arms, with her hands, with her hair, with her back to front positioning…with the quilt, but in her weakness, she could no longer hide herself from him.

She knew the exact moment Hawk saw the small pink shape on her left breast.

“Is it a tattoo?” he asked.

“I don’t have any tattoos.”

The air was thick enough to spoon.

Even in the dark he’d been able to discern the throbbing of her heart birthmark: in his presence, it was neon-sign obvious.

“What is it, Catherine?”

“It’s nothing,” she cried, railing against the fate that made her different from other women, and not for the first time.

The first time she’d renounced her heritage, there had been dire consequences. A baby had almost died…

When she was six years old, she kept having a vision of a kidnapped baby. Not wanting to be different from other children, she’d kept the information to herself. By the time she did finally confess, and her aunts reported the kidnapped baby’s whereabouts to the proper authorities, it had almost been too late: The infant had been close to death, malnourished, with sores all over his tiny body…

“Auntie Caprice, why aren’t I the same as everyone else?” she had asked, twirling around the kitchen as her aunt placed the pan of brownies in the oven.

Caprice glanced up. “The same, Catherine? Why would you want to be the same as everyone else?”

“Because…because Jessica’s the same and everybody in school likes her.”

Her aunt stopped what she was doing, wiped her hands on a messy dishtowel and turned.

Aunty replied softly, with just a hint of misgiving, “Everyone likes you. All the children in your class do.”

But she’d been adamant. “No, they don’t. They think I’m weird because I live in a coven. It’s not fair! Jessica lives in a condo and no one thinks she’s weird.”

Her aunt made a sad face and put an arm around her skinny shoulders. “Well, dear,” Aunty Caprice began, seeming to weigh each word. “Your teacher believes you’re a bit too…well, quiet. Maybe if you chatted more with the other children or joined in their games…?”

Catherine wiped her runny nose on her sleeve. It was hard not to cry sometimes. “The games are dumb! I hate those silly games!” She sniffed. “Besides, sometimes I can’t play. Sometimes I can’t concentrate because the bad thoughts keep gobbling up the good ones.”

“The bad thoughts,” Aunt Caprice prompted, looking anxiously into her teary face. “When did they start up again?”

She looked down at the floor; her auntie was very strict about not keeping her thoughts a secret.

“Last week!” Catherine sobbed. “I was hoping they would stop, but they haven’t. They get stronger and stronger every day. I didn’t tell ‘cause I got scared.”

Auntie Caprice bit her lip. Her hands, still before, started to flutter like butterflies against her apron. “Oh my, dear. I wish you had told me sooner. Can you tell me now about the bad thoughts?”

Catherine’s eyes closed. “There’s a little baby in a crib. He has a dinky so I know he’s a boy,” she confided.

“Go on, dear. Tell me about the little boy.”

“His daddy took him far, far, away. Snatched him right out of his…his…cage thing.” Catherine’s eyes popped wide. “What’s that thing called that babies stay in when they’re not sleeping?”

“Playpen,” Auntie Caprice supplied helpfully.

“Yes,” Catherine said, frowning. “I think so. His daddy is bad but his mommy is good and that’s why they don’t all live together in the same house anymore.”

“Do you think the daddy simply took the baby for a visit?”

Catherine shook her head back and forth. “No, no, no. He’s mean! He made the mother cry and then the policemen came. Right to the house.”

“Are the police trying to find the baby?”

“Yes. They have a big dog, just like old Mrs. Kraft’s dog. The policemen gave the dog some of the baby’s clothes to play with—I don’t know why—and now the dog is helping too. I like dogs! Why can’t we get one, Aunt Caprice?”

“Darling, we are witches! Witches have cats, not dogs. Now please! The baby! Have they found the baby?”

“No, and they won’t either. The baby is crying all the time. He’s hungry and his diapers smell bad. I think he’s sick. And I don’t want to be a witch. You can’t make me!”

“Where is the baby?” her auntie asked, gripping her arm too tight.

“In a cellar. Under a brick house with red shutters. All the houses are close together. They’re joined just like a choo-choo train. It’s not like around here. I don’t like it there at all.”

“The name of the state or the city? Anything, honey! Can you tell me anything more?”

“The baby is gone where the President lives.”

Aunt Caprice blinked. “The baby is in the cellar of the White House?”

Catherine giggled. She knew she shouldn’t, because the baby was sick, but she couldn’t help herself. Sometimes her aunt was so funny.

“No! The house is brick, remember? The baby is near the White House, though. Do you want me to write down the name of the street? I see it in my head but it’s hard for me to say.”

“Yes, dear. Why don’t you do that? We need to give the baby back to his mother. Write the baby’s name too and where his mommy lives, if you can manage to remember…”

After that incident, the coven had drawn in around her. They closed ranks, severing their connections with the outside world. Her aunts devised an elaborate system of networking so that any psychic visions she had in the future could be channeled to the appropriate law enforcement agencies without Catherine’s direct involvement. It was because of their care and skill that she had been able to remain anonymous, although her life had never been the same again.

Hawk examined her body, not as a lover looks upon his adored one, but as a scientist looks at an exotic bug under glass or a CIA agent scrutinizes incriminating evidence. His inspection was humiliating. Hawk would detest her more than he had before. He would find her hideous, an abomination…ugly.

But she could no longer repudiate who she was.

“A pulsating heart is the birthmark of a witch connoting the highest paranormal powers,” she confessed. “Whoever wears the mark will lead the coven. I am a witch, Hawk.”

Chapter Six

“It’s beautiful,” Hawk said, mesmerized by the pink strawberry mark on Catherine’s breast, the heart that seemed to glow with a life of its own.

Pushing back on his haunches on the bed, he said, “You’re beautiful.”

His heated glance devoured her high, full, breasts, the peaks of which were hard and pointed. They aroused him with each breath she took.

He reached for one luscious full mound, and thumbed the elongated nipple. “I find you utterly irresistible.”

Paradise. Abandonment. Release. Catherine represented all those things to him and more.

“You should have told me that you were a virgin,” he said quietly, morosely, guilt-filled. “I could’ve made it better for you.”

“Make it better now,” she said, breathlessly.

“Not until you tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“What I am to you.”

“You are my lifemate. I will never make love with another man, save you.”

Hawk knew from snooping in her CIA dossier that Catherine was twenty-four years old to his thirty. Twenty-four and beautiful and still a virgin. As chaste as a nun, except she was a witch. This was a night for firsts for him: he’d never been with either a witch or a virgin.

Hawk ran his big bronze hand up the inside of Catherine’s leg, from knee to sticky thigh, sighing at the red stain on her pale skin.

During his imprisonment, he’d often prowled the confines of his cell. From one wall to the other took exactly eleven steps. He’d spent months in the darkness, in a space that was barely high enough for him to stand up straight, recalling childhood rhymes, snatches of poems, anything to train his brain to stay on the alert, anything to stay sane.

Catherine had kept him sane.

When he became ill, hallucinating one minute, okay the next, in a murderous rage an hour later, Catherine had been a soothing presence. A calming force. A woman a man could open his heart to and be accepted for what he was. When he couldn’t trust his own judgment any more, he’d trusted her.

He’d never been the hearts and flowers type. And no one had ever accused him of being a believer in mysticism either, but he’d believed in the vision of Catherine, shimmering in the dimness of his cell.

He’d poured out his heart to her, telling her things he never would have been able to tell anyone else, not even his family. He told her the things he had done, the horrible things he had done in order to stay alive, in order to get the men whose lives were his responsibility out in one piece. Emotions he didn’t know he had rose to the surface and he trusted them to her. In the semi-darkness of his cell and with her quiet listening, he told it all. When he was done, it was as though a terrible burden had been lifted from his chest.

In response, she had said nothing. All through the bloody descriptions, she said not a thing. No judgments. No trite phrases to bolster his spirits. Nothing.

She only whispered, “Touch me.”

“You told me what I am to you, now tell me what you are to me,” Hawk growled.

Her smile was tight. “I’m your—I’m your sexual bliss,” she replied weakly.

He started to laugh. “My bliss, eh?”

“I’m sorry.”

At her dismal apology, he sobered and looked directly at her. “Tell me the rest.”

They were so close, he felt her convulsive swallow. “When you were twelve years old you became lost in a swamp in your home state of Florida. You didn’t mean to, it just happened. You hurt your leg and couldn’t walk. You were stuck there. I called to you. Remember?”

“I remember. Problem is, I’m having a hard time accepting it. My parents...the police…no one knew who made that call to the police. You saved my life. I was one day away from dying—”

It was not the only time he’d come close to death, not the only time she’d brought him back to life.

To reaffirm that he was very much alive, his cock rose rock-hard from his groin, lancing and dripping with seed.

He went back on his haunches. “Open your legs for me, Catherine.”

She immediately spread her thighs.

What had he done? The sight of her bloodied slit appalled him.

Something else appalled him too. “I didn’t use a condom before—can I impregnate you?”

“Only if you wish me to conceive. I summoned you here, but you control everything else. You can control me if you wish.”

Hehad to touch her with his big bronze hands; he had to see his copper-dark fingers on her pretty cunt.

He fingered the top of her sex, massaging her clitoris until she was arching her pelvis.

She convulsed. Teeth bared. Head thrown back. Her nails clawing at the ruin of sheets under her hips.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she cried and the heart on her breast glowed and vibrated.

The girl who had saved his life was all grown up, and writhing underneath him on the bed, moaning and begging him to enter her.

Catherine was entering a psychic void, a supernatural world of visions and images. Hers was a world he couldn’t enter. A place, he couldn’t go. He couldn’t understand her telepathic universe of light and shadow. He couldn’t go there with her. He was only a man. Mortal. Fearful.

As a boy of twelve he’d been bold and fearless. Shaking off his parental restrictions with a fury, he had set out to conquer the wilderness of the Florida Everglades all by himself. To slay the dragons, to kill the monsters, single-handedly.

Every day he’d hop on his bike and explore a new section of the Glades. He’d stuck to the periphery at first and then he’d grown more daring, sinking further and further into the interior, the swampier the better.

One day he went too far. Going off by himself to hunt alligators he had gotten himself good and lost. Pretending he was a scout on an African safari with alligators as his big game, he had tracked the great reptiles for hours until he had fallen over a swamp vine and gone down in the muck. He’d learned too late that his child’s game might have deadly consequences.

He knew right away he’d never make it back out. The throbbing in his leg told him so. And no one knew where to find him. Hurting, alone, and scared, he gave himself up for dead.

For two long nights and three hot days he’d listened to the gators approach, knowing that the tables had turned and now he was the one being hunted. In his heart he knew he didn’t stand a chance against one alligator, never mind a full roving pack. He waited to die.

Until he’d heard a girl’s voice inside his head telling him to hang on. That help was on the way. That she was not going to…allow…was the word she had used, any yucky alligators to get him like what had happened in Peter Pan. Suddenly he hadn’t felt so very alone.

On the third day help had arrived. Just in time. The gators had started to move in for the kill. His rescuers carried him out on a stretcher, and the doctors had set his leg as good as new. Through it all, he’d never once mentioned hearing the girl’s voice. And the police never learned who’d placed the anonymous tip or who had told them of his whereabouts.

He couldn’t enter her again; Catherine’s paranormal powers were just too much for him to digest. Instead, he brought her to climax with his hand.

Afterwards, she curled up on her side and refused to look at him.

Chapter Seven

In the moonlit room, Hawk looked savage.

The stark planes of his angular face were tight; his black hair had come undone from its leather tie and fell neglected almost to his shoulders.

She was vulnerable to Hawk’s needs, to his probing looks, to his questions, to his curiosity. She’d answered his queries, but he hadn’t accepted her answers. Not really. How could he, when she didn’t totally accept them herself?

His deft skill as a lover had taken her to the edge of physical release and beyond. The pressure inside her had been direct and specific and not easily refused. When the rolling waves of mysterious excitement grew, she let herself go, giving herself over to pleasure. The upheaval of her senses was cataclysmic and frightening. The region she’d passed through was uncharted, shattering, and violent.

And Hawk had made her go there alone.

She couldn’t bear to lose her sense of self without him again.

“Do you have a familiar?” Hawk asked her finally.

She was on her belly where he had placed her and he was kneading her buttocks. “You mean, like a cat?”

“Yes, like a cat.”

“Animals frighten me.”

She respected animals, but from a safe distance. Despite the bad rap witches had gotten through the years, the closest she’d ever gotten to a warty toad was a poor frog stuck in a bottle of phemaldyhide in Biology lab. That sight had upset her so much she’d led her first peaceful demonstration in high school protesting frog dissection. She’d saved many amphibian lives. The fact that she couldn’t stand the noisy croakers was beside the point as far as she was concerned.

In her life as a witch, she had never dropped so much as a dust bunny in a boiling hot cauldron. She didn’t even own a cauldron, preferring a wok for vegetable stir-fry night at the coven. She certainly didn’t have the familiars often alluded to in witch stories.

As a textbook witch she was a textbook flop.

She’d begun to think she was a textbook flop as a woman too, that she couldn’t feel what other women felt, respond the way a woman should respond to a man.

Until tonight. Until Hawk.

She purred when he stroked her buttocks, and when he said, “Raise your hips,” she complied with embarrassing speed.

“I’m not a merciful man, Catherine,” he told her as his finger swept deliciously over her slightly elevated derriere. “I want you to know that it’s not entirely my concern over hurting you that is keeping me from taking you again.”

John Hawk was a one-man killing legend. But she knew that John Hawk was also a man of peace, an agent who abhorred violence and resorted to force only as the last alternative. Which man was touching her now?

“You were a virgin, yet you seem knowing, experienced—” he rasped, his fingers slipping into the demarcation between her buttocks.

Catherine trembled at what Hawk was doing to her…and at his perceptiveness.

Physically, she had been a virgin when Hawk took her, but because of her psychic connection to her ancestor Euphremia Prim, she was no innocent—

Psychic connection…

When she’d first realized that she possessed psychic powers, the knowledge broke her.

It also freed her.

Clearly, she was different. Clearly, she wasn’t a normal woman. With the acceptance of that basic truth, she had known peace. Real peace. Peace of mind. She no longer questioned what kinds of recessive DNA formation had gone into her making. Or what kinds of chromosomal quirks were floating around inside her brain. She was what she was: a screw loose; shaky neurological circuitry; synapses spread too wide apart—a witch with duties, responsibilities, visions…

She also accepted that in the year 1644, the CIA agent’s ancestor had been a great warrior amongst his Wamanoag tribe…and her ancestor, Euphremia Prim’s, lover.

“Come up some more,” Hawk demanded. “Stretch like an obedient cat for me.”

Dutifully, she came up for him, lifting herself up onto hands and knees, and stretching her back. Her breasts ached, the nipples hard and elongated, needy. She shivered with anticipation and her nerve endings tingled as wave after wave of desire swept over her.

He reached underneath to catch her full breasts. When he fondled their weight, then pinched the tips, she bit her lip in pleasure as rays of light broke within her. Her nipples were highly sensitive, and Hawk’s sensual mastery was undoing her.

When she thought she might scream in delight, he stopped playing at her breasts to slip a hand between her legs, a finger gently penetrating her woman’s core.

He was going to make her come again. Alone. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want another lonely climax! The pleasure he gave her was less than what it should have been because it was without him.

But too weak to resist, she took what he was offering—

A few strokes later she was moaning, her bottom moving in time to the thrust of his finger, faster and faster, her breasts swinging heavily back and forth. Her hair fell forward over her face, her neck dipped, every muscle in her body strained to capture the light.

Her climax was intense, the light blinding. Oh, how she wished she could share it with the man who was her life mate!

Afterwards, she collapsed spent on the bed, and cried.

Through her tears, through her snarled hair, she watched as Hawk rose from the bed.

He was all bronzed masculinity, all sinewy male strength, his muscles long and sleek despite his recent bout with malaria. His manhood thrust boldly at a right angle to his flat abdomen as he dragged on his pants. He didn’t zip or snap—too uncomfortable because of his erection she suspected—and his black-nest of pubic hair showed through the gape.

Hawk was beautiful. His naked bronze chest rose tight and toned above the low slung khaki trousers, and she cried all the harder because she was tear-stained and semen sticky and covered in her virgin’s blood.

“May I have some privacy while I wash?”

Taking up his shirt but not putting it on, he said, “You want to wash, you can do it in front of me.”

Chapter Eight

It was a testy Hawk who leaned his shoulder blades against the bathroom’s doorjamb. “No shower. Wash at the sink. And this time, donot turn your back on me.”

He’d never stayed with a woman while she performed the necessary ablutions after sex. Always before, he tugged off the condom and trashed it the same way the woman eventually got trashed. He had no time for women in his life; he only squeezed in sex once or twice a month because a physically frustrated CIA agent might have his mind on his erection, not on the job. And so it was with a sort of quizzical enchantment that he got ready to watch Catherine cleanse herself.

“No wash rag. Use your hand.”

Catherine filled the basin, and as instructed, remained facing him as she dipped her hand in the water.

In the European fashion, Catherine shaved neither her legs nor her underarms. He liked that. American women were too sanitized for his tastes; they removed the scents and sights that made a female a female.

As she began to wash her body, her full breasts swayed. The movement was so womanly, so erotic, so carnal that he had a hard time sucking air into his lungs.Mercy! But he lusted over Catherine’s round voluptuousness.

He noticed, but only in a distracted way, that the pink heart on her left breast had quieted down; the birthmark was no longer pulsating. He noticed, and not in a distracted way at all, that her large nipples were still hard, and very,very elongated. The evening was almost over and he hadn’t had his mouth on them yet; that frustrated the hell out of him.

He hadn’t tasted her between the legs either. Normally, he didn’t take the time to go down on a bed partner, but cunnilingus with Catherine was a foregone conclusion. Would she let him taste her?

When she started to wash her breasts, he could no longer stand by and just watch. He had to touch her.

“Let me,” he said, quietly, as he dipped his fingers in the water and then touched her.

Her flesh was soft and silky; her breasts were those of a fertility goddess. His wet fingers slid across her enormous nipples and he trembled.

He smoothed his hand over her belly—a woman’s lush belly—and then skimmed his fingers downward to her near-white pelt.

He gently parted her swollen folds, and proceeded to cleanse her opening with his two wet fingers.

She winced.

“Christ,” he whispered, concern for the pain he’d caused her deepening his voice, as hitherto unknown emotions threatened to unman him. He accepted that he had caused her hurt, accepted the horrible responsibility for what he had done, but accepting was not enough. In that prisoner’s cell, the image of Catherine had kept him alive, and in return, he’d brutalized her. No, acknowledging his culpability was not enough—

This night would forever shame him.

Something hard and inflexible shattered inside Hawk.

When had he become so intolerant, so closed off, that he couldn’t simply accept that some things—some beautiful, lovely things—could not be explained rationally.

Like Catherine. Why was he trying to put her in a neat little compartment? Was he such a coward, such a fool, that he couldn’t merely accept her in his life as the gift she was?

“Don’t douche,” he said softly when she reached for a floral package. “I want to be able to smell your musk.”

She nodded and placed the silly idea back on the shelf.

He handed her his shirt. “Here. Put this on. But don’t button it.”

Catherine shrugged into the cotton sleeves. “I’ll make us a cup of tea. We can have it by the fire in the front parlor.”

And like the perfect witchy-hostess, she swept passed him out the bathroom door, the tails of her borrowed shirt, flying.

At least it isn’t a broomstick,he thought, and chuckled. It was the first time he’d felt genuine mirth in over a year: another gift given to him by Catherine.

While Catherine banged around out in the kitchen, filling the kettle with water, placing it on the old-fashioned stove with a metallicclunk , he stumbled back to the bed.

The impression of Catherine’s head was still on the pillow. With his sharpshooter’s vision, he saw a strand of her golden hair decorating the pillowcase.

Without a thought as to how crazy it made him, he plunged his hand toward the single stand.

He captured it. The silky texture tickled his coarse fingertips as he pocketed it.

His muscles were quivering with leashed strength. He wanted to rush out of the bedroom, race to the kitchen, and bring Catherine into his arms. He wanted to kiss her forehead first, and then drop small kisses down across her cheekbones to the corner of her lips. He wanted to explore her mouth’s interior. Unhurriedly. He wanted to tilt his head to accommodate the difference in their statures, and then lift her up onto her toes until his hardness nestled against her belly. He ached for Catherine.

By the time he got himself together, the witch was already seated cross-legged in front of the hearth in the parlor. He took a seat across from her, and she served him tea in a china cup like they were having a friggin’ tea party. Drinking tea. Munching on hard biscuits spread with raspberry preserves. The fire at their backs.

Finished with the snack, Hawk leaned back, arm slung over his raised knee, watching Catherine delicately lick her lips clean of the raspberry preserves. Her small tongue darted across the fullness of her red-tinted lips, capturing every remnant of the berries.

He envied the raspberries.

Raspberries and woman, an irresistible combination…

“Let’s pretend we’re eating at a fine French restaurant and this is our dessert,” Catherine said.

“You do that a lot, don’t you?”

“Do what?” she asked between swallows.

“Pretend. Make up stories.”

She grinned, a gamine, playful acknowledgement of his words, completely negating the seriousness of his question. “A storyteller’s occupational hazard, I guess. There’s raw material everywhere for fantasy.”

“You admit to living in a fantasy world?”

“Hardly! But I was raised by two elderly aunts. Though I loved them dearly, sometimes being a child in a house without other children gets lonely. I often made up imaginary friends to keep me company.”

“Didn’t you have real friends?”

“Some. Not many. Kids weren’t allowed to associate with me because of my, shall we say, less than usual upbringing.”

The last bite of biscuit was popped into her mouth.

Her green eyes twinkled. “Mmmm, delicious!”

He laughed at her enthusiastic nibbling. Then, “You know, I can’t recall the last time I shared food with anyone.”

“Being isolated during imprisonment must have been particularly trying—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

He eyed the slender ribbon of flesh revealed by her gaping attire.

“Open the shirt, Catherine.”

She did, and her full breasts spilled out, their flagrantly huge nipples thrusting.

“The shirt is still covering your legs, Catherine.”

Licking a bit of raspberry preserve from her fingertip, she wiggled a bit and the tails of the too-large shirt parted, revealing her lush femininity, fully displayed in her crossed-legged pose.

He pushed the jar of preserves across the floor at her.

“Coat your nipples and clit with the raspberry preserves, Catherine.”

As instructed, Catherine dipped a finger in the jar and circled her huge nipples.

When they were bright red, and sticky, her finger went between her legs to the top of her sex.

She smeared her clit, until the plump nub was scarlet.

He could hardly speak in his excitement. “On your back,” he gasped.

After gracefully reclining, she asked serenely, “I imagine you’d like my legs open?”

He managed a jerky nod of his head.

Smiling, she bent her legs at the knee and opened them wide. “Is this what you had in mind?”

He didn’t attempt an answer; he crawled over to his raspberry tart and mouthed the preserves from one turgid areola, licking her sweetness in a circular motion. Done there, he moved to the next nipple, suckling her until the sticky preserves were gone.

He kissed his way to her white-gold fleece, his tongue darting inside the swollen folds, seeking and finding the sticky passion bud.

“Hawk,” she cried, winding her fingers into his long hair. “It’s happening again.”

He made a meal of her clit, rasping the plump nubbin with his teeth long after he’d swallowed the last of the raspberry preserves.

Craving. Wanting. Urgency. He had never felt this way before about a woman. He had never before known the desire to throw a lover on her back and kiss his way up her body--

Writhing on a fiery bed of nails, desperate to make love to Catherine but unwilling to hurt her again, he dragged himself to his feet. Hands gripped into fists, the head of his bulging cock weeping seed, he watched as Catherine, in the aftermath of climax, curled herself into a tight ball and wept.

He felt like doing the same.

Chapter Nine

Hawk’s shirt comforted Catherine as she recovered from another lonely climax.

Hawk’s scent was woven in the cotton; his warmth clung to the fibers. She pretended his arms were around her, not the shirt’s empty sleeves.

Hawk had pleasured her, and then retreated from her; he was standing way across the room, his expression bleak.

She had to help him!

Dying a little inside, but keeping her tone light, she said, “You don’t want to be attracted to me, do you, Hawk? You want me to fix it. To take the attraction away.” She forced out a small chuckle. “I usually get requests to cast love spells not remove them, so this will be a first.”

Catherine clutched at her empty womb. “I will try to sever our psychic connection! I’ll give myself over to incantation…”

But the pull between them was much stronger. Could she really do anything about it? Some forces were too powerful even for a witch. But for Hawk, she must try!

Poor Hawk! He looked so pained. His bronzed skin was stretched tight across his prominent facial bones; his body was vibrating with sexual urgency that he refused to give in to; his blue-black hair fell into his tortured face. She longed to brush her fingers through his hair. She longed to grab a fistful of it and pull him closer. She longed to comfort him with her body. But clearly he wanted no part of her.

“I know you think we’re wrong for each other, Hawk,” she said quietly. “That we’re two opposing forces. That a man like you couldn’t possibly become involved with a witch!”

Hawk laughed. “They say opposites attract, Catherine.”

She laughed too. “Oh, yes, I know.They say a lot of things and I bet you wish to hell thatthey’d shut up and leave mismatched people alone. And I suppose you’re right: opposites have no business getting involved in any romantic entanglements. It’s not practical.”

“Catherine, in case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t said anything. You’re the one doing all the talking here. And as far as I can see, practicality has nothing to do with this, with us. We could try to find a common meeting ground—”

“I know where that would be! Between my legs!”

“Catherine,” he said with a sigh, “some men and women have less. I know I’ve settled for less—”

“You’re just being kind. I know I must scare you. I know you don’t want to want me. I know you don’t believe for a moment that we belong together. You think we go past being wrong for each other into poison.”

“Geez—I’m doing an awful lot of analyzing here.”

Why was Hawk smiling? she wondered, when he had to be in pain.

Hawk had raised scars on his wrists and hands. She could see them clearly now that he was raking his fingers through his hair. The scars were red, still fresh. He had been through so much during his imprisonment! He had risked his life to save others, and now he needed a peaceful mind to recuperate from the torture he’d gone through. She was desperate to help him, desperate to love him and to have him love her, but sometimes the greatest love of all is in letting the beloved one go.

She recalled his psychic entreaty to her, remembered that branch Hawk spoke of. Well, they were both out on a branch, and Catherine was very much afraid that the tree limb was cracking under their combined weight. It was up to her to fly away and leave him in peace.

“Hawk, there is a way to sever our psychic connection. I could try to travel back in time to the year 1644, to when our ancestors were lovers in an early pilgrim settlement in Plymouth Massachusetts. I could try to sever our psychic connection before it ever took hold—”

* * * * *

In the summer of 1644, the pniese had claimed exclusive rights to Euphremia Prim’s body, but he had refused to wed her in traditional tribal ceremony.

One night, in a Neesquattow—house with two fires—there was a ‘get together’ for the unattached male and female members of the tribe. Hawk was an eligible buck, and the tribal pniese; it would have been considered an insult if he did not participate.

Euphremia was among the naked females who sat cross-legged on one side of the Neesquattow’s bulrush-covered walls. Bucks, stripped down to their loin skins, sat on the other side. As was the custom, each side silently eyed the other.

Once the ‘getting acquainted’ part of the evening was over, a wise woman entered the wetus and blindfolded the females. This was done to avoid petty jealousy and squabbles amongst the women.

Soon, the skin-covered communal sleeping platform was rife with the grunts and sighs and scents of sex as bucks chose females to mate. After copulation, the female partner was swapped, and often times shared, amongst the males.

Like the marriageable Wampanoag females, Euphremia was touched and stroked and fondled by the bucks. At times, by one set of hands, sometimes by two or three pairs, the eventual coitus done in every conceivable configuration.

By dawn, when the wise woman re-entered the wetus to remove the blindfolds, Euphremia’s vagina was raw and sore from non-stop intercourse and her buttocks were bruised from a gentle but insistent anal penetration. The things that had been placed inside both her back and front openings were still lodged there; they made her unable to stay still. Like the rest of the females, Euphremia writhed on the sleeping platform on her hands and knees, needing to copulate. Now! With anyone who would have her; she didn’t care who—

The males, grinning wickedly, didn’t comply. Instead, the females were herded like animals in heat, naked and writhing, through the village to the stream.

At the stream, the arrogant bucks watched while the frustrated females bathed and rubbed themselves, generally putting on a lewd show for their entertainment. By that point, the females were more than willing to wed whoever asked them, just for sexual relief.

Euphremia didn’t know how many men had shared her body the night before or who they were, but Hawk knew.

The reticent pniese refused to speak of it…or to ask her to marry him.

He had returned her to his wetus, and after removing the stone from her vagina and the smooth animal bone from her anus, he’d indulged both of her needs. Afterwards, he told he would release her back to her people—

* * * * *

It was time to tell Hawk the truth.

“You are the ancestor of a proud Wampanoag pniese, a wise warrior called Hawk Black Sky, nephew to sachem Massasoit. I am the ancestor of Euphremia Prim. Your ancestor took my ancestor as a raiding party trophy and raped her. They lived together for a summer and were blissfully happy, but he never told her he loved her. He set her free, Hawk, without ever saying the words! She married someone else, as did he.”

Hawk left his side of the room and began to approach. Slowly. Methodically. He was a careful man, even when his emotions were volatile.

In the intervening seconds before he closed the space that separated them, Catherine listened to the rapid tempo of her pulse, her heart, her breathing. All her senses were agonizingly sharp, magnified far beyond reality.

He took one more step and leaned into her; only a buffer of air kept their bodies from touching. His tortured face was within millimeters of her own. His nostrils were flaring. He seemed to breathe her in, cell by cell.

She was doing the same. They were each of them trying to absorb the essence of the other without ever making contact. The futility of that notion had long ago been written in the stars.

It hurt to witness the extent of Hawk’s aloneness.

It hurt to experience the extent of her own.

A person could die of loneliness long before disease ever claimed them. A person could die of a wasting spirit long before their physical body gave out. That’s what was happening to him. John Hawk had never allowed himself the simple pleasure of being close to another human being and he was shriveling up inside because of it. He needed to be inside her as much as she needed to have him there. But Catherine knew he was refusing the pull, he was fighting their connection. The psychic energy was draining him of his inner spirit. She had to let him go!

Then, something miraculous happened. The harsh planes of Hawk’s face which had first reflected disbelief, now showed a reluctant…not acceptance…that was too much to expect…but maybe the start of coming to terms with who he really was.

“I was adopted,” he said slowly. “There are no records of my birth.”

“You have the blood of the Native People flowing in your veins.”

He traced the outline of her face; the stroke of his fingers was so, so sweet. “My ancestor had to have loved your ancestor back then. If Euphremia was anything like you, how could he not have loved her? It was cowardice on his part that caused him not to commit to her; it was fear that caused him to set her free. My ancestor was a cowardly fool!”

Hawk was touching her face, his fingers lingering, and the action was entirely of his own volition! Hawk was giving her a Valentine’s gift beyond compare, and it would be the height of selfishness not to reciprocate in kind. Despite the fact that he was touching her, sheknew Hawk must still wish to be free of her! Well, her Valentine’s gift to him was to make his wish come true.

Chapter 10

Less than an hour later, Hawk followed the melodic singing into the bedroom.

Catherine was standing against the wall, chanting. Her beautiful face was radiant, transformed by something he saw, but couldn’t give name to, or totally understand. Perhaps he never would…

When she saw him, she stopped her song, closed her eyes, and repeated the words he had written with his own blood:

Witchy-woman,

A wild raptor trembles on the branch, his plumage broken.

Flight is impossible; the sky is too far away.

Will you catch the bird before he falls?

SOSays Accipiter

“We are one another’s receptor,” she said, staring at him, unblinking, eyes wide open. “That’s how I knew where you were in that horrid jungle. You called to me and I heard you, the same way we heard each other when we were children. The only way for me to free you of our psychic bond is to go back in time.”

Hawk went to her, not touching her, but so close the fine hairs around her temples lifted at his breathing, so near he breathed in the scent of roses and the breath she’d just released. From her mouth to his mouth. A kiss without touching.

Catherine had shaken him to the core of his beliefs. Was his ancestor a Wampanoag pniese? Had his ancestor mated in a green forest with a beautiful fair-haired pilgrim, a woman he had raped, fallen in love with, and then refused to marry? Was the psychic connection between Catherine and him real? And, most importantly, did any of it really matter?

“Happy Valentine’s Day, Hawk,” Catherine said, and held out her hand.

“What is it?” he asked, as the contents of her open palm settled into his own.

“It’s a feather from a ceremonial headdress your ancestor wore in 1644. The feather is my Valentine’s Day gift to you. That, and making your wish come true: I’m going away, Hawk.”

“I made no such wish!” Then, his horror escalating: “You’re leaving me?” He was unable to believe his ears, to grasp what she was saying. “But where are you going?”

“To a calm stream in a green forest. Our ancestors met there in 1644. Somehow, someway, I must break our psychic connection.”

“No. Don’t go. I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to leave me!” He thumbed her lush mouth. “Catherine, please, sweetheart, we can’t change the past. We can only change the present.”

“W-what are you saying, Hawk?”

“I’m saying, don’t go. Please don’t go.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you to. Because I couldn’t bear it if you left me. Because you’re the only thing that has kept me alive. Because you’re the only woman I’ll ever love. Because you’re my damnbliss. You can’t make it right in the past. But I can make it right now. Right this very minute. Forgive me, Catherine. Please forgive me. For what I said, for how I treated you. I’m begging you. And I swear if you do, I will spend the rest of my life making this night up to you.”

“Hawk, no. Shh. There’s no need.” She touched his lips with a fingertip and he felt her love flowing over him, healing him.

“There’s every need,” he insisted, feeling stronger than he had felt in a very long time. “My ancestor needs me to say the words.I need to say the words.”

“Then, I forgive you, Hawk,” she murmured. “Of course, I forgive you.”

Hawk took Catherine by the shoulders and brought her so close that even a ceremonial feather couldn’t come between them. Neither could a mistake from the past.

“I love you, Catherine. I’ll always love you. Forever. Marry me?”

At Catherine’s softly answered, “Yes,” Hawk slanted his strong jaw to hers and took his beautiful witch’s lips.

A Man Called Lust

© Stephanie Burke, 2002.

Prologue

Hold these close to your heart,

So that you will never forget me.

Our time is short!

We are blessed with such a short time.

One day

Yet I know that this one day

This one day eternal

Will sustain me for the year.

For if they discover our secrets

Those secrets will destroy us.

A letter from the box

Trembling, I reached inside and let my hands gently caress the aged parchment paper.

My heart pounded in my chest as I felt each bump and ridge of the old papers, felt the emotion that permeated each thin sheet.

The appointed hour was almost here.

I stared intently into the mirror that sat on my dresser and again saw nothing special, nothing unique, and nothing that I could figure would make me the recipient of such a wondrous gift.

Large brown eyes, Plain Jane eyes. Same medium length black hair, caramel colored skin. Nothing exotic or beautiful, just plain old me.

I wondered what my parents were thinking when they made me, plain old me, guardian of their secret treasures, the letter and the carved wooden box.

But I blessed them, wherever they were, for the duty that became a gift of immeasurable delight.

From the moment I’d received it so long ago; it had changed my life.

As the clock struck midnight on this night of all nights, I felt my pulse quicken and my eyes flash.

It was time…time to greet my love.

Even as I watched, the mirror began to grow cloudy. White and purple mists swirled and danced on its surface. Faster and faster they twirled, creating a cyclone of color in the rather dullness of my room. Faster and faster they turned, keeping pace with my pounding heart, and then I saw his face.

Large lavender eyes blinked owlishly at me, before the mist began to fade. As I watched, a slender, almost delicate hand pressed against some invisible barrier, leaned against it and without a sound, forced its way through.

“My love,” the reed thin tinkling voice, distorted by distance and space, whispered as the hand beckoned me to follow.

It was time.

My heart racing in anticipation, I eased the lid closed on the letters and placed my hand in his.

It was Valentine’s Day and, for a few hours, I would be away from the wasteland that the wars of 3009 created. I would be away from the land that never produced enough to eat, away from the struggling people, the constant darkness that surrounded the Earth, away from the misery of my life here.

For a time, I would be free, I would be with him, and this yearly blessing allowed me to stay sane, to survive another year here.

Without him.

Chapter One

Come quickly, come alone!

If you are followed, disaster will surely be fall us!

Together, we will defy those who would separate us

Those who are against us.

But as I stare into this mirror,

At my reflection, know this.

In my eyes, I see you.

And I love you, forever

A letter to my love; from the letter box

As always, I first felt a chill as I pressed one hand against the glass.

This mirror is all the vanity that I have left, all of my femininity, the only thing of beauty that I own. And as I leaned against its familiar chill, I again prayed that this time I would find a way to stay.

The hand I held was warm, pulsing with light, almost hot to touch. And he was mine.

Pressing harder, I began to feel the barrier of glass, like some thick gel, part for me. Its coolness eased past my face, making my nose itch as I began to force my way through. That warm hand was a beacon urging me to move faster. I closed my eyes and my body tingled as my face began to pass through.

This was always the hardest part, the face. Even the popping of my ears never sent a shiver up my spine as the coolness of magic and time slipping by, as if it would rip me back or toss me into an eternity lost in a void of darkness. I never watched, once I opened my eyes and was almost thrust into shock as the colors filtered and danced before my eyes. They surrounded me like they knew I was some anomaly that didn’t belong.

But as soon as I felt the coolness on my neck, the hand that still held mine gave a tug, and almost like a pea popping from a pod, I was forced through. I was free of the mirror and once again, I faced my love, my life, my air, my reason for being.

“Sinopee,” he breathed as I threw myself into his arms. His voice was as raspy and deep as I remembered.

“Lust,” I breathed into his chest, inhaling the rich sent of him, almost tasting him as I lost myself in his touch.

His name was Luster, but I called him Lust. But oh, how he sparked and shined in the sunlight.

His large almond shaped lavender eyes perfectly matched his hair so silver it sparkled. This long mane hung to below his buttocks and shimmered with his every movement. His skin, so pale and delicate in appearance, gave him an elf like quality, an illusion supported by his set of high pointed ears. But that is all that’s fae about Luster.

He was over six feet of strong muscled warrior. The sword that hung at his back was no mere ornament. I had seen him practice with the sharp blade and he could do serious damage when he wanted.

Like always when he greeted me, he was dressed only in tight black leather pants and knee high boots. The silver ring in his left nipple glistened, as did his hair, as did his whole body. On his wrists was a set of huge black braces, tooled with the name of his clan and the land that he was born to control, but denied…by them.

“You have come back to me.” His hands, those warm, work hardened hands, caressed my face as he lifted my head to meet his gaze.

“I will always come back to you. You are my life.”

“I am your fuck toy and you know it.” His rumbling laughter belied any seriousness in his tone.

“And I only have a day, so let’s get to it!” I playfully demanded.

“Commanding creature,” he hissed as he tangled his hands in my thick hair. “Do you not know who you order about?”

“Yes, my fuck toy, and the best fuck toy I ever happened to own!”

“Own? Me? Great warrior that I am? It is you, who are my object! And it is you who will find herself in serious trouble if you do not give me the respect I deserve!”

One would almost think he was serious, if it were not for the laughter sparkling in his eyes.

“I respect you,” I taunted. “Now take off the pants! I don’t have all day!”

He threw his head back, roaring with laughter, this merry sound carrying over the lush green grasses and tall trees that I would have never experienced had he not been the one to perform the sacred ritual that drew me, through the words in the letters, through the mirror.

“I have missed you, Sinopee.”

“And I you, Lust,” I replied, tears against my will, welling up in my eyes.

“None of that! You have time for tears after the mirror draws you back. For now, I intend on enjoying what I have missed during you long absence.”

“No relief?” I teased as he took the wooden box with the letters and placed them in a pouch at his side.

He said nothing as he took my hand and began to lead me where he had set up a camp.

“Only my left hand,” he sighed mournfully. “You know I am connected to you. I could never derive any pleasure from the act if I were with another woman.”

“Lucky me!” I giggled as he led me to his tent.

Large, black and made of some silky material, Lust’s tent was filled with lush carpets and huge pillows. It resembled some desert pasha’s harem from Old Earth.

“Is this how a rebel leader lives now?” I teased.

“Only for you, only on this day,” he replied, serious as he eased me inside and lowered the flap.

“And if they attack?”

“Glow and Shimmer will alert us. We are alone, but never totally alone.”

“I understand.”

I looked up at him. Even in the dim light of the tent, he sparkled and shone with an Inner Light, an energy that I have never experienced before.

As I watched, he reached out one hand and gently caressed my face.

His fingers trembled.

He pulled me closer as his hands began to explore my features, one by one, memorizing them for the long separation we faced after this day. His pupils, black islands on seas of purple, dilated and became hazy. His nostrils flared as his skin began to heat, to burn.

“I want you,” he breathed as he pulled me close to his hardening body.

Even as I watched, a noticeable bulge grew in the confines of the supple leather, grew and taunted me with its hidden secrets.

“How?” I whimpered as I felt my body respond to the nearness of his.

“Hard,” he whispered as he lowered his head to mine. “Deep,” he added as his tongue, long and pink lashed at my lips, moistening them with his essence, marking me as his. “Now.”

His mouth touched mine, that agile tongue reaching out to part my lips, to invade the territory he marked as his own.

I closed my eyes and moaned as I felt the large warmth of him take command of my mouth, exploring each tooth before delving deeper to taste the very essence of me.

“Yes, now!” I whimpered as I began to rub against him, like a cat in heat. My nipples tightened and began to swell with my racing emotions. My heart pounded as I inhaled his scent, the smell of earth and musk. Desperately, I ran my hands along his thighs, feeling his muscles tense under the leather, now hot to touch.

Slowly, I drug my hands upward, skirting his obvious erection and sliding up the muscled abs that supported a chest built for pleasure, my pleasure. I shuddered at the feel of his hot skin and pulled back to watch my progress as my fingers grazed his erect nipples, tugging lightly at his ring.

Lust threw back his head and groaned, the almost pained sound filling the confines of the warm tent. His hair cascaded backwards as he arched his back and reached for my touch.

“Yes,” he hissed as one large hand covered mine, forcing my fingers back to his ring, silently telling me to pull at it, to stimulate his nipple with a touch of pain.

Knowing his limits, I grasped the ring and gave it a gently tug, my breath catching as his body sheened with sweat and he began to tremble beneath my touch.

Then suddenly I was lifted from the ground, his arms a tight vise around me as he carried me to a pile of pillows in the center of the room.

I felt his knuckles graze my chest as he grasped the material of my tunic and rent it in two with one fierce jerk.

My bouncing breasts were exposed to his hungry view.

“Have you been waiting for me?” he demanded as he sat to roughly pull the boots from his feet. “Have you been a good little girl?”

“For you, always,” I breathed, excited by his touch and the lust in his eyes.

“I will know,” He stared down at me a moment before his hands went to that drawstring that held up his pants.

Slowly, under my watchful eyes, he tugged the thong free, exposing the firm pale flesh beneath his navel ands the silver treasure trail that marked the way to his greatest prize.

“Let me,” I whispered as I reached out and grasped his slim hips, my torn tunic falling from my body with my movements.

Slowly, I rose to my knees, grinning up at him, before I leaned in close for my first taste of paradise.

His skin was slightly salty and oddly enough, tasted fresh and new. Slowly, I ran my tongue down that glory trail, tickling his muscles, wetting his flesh, then I gently blew on the wet path I had blazed.

He moaned and then I could feel his hands shifting though my hair; tugging slightly, massaging my scalp, urging me onwards.

Eager to comply, I moved my hands from his waist to gently score his sides with my nails, before I ran them down to the opening in the confining leather.

Almost teasingly, I ran my fingers around the small indention made by the waist of his pants. I tormented him further by moving my hands to cup the hard firm globes of his ass.

“Sinopee,” he groaned as I played my erotic game of touch. “In a moment, I am going to forgo any tenderness that I feel and just fuck you until you can’t remember your own name.”

“Promises, promises,” I purred, but firmly gripped his pants and peeled them from his body.

Instantly, I was assaulted with the scent of hot leather and even hotter man. Inhaling deeply, I gently eased the front of his pants down, carefully freeing what I had craved for so long.

A thin sprinkling of hair made up his pubic bush, in the same silver tones as the hair on his head. It trailed lower until it surrounded the base of the most beautiful cock that I had ever beheld!

Thick was the only word that would do him justice. Thick and long, reaching about ten inches in length. The most amazing thing about his hard flesh was not the super soft skin, the near scalding heat it threw off, or even the sight and smell if the sweet precum that oozed from the purple mushroom shaped head when he was really excited, like right now. It was the curve.

Lust’s cock was bent in such a way that no matter what position I was in, the head scraped against my hot spot with every thrust. It was also perfect for double stimulation, as I lay beneath him and let his hardness slide down my throat. There was a lot to love about Lust, and I was ready to begin!

Chapter Two

Looking up at him, I lowered my head enough to run the tip of my tongue up the backside, from base to the hard ridge of flesh at the tip. He closed his eyes and his breath hissed from between clenched teeth as shards of pleasure pieced his skin.

Smiling, I hungrily lapped at the head, swirling my tongue around its flaring base before I engulfed the whole of him in my mouth.

“Gods, yes, Sinopee!” he breathed and his hands once again tangled in my hair, urging me faster.

Always ready to comply, I began the learned process of easing him to the back of my throat, gagging once as I became used to the feel of him in my mouth, then swallowing him deep.

“Pull off now!” he hissed. “This load is not going down your throat!”

That said, I slowly pulled him from my throat, marveling that I actually had swallowed it all. When finally only the head rested in my mouth, I gave him one final lick then sat back on my knees, waiting to see what would happen next.

I didn’t have long to wait.

In a flash of silver hair and pale skin, Lust pounced on me, pulling me to my feet, ripping the scant covering of my panties from my body. At last, I stood bare before his lavender gaze.

“You are beautiful,” he breathed as he took in first the damp curls that hid my pulsing center, then my heaving breasts with their erect berry colored nipples. Finally, his eyes met mine, and I knew that the heat brewing within him would soon be flowing through me.

Before I could blink, his mouth slammed onto mine, sucking the air from my lungs, stabbing his tongue deep.

I whimpered as I felt his fingers run down my back to cup my ass, to pull me into the long hard length of him, to grind against my curls, making me moan into his mouth.

Those same hands slipped up to my waist, lifting me, leaving me no choice but to wrap my legs around his small waist and hold on for dear life as I felt him position me for the taking.

“This is what I want,” he hissed as he pulled back, the long strands of his hair caressing my swollen nipples, making me tingle with an inner fire that he controlled. “Hot, wet, and mine.”

I felt him free one hand to position his hard cock at the entrance to my wet pussy.

“Please,” I whimpered, wiggling around as I felt the large mushroom shaped head began to part my lower lips.

A leering grin crossed his lips and a twinkle filled his eyes as he stared down at me. I held my breath, anticipating the first thrust, then I screamed as he drove home in one long deep thrust.

It had been quite some time for me, and the feel of his hot steel parting me was a painful pleasure. Almost immediately I tightened my legs around his body and began to ride his pleasure pole.

“Tell me!” he hissed as he held my writhing body still, trying to keep control of me.

I whimpered in response and threw my head back as I could feel his heartbeat vibrating and beating inside me through his cock.

“Tell me!” he demanded again, refusing to move until I acknowledged him.

“Fuck yes!” I cried out, reassuring him that I was uninjured. “Please! Ride me hard!”

He groaned at my words, but then I felt the big muscles of his thighs contract a moment before he eased out of me, a slow delicious slide, then slam back home.

“Lust!” I cried, tears filling my eyes as fire shot from my nipples to my clit. “Please! More!”

He smiled as I felt his hands return to my waist and shift my body. Then I felt his silky pubic bush grind into my clit, making it burn with a fire of his creation.

He rotated his body as he pulled out, making sure the thick shaft of his cock drug against my clit. This was an entirely new feeling.

By now my head was lolling back and forth on my neck, my mouth hanging open as my moans and cries filled my ears and took me to another level of excitement.

“Faster?” he asked as I felt him shift again.

Before I could even get my thoughts together to respond, he dropped to his knees, the jarring of his body sending another frisson of pleasure shooting though mine. Then my back was to the carpeted floor, his large body looming over me, his purple eyes dilated in pleasure as his breath hissed through those perfect lips.

“For life,” he breathed as he rested his hands on either side of my head,

Lost in desire, I began to lick at his thick wrists, tasting the salt from his sweat, the taste of my man, while urging him silently to cover me and lead me on to a glorious explosion I only experienced in his arms.

He grunted as he shook his head, his long silver hair caressing my breasts, my neck, my chest as be began to move.

“Take it!” he growled as the first powerful thrust nearly lifted me from the floor.

My legs slid up until my knees were almost pressed to my chest, opening myself fully for his assault.

Lust took advantage of my actions by pulling my legs around his waist, sliding his hands under my back to cup my shoulders and pull my body deeply into the curve of his. The race was on.

I struggled to thrust my body towards his pleasure maker as he began thrusting deeply into me. The wet slap of out bodies combined with our passionate screams and gasps filled the air. The scent of our combined bodies created a heady perfume that drove my sense wild. I needed more!

I could hardly think at all as the large flaring head of his cock hit my every hot spot, repeatedly. Faster and faster he moved! Sweat shined both of our bodies and the hard press of his body gave me a feeling of being dominated by the mound of muscle above me.

Harder and harder we strained against each other, building and striving until my muscles began to tense in anticipation of a cataclysmic explosion.

Suddenly, for a moment, the word tipped on its axis! I forgot how to breathe, to see, to think! All that mattered was the next thrust of his cock that would send me over into the next realm, shooting through the galaxy on my journey of delight.

Explosions! Eruptions! Detonation! I was there!

My internal muscles spasmed around the fullness of his shaft, caressed and milked and pulled until a scream exploded from his throat.

I whimpered as I felt blast after blast of his hot cream scalding my insides, soothing the muscles that he had abused, filling me with a sense of joy and peace.

I looked up at him, my man, and saw the damp silver strand of his hair sticking to his face, the mouth slack in pleasure, his muscles rippling as they dealt with this outpouring of emotion, his dazed yet beautiful lavender eyes.

“I love you,” I whimpered as I shuddered in his arms.

“More than words,” he repeated. “Forever.”

Chapter Three

I leaned in closer to him, eager to feel the warmth of his touch again. We had so little time! I had to store up my memories, I had to hold a part of him embedded in my mind, for the time when the magic faded and I was thrust back into my own pathetic dark existence, a brain, nothing more, nothing less.

I felt his hands, those pale powerful hands, cupping my face gently. He understood my pain for he shared it. I could see the knowledge in his eyes, see him damning the fates that had so cursed us, yet hoping against hope that this time would be different.

A tear fell from my eye as his lips brushed against mine, but a loud noise, the sound of horse hooves, broke us apart.

Luster turned as the door flap was flung open.

He opened his mouth to protest and I dove for a pillow to use as cover as the onyx face of Glow appeared around the tent flap.

“Tritons!” he shouted as his knowing eyes took in my naked body cowering behind pillows and the unashamed nakedness of his leader.

Lust was instantly all business as he reached for first his sword, then his pants.

“How many and where?”

“A group of twenty,” Glow answered as he stared at the ground. “And they are headed in this direction. What magic do they posses that makes us to easy to track?”

“Damnable luck,” Lust responded as he quickly donned his pants and attached his sword to his back.

“But to find us here? They have never been able to track us here!”

Glow, so named for the white-hot glimmer that exploded from his eyes at his agitation, swore softly as he turned to leave the tent.

“Something is not right, Luster. Glimmer feels it, I feel it, and maybe if you weren’t so involved with the thinker, you would know it.”

I gasped as I stared at his retreating back. Never had Glow spoken so harshly of me. Thinker was the worst insult you could lay on someone in this world of myth and magic.

“Glow!” Lust shouted, anger lending his pale skin a bluish tinge. “Sinopee has nothing to do with this!”

“Well…they left we of the forests, alone until she started visiting! And she is from a place where thinkers rule! Thinkers, just like the ones who are hunting us down and killing us slowly!”

“It was magic that brought me my Sinopee, Glow! Do not forget that!”

“Well, I guess that magic does not hold the answers to all the problems, does it?”

Glow slammed out of the tent, without a word, leaving his leader panting in anger.

“Maybe I should go,” I offered, my voice trembling in trepidation of what he would say. He alone held the final verdict. No one could force me to leave my Luster, no one but Luster. And if he willed, it I would go.

But to never see my lover again, never to caress the ice hair or the skin that seemed too delicate for a man. My heart would break, my reason for being extinguished.

“You go no where,” he said, turning back to me. “My people appointed me leader for a reason, Sinopee. Glow is just flustered by the Triton being so close. They are growing more skilled. It seems that maybe this science stuff has some merit, or maybe they got lucky.

“Science is important, Luster. If you would let me help you, we could set up...”

“No, Sinopee. It is science that created the Tritons. It lends them their strength and is their greatest predictability. We will rely on what was gifted to us, magic and strategy.”

“But Luster—”

“No, Sinopee.” He smiled at me to alleviate some of the sting of his words, but they hurt nevertheless.

“Luster,” I began again, turning away from his great beauty. “Science is my gift.”

“But Sinopee, sweet Sinopee,” he sighed as he dropped to his knees beside me. “This is not your world, not your fight.”

“But I was brought here!” I protested, trying to keep the frustration and fear out of my voice. If anything happened to Luster, if anything happened to my lover...

“For me, Sinopee. You were brought here because I need you to be complete. Without you, I have no will to go on.”

“Just maybe I was brought here so that you could utilize my gifts,” I repeated sullenly.

Before he could answer, Glow returned.

“I have brought clothing, Sinopee,” he sighed. “And...an apology. I was out of line. This has been our fight for years, for as long as I can remember. I let my anger get in the way of my judgment. Neither you nor anyone else will make a difference in this battle. I fear it will be eternal.”

“Thank you, Glow,” I answered, trying desperately to think of something to say. But what can you say to people who have known war, poverty, hunger, and desperation all their lives? I feared that if this war ever ended, the people would lapse into decline for lack of knowledge of anything else but war. “I appreciate the clothing and the apology.”

“We had best make haste.” He nodded in my direction, then turned to exit the tent.

Glow was a gorgeous man, as dark as Luster was pale and light. His onyx skin seemed to show off each muscle to perfection. His hair was straight and long, the black mass hanging way below his waist, and he moved silently like the shadows. But it was his eyes, the pearlized white eyes with the even paler pupils that made Glow stand out. He was Luster’s right hand and the Resistance would be lost without him.

But he was so pessimistic!

“Well, make haste woman!” Luster laughed as he turned his purple eyes, happy once again, in my direction.

“But go where? We always spend our day in the tent, here! Next to the ancient Rowan and the crystal clear stream.” I closed my eyes and listened for a moment, hearing the roar of the waterfall that fed the stream that I hailed near in my dreams.

“Yes, but now I will have to take you with me.”

“Where?” I wanted to know! In all the time I had been journeying through the mirror to these foreign lands, I had always found myself in the company of Luster and his people, here! I had been nowhere else! I knew of no other places. And what if I could not make it back here before the enchantment ended?

I shuddered as I recalled the blank void of cold nothingness that separated these two places, my world and his.

“We go to the Citadel,” he said as he held up the garment that Glow has chosen.

It was very feminine, in a homespun kind of way. It was a long gown; a light tan color that I knew would compliment my complexion and my eyes. But I had never worn anything like it. My tunics were made mass-produced by the government. Everyone wore the same shapeless thing, thought the men’s tunics were a bit longer. But still, uniformity was kept. This was completely new to me.

“Get dressed,” he urged as he plopped the thing over my head.

It felt almost rough to the touch, but so light and...and feminine. I could almost picture myself running through the trees and picking flowers, something I had been only able to do here.

Shrugging and struggling to hide my delight, I slipped the garment on and stood, easing it down my bare legs.

But then I felt something else easing down my inner thigh.

I blushed as I looked up at him.

“What?”

“I need to use the...river,” I stammered as I took baby steps to the exit.

Laughing and understanding my predicament, Luster nodded and called for Glow to help take down and pack the tent.

“Five minutes,” I heard as I gingerly made my way to the bushes that grew along the bank. “And then, to the Citadel.”

I let a smile break free as I made the river and stripped off my new garment. After all of these years, Lust was taking me to his home.

Chapter Four

I smiled as I tromped through the tall green grasses and delighted at the feel of their dampness beneath my bare feet. I looked up, towards the heavens, as sunlight filtered down between the tall branches of stately trees. The air had never smelled so sweet, felt so fresh, been so important to me! I stifled a giggle as I fought the urge to race ahead, touching everything that I could, gathering nature to my chest, burying my face in the splendor that no one from my world had ever experienced.

“Slow down!” laughed Luster as he followed in my wake. “It is not as if you know the way.”

“But I am free, Lust! Free and I have never felt more alive!”

I twirled around, getting my hem caught on the odd bush, but even that was a joy.

“We don’t have trees where I come from. Only pictures.”

“Where do you come from?” Glow asked. Between the two of them, Luster and Glow had broken camp and had stashed the tent and the pillows behind the waterfall. Luster said that is where they kept special things, and I agreed. That tent was indeed special. Luster still carried my ancient box of letters and both men carefully listened for any signs from the still unseen Glimmer.

“From the other side of the mirror,” I said as I fell back to march between the two warriors. “Where thinkers rule and life is dull.”

“But where is that?” Glow would have made an excellent scientist, with all of his questions and queries.

“It is just there, Glow. And it’s so different than what is here. I mean, there is no grass and trees. Well, there is some grass at the University. They are trying to grow or create more. And the air is not as sweet. That is because of the lack of trees. There are some trees left, but the great wars killed off most of them.”

“That sounds...ugly.” Glow decided as he held back a branch from a large tree for all of us to pass.

“It is very brown.” I decided, after a moments’ thought, and nodded my thanks as I walked past him, almost slipping as the land began to curve downward. “And the people, well, there are no people like you where I come from.”

“And what does that mean?” Glow asked as he tried to picture a world beyond his imagination.

“Well, we all kind of look like me.”

“Everyone?” he asked incredulity in his voice. “That’s not possible! We are all born with certain gifts.”

“There is no magic where I come from Glow.” I said, sighing in true regret. There hadn’t been magic back at home for a very long time. And for me, more so, since my parents had disappeared. “And just about everyone looks like me. There are no people with glowing eyes or translucent skin. We all are kind of...brown.”

“Like the land.” He shook his head as if oddities like this were abominations.

“Like the land.” I assured him. “The land and the people are quite plain and brown.”

“But you are not plain, Sinopee,” Luster laughed as he finally spoke. “You are full of wonder and energy. And you are mine.”

“As you are mine,” I laughed. “But I am plain and brown. The land is plain and brown. We kind of match.”

“But with magic...”

“There is no magic, Glow.” I sighed. “We have science. Only science. Science will help create a better world for our future generations. My parents died searching for a way, and I will carry out their work to find away. Perhaps being here has inspired me, but for now, there is only science.”

“But I have heard you mention these weapons of war that destroyed your planet, your Earth.”

“Yes,” I sighed again as he marched onward. “We created the bombs and the chemicals that caused a lot of damage.”

“Then did your science, the science that you depend on now, not destroy your land?”

“People...”

“Same with magic,” Glow interrupted. “The people who control it shape the use, be it for bad or for good. But with magic, only certain people get certain gifts. There, anyone can use this science and create disasters. It is what made the Tritons so powerful. Any one of their choosing can yield it, use it, and destroy with it. Magic is scarce. Those of us who posses it regulate others. We cannot hand it down to people who will follow. It is...sacred.”

“Good point, Glow.” I conceded as he began to leave the tree-studded forests and head for clearer land. “But look what science is doing here. Only a few have the magicians on the run. You need to even the battle field, to regulate it.”

“The best way to defeat you enemy is to know your enemy.” Glow said, nodding in agreement.

“The best enemy is one who can make you think that he does not exist.”

Glow paused and turned to face me, his eyes...glowing.

“The woman has some intelligence, Luster!”

Luster beamed.

“And here I thought that she was just a good lay!”

“Hey!” I glared at Glow for his comments, but both he and Luster exploded in laughter.

“But it was not me, screaming like a cat in heat!” I sniffed as I walked ahead, grinning as Lust’s face exploded blue with embarrassment and Glow’s hissing snickers filled the air.

I could take it, but I dished it better.

“Coming?” I called back. But as I turned to resume the trek, a whistling sound filled the air, and the land to my left exploded as though struck by lightening.

“Tritons!”

Chapter Five

“Move!”

It was Luster’s voice that sounded in my ear a moment before his heavy body thrust me to the rocky ground I had earlier reveled in.

“Where the hell is Glimmer?” Glow’s voice whispered and I realized that he was lying off to my right, close enough to protect Luster with his body if need be, but far enough to give him room to maneuver.

“No time!” Luster hissed as he peeked over his shoulder, up the hill, to see how far we were away from the timberline, I assumed. “Where did the blast come from?”

“Ahead,” Glow answered as he cautiously rose up on his elbows.

I realized that we were sheltered partially by an outcropping of stone that grew out of the earth near the bottom of the hill. As I lifted my head a bit, I could see where the trees started again at the bottom of the hill. But I could also see the great distance we had to cover without any protection at all.

“Positive?” Luster asked as he dropped down and looked towards Glow again.

“Positive enough,” he hissed a moment before another blast tore up the ground a few feet away from us, the closest the blast could get with us behind our protective barrier.

Fear struck me numb, but also there was curiosity. Would I finally get to see what the feared Tritons looked like, and would I live to tell the tale?

“Can you do it?”

What? They had slipped into that damn code speak they sometimes did. I realized that it was an efficient way of giving orders when time was short, but it kind of bugged me. I hated not knowing what was going on around me. Maybe it was my analytical mind; maybe it was because I was curious by nature. Or maybe it was because I hated being in the dark about anything. But I looked over at Glow, trying to see what it was that he was supposed to be able to do.

“No choice.” He hissed back, then he did something that I thought I would never see. Glow began to undress.

Peeking over the stone every few seconds, Glow mentally plotted some course of action while he divested himself of his garments. His gauntlets went first, the black leather sliding from his powerful forearms and fists. Next, he slid his tunic over and off his chest. Unlike the men that I had met previously, Glow was the only one to run around with a shirt on. Now that the muscular planes of his chest were exposed to the dim light of the growing day, I wondered why.

Each muscle was perfect in their ebony skin. Each bulging with strength that can only come from hard work and practice. His massive shelf of a chest tapered into a neat triangle of muscle, a tiny waist and a stomach that rippled with tight drawn abdominals.

The ties of his pants were unknotted at one side and the material pulled down thick thighs tense with the rising tension around us. He paused for a moment to ease his boots from his feet, before the dark leather was drawn away from his body.

I tried desperately not to look at what I wanted to see, but curiosity moved my eyes.

As Glow leaned up to peek over the boulder again, I let my eyes roam over the very core of his body, to see if he measured up to Luster. Crass I know, but under the circumstances, not knowing if I would live to see another year, I had to peek.

Even limp, Glow carried a formidable weapon. Just as dark as the rest of him, Glow’s manhood hung heavily between his muscular legs. It rested atop a pair of neat rounded balls with its large flange of a head that was strangely enough, circumcised.

For that matter, Luster was circumcised. For rebels whom escaped and now lived in the underground protected by the forests and who were immersed in magic, it seemed quite odd to me.

But Glow’s next words brought me swiftly out of my musings and back to reality.

“If you are done examining me, I will endeavor to explain what is happening.”

My face exploded in color and Luster chuckled from behind. Thank God he wasn’t upset by my lapse in manners, but Glow was worth a few glances.

“Not funny!” I hissed. “Besides, I wasn’t expecting a strip show. My people just don’t remove their clothing at a moment’s notice.”

“A pity. If they did, I am sure that you would find the thought of our encroaching death more attention holding than a few bits of male flesh.”

I stuck my tongue out at Glow. Childish I know, but it was the only thing I could think of at the time.

“No wonder you were screaming,” Glow had his eyes firmly on Luster as he delivered his words. “I bet that thing could wrap around you twice, it is so long.”

With all the dignity I could muster, I pulled my tongue back into my mouth and felt the burn as my embarrassment reached new heights.

“Nay!” Luster chuckled. “I am far too thick, but she can use her tongue in ways I never imagined.”

“Luster!” I hissed, reaching out to pinch a conveniently located thigh.

“Ouch!” he hissed, sounding wounded. “It is a talent; something to be proud of.”

Then I realized that they were trying to use a bit of humor to break the tension a bit. I noticed that Glow’s muscles still bulged, but were not as tense. His attention was once again drawn over the lip of the boulder, observing something.

“There are shadows there,” he explained as he eased back down beside us. “There are shadows, and that should be enough.”

“Enough for what?” I asked quickly. I wanted to know what to expect. I couldn’t fathom Glow moving from behind the protection this boulder offered. It scared me to think of the rough spoken man putting all of his naked glory on the line for us, while we did nothing.

“The shadow’s, Sinopee,” he reminded me. “The perfect enemy? Remember?”

The perfect enemy was one that could make you believe that he didn’t exist.

“Glow?” I reached out to touch his arm. What was this man planning on doing? What was Luster letting him do?

Before I could say anything more, Glow nodded to Luster who rose to his knees, a perfect target, and let loose with a flash of purple white light.

It flared so bright that I had to cover my eyes, yet I knew that it exploded from his person. This I had seen before, when we first met, when he first recited the spell in the letters that brought me here. He used a bit of his energy to gain my attention through the mirror. But now, I saw no purpose to what he did.

I turned to ask Glow what was happening, but there was no one there.

I rolled back to face Luster, but he dropped to the ground beside me, just as several bolts of light struck the stone just above where we were hiding. Stone chips and dust kicked up and encircled us as Lust once more covered my body with his.

“Now we wait,” he said as he settled himself more conformably on top of me, burying his face in my neck.

“Wait for what?” I asked as I reached up to grasp two handfuls of his hair, pulling his face up so that I could look into his eyes. “Where is Glow? What just happened?”

“Glow has gone to be the perfect warrior or the perfect enemy.”

“What?”

“The shadows, Sinopee. Glow is perfectly suited for moving in shadows. I just provided enough light to creates some, so that he can utilize his magic to its fullest potential.”

“Speak English!” I shouted at him. “What did you do? Where is Glow?” I was almost shouting in my fear.

I had never sent anyone out to die for me! I didn’t want Glow to be the first! I would rather us perish together than to carry that guilt for the rest of my life.

“Glow’s magic,” he soothed as he pulled his hair from my frantic grip, wincing all the while, “Is based on shadows. If he can find a shadow as small as a blade of grass, he can meld with it, hide in it. That is why he thought your words about the perfect enemy amusing. Glow is the perfect enemy. The light blast I provided distracted the Tritons watching, and created a big enough shadow so that Glow could have a good start on making his way down the hill.”

“He is going for help?” I hoped that he could reach the Citadel in time. I had no idea how long the Tritons would hold their position. If they knew that he had no serious weapons, they could rush us and end the matter permanently. I knew of no magic that could bring the dead back to life.

“No, he is going to get the Tritons.”

“What?” I shrieked and tried to rise to my feet. If Luster would not end this foolishness, I would call Glow back!

“Calm down!” Luster hissed as he pulled me back to the ground and this time added his weight to my body, so that I could not move. “Glow knows what he is doing!”

“He is going to get himself killed!” I tried to fight against Luster’s strength, but he easily held me o the ground.

“This is our fight, Sinopee. We are experienced. We know what we are doing!”

“He is but one!” I argued.

“One of us is all it takes.”

“But...”

Tears began to fill my eyes as I stared up at Luster, at the beautiful eyes that on the surface appeared calm. But being around him long enough gave me insights into his person. Under the façade of ease and confidence, there was worry.

I realized that doing this, allowing his men to tromp out into danger, hurt him. He was almost like a parent, wanting to protect each one, and hurting when they faced danger. But he had confidence in Glow’s abilities. I saw that as well. But this course of action was eating him up.

“Glow knows what he is doing.” Lust stated with authority. “He knows what to expect and has gone against the Triton before. He will signal when all is clear.”

But as he rested against me, I could feel the rapid beat of his heart, feel the tension that never quite left. And I knew that Lust would suffer until he saw that signal.

I did the only thing I knew that would calm him a bit, that would ease his tortured spirit.

“I believe,” I whispered as I stared deep into his eyes, showing him that I meant what I said. “I believe in Glow and I believe in you.”

I had no idea that my doubts were causing him to worry. Now I tried as best as I could to ease the damage.

Instead of answering, he lowered his lips to mine. I felt the brush of his tongue, a moment before his mouth descended and took control of mine.

I moaned as his tongue invaded, as it coaxed mine to duel and his unique flavor filled my mouth.

In that instant, worry became desire, and God help me, I relished it.

Chapter Six

I whimpered as I felt my body instantly respond to his caresses. Before I could even think or breathe, a white-hot passion filled my body, making me moan into his hot mouth and arch my back, dying to get closer to his naked flesh.

“Oh God!” I gasped pulling away. “What are we doing?”

Glow was down there, somewhere, risking his life, and all I could think about was burying my face in his crotch and inhaling his male musk.

“Sinopee,” he breathed as his hand began pulling the dress up my legs, baring my skin to the shock of his callused flesh.

Then my thoughts were lost again as I felt his fingers tease at my thighs.Maybe we shouldn’t, became,please and yes!

Up my inner thigh his hard fingers trailed, pressing hard enough as not to cause a tickle, but just light enough to tease.

His tongue was playing a new game too, licking at my lips, daring mine to tangle with his, as he tasted my face.

“I am going to eat you out,” he whispered as his mouth moved up my neck, to blow a puff of warm air in my ear. “I am going to eat you and suck all the juices from your body. Are you wet for me, baby?”

I nodded, my voice escaping me as my body writhed against his strength.

“Not an answer, baby.” His fingers moved a bit higher as his tongue made a foray down my neck and into the exposed cleavage the gown allowed to show.

But it was not enough. It was never enough. The gown, my sturdy yet feminine dress, the most ladylike thing I had ever owned, had to go.

Ignoring his chuckles, I pulled the gown higher than he had.

I felt no shame! There in the waning darkness of the previous night, I pulled my gown up, exposing my breasts to the chill air, my nipples tightening in reaction.

“Pretty, baby,” he purred as his other hand left off teasing my thighs to caress the whole of my breast.

I gasped at the contrast between my cooling skin and his hot hands. I closed my eyes; my head rolling back and forth as his fingers gently tugged at a nipple.

“Harder,” I managed. “More!” But then his fingers made a jump from the warm skin of my breast to the damp curls that protected my portal.

“Here?” he asked, his breath hot against my neck as he bit at my shoulder.

“Uh huh,”

The suddenly his head was between my legs.

“Fuckromance. I wantraw passion .”

I bit my lip to prevent a scream as his tongue delved between my lower lips and lapped at my clit.

“Fuck yeah,” he breathed as I arched up against his mouth, my moans becoming louder.

I felt his fingers part me and expose my throbbing nubbin. His hot breath rushed over me a second before his mouth descended. He took me into his hot mouth and began to gently suckle me.

“Luster! Don’t stop!”

I whimpered and wiggled as I tired to get closer to his explosive touch. Then he added another element to my arousal.

I felt my juices slip between us as his fingers toyed at the portal to my cunt. I whimpered, thinking about how good those hard fingers would feel thrust...

“Yeah!” I gasped as I felt him ease two fingers inside, deep.

His fingers gave me the penetration that my body desired, and they began to thrust in and out slowly, fulfilling my need to be taken.

His wiggled his fingers as he suckled me a bit harder, making me whine like a bitch in heat, searching out that spot deep within that would explode my universe.

Then his fingers found that spot that sent electric waves coursing through my body and flashing lights behind my closed eyes.

When I jumped, he began to hum, sending vibrations into the heart of me while his fingers moved faster and faster, grazing that spot, massaging it until my nerves were ready to snap.

My body locked up, my muscles tensed, and suddenly, I was airborne, flung high into the sky by the convulsion now taking place within. His hands and his mouth worked together, masturbating me to the highest climax I had ever reached. I never wanted it to end!

My inner muscles grabbed at his fingers, squeezed them as liquid heat ran through my veins!

My heart pounded in my chest, my breath heaved and my whole body trembled in the face of such an awesome release.

“Luster,” I managed after a moment as I winced at his caresses. “Too sensitive,” I gasped as slowly he withdrew from me, his fingers cupping my wet womanhood as if staking his claim.

Chapter Seven

I shuddered as I dropped down from my climax, wondering if I would ever fly that high again.

I turned to look at Lust, his head resting on my thigh, his tongue lazily bathing my flesh clean from the juices that still dripped, showing him my willingness to do it again, and thought, why not?

I reached for the thong that held his pants up.

I wanted more than a good...okay, a great lick from my man. Time was short and like he said, life was unsure. So I was going to take advantage while I could.

My fingers tore at the tiny strip of leather that was determined to keep me from the hot flesh that I needed.

I could picture his cock, thick and throbbing with his every heartbeat, its widened head oozing his sweet pre-cum. I wanted his essence to mix with mine. I wanted to feel that steel hard shaft sinking into my depths, forging new territory within my body.

Grunting with my urgency, I tore the belt pouch away from the thong holding up his pants and began whipping it from him.

“Eager?” he joked, though his face looked pained. The tightness of his leather pants was starting to get to him. My baby needed release, a quick release.

Denying to answer, I moaned in impatience as I began to work the hot tight leather down his body.

But then I heard it.

It was Glow.

“Ifyou want to get out of here, I suggest you put the festivities on hold.”

“Glow!” I nearly screamed as I pulled away from Luster and turned towards that naked man, my eyes first assessing his dirt streaked body, before returning to his face. “You are alive!”

“Like you would have noticed if I died,” he snickered and my hands immediately went to my gown, pulling it down to cover all of my damp swollen exposed parts.

“Are they...”

“Report,” Luster interrupted, earning a glare from me, which he responded to with a sheepish grin.

“I caused enough confusion so that if we are very careful, we can get out of here right now, if we hurry.”

I was all for leaving. I may have some fond memories of this huge rock, but I was ready to go.

“How much time?” Luster asked as he retied his thong and loosely attached the pouch containing the letterbox.

“About two minutes.”

As he spoke, Glow tugged on his black pants, adjusting them to hold his obvious arousal, but not bothering with his shirt.

“What did you do?” I hissed as I straightened my clothes and crouched low, as both men were doing.

“I caused chaos and confusion. They are shooting at shadows, but they won’t be for long. Let’s move.”

Following his lead, Luster and I carefully ran down a trail marked by Glow, a trail that apparently only he could see.

“Where is Glimmer?” I hissed as I discovered that my physical fitness could not be maintained screwing around with Luster once a year! I needed more exercise.

I was out of breath as we zigzagged through a maze of boulders and scrub bushes. But I refused to slow the men down. We needed to get to safety and I refused to be the reason we met with disaster if we did run into Tritons.

“Ahead,” Glow whispered back as he dropped to the ground and slithered across the rough gravel of the exposed mountainside. “She got cut off, but I made some room for her to move and prepare the way.”

I blinked at his actions, as he seemed to grow feet and protective gear under his bare stomach.

“I am not...”

“Down!” Luster hissed as he grabbed my arm and almost ripped it off my body in an effort to get me low.

Obediently, I dropped. I decided to leave this to the professionals. But if a problem involving three-dimensional calculus ever came up, I was your girl.

As Luster hit the ground beside me, two things happened. There was a hiss and the air around us tingled a moment before a boom sounded where the boulder previously was. And under that, there was the faintest sound of wood cracking against stone. It almost sounded like a bone breaking, but the sound was sharper.

The box! The box had fallen out of Luster’s pouch.

“Luster...” I began, but again he cut me off.

“Now is not the time, Sinopee!”

“But...”

“No! Tell me later! We need to try and save our lives and not worry about petty shit!”

“Petty!” I almost rose to my knees to tear a strip off of him, but the explosion to the right of me halted my movements.

Taking a cue from Glow, who was now rolling down the remainder of the hill, regardless of the sharp stones and stinging branches, I sucked in a deep breath and rolled.

I could come back for the letters later. If we didn’t get them back... I thought of the cold feeling in the abyss of space then shuddered. I didn’t want to think on it right now.

But I could silently curse as I felt the skin of my hands and face tear as I slid across the rough gravel. I was too sacred to remember to cover my face, so I just sucked in my screams and tried to ignore the friction burns that were sure to cover my body, especially after the gown started to rise up.

Behind me, I could hear Luster doing his own barrel roll as he flew down the mountainside. How he managed to keep his sword from stabbing him, I will never know!

We landed at the bottom of the hill, at the base of a huge green tree just as the sun chased away the final shadows of the morning.

“Run!” a voice hissed from above.

I looked up barely in time to see a shimmering form and deep blue hair before I was jerked to my feet and we were running.

Glimmer had arrived. We must be close to the Citadel, I thought.

And we had better not be too far away from the mountain! Luster didn’t know we had lost the box with the letters. If anyone else found them or if they were destroyed...

I didn’t even want to contemplate that future. I always said that I couldn’t live being parted from Luster; but if that box was not recovered, I would learn what it is like to die with him.

Chapter Eight

My love! They know!

You must guard these words that I have written!

Keep them from prying eyes, the eyes that will spy

The eyes that will lie!

Disasters beyond your imagining will occur if these letters,

If these precious words, are lost to you.

Death will be preferable to having them own my gateway to my sanctuary, your heart.

From the letter box

“This way!”

The fairy light voice tinkling at us led us through a winding twisting maze of tree roots.

This other half of the forest was darker, much denser, and harder to traverse. The men followed the voice and the flash of blue hair and we never missed a step.

“Lust,” I panted as I ducked and dodged over the thick brown roots. “The letters...”

“Not now,” he breathed as he looked back over his shoulder before urging me forward. “We need silence. We are too close to the entrance.”

“But...”

“Why didn’t you just leave her?” the voice tinkled, the blue hair flashed, and I still could not see who was leaping from tree to tree.

“Because she is mine,” Luster sighed. “She owns me heart and soul.”

“How cute!” the feminine, and it definitely was feminine, person snorted. “And is she worthdying over?”

“That is enough,”Luster snarled as he pulled to a stop, his chest was heaving and damp tendrils of hair clung to his bare flesh. Gorgeous as always, I thought.

“Glow almost...”

“Glow did his job. Now I suggest that you do yours.”

We halted at the base of a rather large tree with a thick green base. The trunk was so thick that I doubt that Glow, Luster and I, with arms linked could reach around it.

It was from this tree that the arguments were now coming.

As looked up, the leaves began to tremble and shake, some of the leafy canvas dropping away to rain down upon us.

I threw my head back further, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious Glimmer, but got another surprise.

Bark hurts when it gets in your eyes.

“Ouch!”I cried out as a sharp brown bit of bark pierced my brain. Well, it lodged in my eye but the feeling was just as intense.

Tears instantly tried to flush out the foreign object, but to no avail. I felt my nose stuff up as I began to do a little hopping dance, blinking rapidly and trying not to wail out in pain.

“What is she doing?”

The voice was closer.

I managed to stop the dance of pain long enough to catch a glimpse of a thing hanging from the tree.

It had blue hair, so I assumed that it was the missing Glimmer.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Her,” Glow corrected as he scratched his head and stared at me.

“My eye!” I cried out. “It’s in my eye!”

“Are your personal barriers so weak?” Blue Hair asked, curious as she stared at me with a familiar expression. It was the same look I gave new specimens under my microscope. Fascinated and faintly disgusted by the unknown.

“She has no barriers,” Luster answered as he assessed the situation and walked over to take me in his arms.

I felt his hands caress my face, then a gentle warm gust of air caressed my eyes; pulling out the bark and soothing the scratches that were no doubt covering my cornea.

Vision clearing, I turned to face the rude creature that still hung in the tree.

“You must be...ack!”

Well, it was female and it was beautiful in a strange sort of way. But speaking to people who hung up side down was just plain disturbing.

She must have been hanging by her feet, for her strong body swung back and forth slowly from a branch.

It was odd staring at someone whose mouth was where the eyes were supposed to be, but I tilted my head and tried to get a description of Glimmer right in my head.

Her skin was blue. Not unusual here, I decided, where skin tones seemed to flow to the extreme, but it was her extras that seemed more alien to me than Glow or Luster.

Her hair was a deep almost cobalt blue. As were her eyes, her lips, and her fingernails I noted as she tapped her chin in consideration.

As I examined her, she was assessing me.

“No magic?”she asked as she crossed her arms just under her breasts and frowned. It made deep wrinkles in her forehead and gave her an even more odd appearance.

“Look, you’re making me dizzy. Will you come down from there?”

“No time for this,” Luster sighed as he tapped the tree three times. “We have to get inside.”

“But the letters,” I tired again, putting the woman aside for a moment and turning to face Luster. “You need to know...”

But my words ended in a gasp as I felt the ground shudder beneath my bare feet.

I reached out to touch the tree trunk for support, but uttered a single muffled shriek, as my hands touched nothing.

The tree was gone.

And I was plummeting into dark unknown space.

Chapter Nine

“You know, magic could have prevented all of this.”

That female voice made the comment, and I know of only one other female that would dare utter such rude words to a total stranger.

No, not my mother, but a little blue hared imp named Glimmer.

I tried to open my mouth to deliver a sharp retort, but only groans emerged as I felt my head throb.

“I think it’s broke.”

With that, I managed to open my eyes and try my best not to scream.

I was surrounded.

There were glowing bodies everywhere!

Pink ones, blue ones, purple ones, white ones, black ones, and was that periwinkle over there?

Where the hell was I?

“Sinopee?”

I recognized that voice. It was Luster.

“Ease off!” a voice called out. “I can smell her fear.”

“If she had magic, she could defend herself.” That from Glimmer.

“Be considerate!” Glow’s deep voice rapped out. “She is smarter that she looks.”

What?

“But magic could have saved her a fall. Luster could do better.”

“Ease off!” Luster shouted and instantly the murmur that had begun to fill the place quieted down.

“I was just saying,” Glimmer began, but at a nod from Luster, Glow reached out and bodily removed the woman from my presence. The others followed, shooting curious glances back at me.

“How are you?” Luster asked as he sat beside me. I realized that I was on some sort of platform. I looked around slowly, ignoring the pounding in my head and see, to my amazement, that I appeared to be in a dark tunnel.

“I am... Where am I?”

“The Citadel.” Luster answered as he gently ran a hand across my forehead.

“We made it?”

“The tree was guarding it.”

Well, this was a place of magic. And I had just spoken to a woman with blue hair and fingernails. A guard tree, I could see it happening here. Seemed kind of appropriate.

“What happened?”

“You fell.”

“I know that! But where?”

“I removed the tree, displaced it actually, and you tumbled down the entrance. You made quite a splash too. My people have been eager to meet you for some time.”

“Why?”

I tried to sit up, but the darkroom began to spin. So I decided to take a visual inventory while I waited for his explanation.

We definitely were underground; the tree roots hanging from the ceiling gave truth to that. But it was also very warm here, almost humid.

It was dim, but not dark. I realized my eyes had adjusted to the new environment. And there were pockets of light here and there.

The room I was in was pretty large, and I realized that the ground was covered in a carpet of thick fragrant grasses. I had never seen the like before! There were even some small flowers growing here and there, adding color to the living rug.

Several colorful murals covered the cavern walls, which appeared to be made of stone. The brightness of the color contrasted with the dim room, but perfectly matched the people I had seen milling about when I first opened my eyes.

This place was beautiful!

The sounds of laughter, something that I rarely hear even in my own world, filled the air. These people were struggling and fighting, but they were also enjoying each moment of life that they had left to live.

And why not? At any moment, a Triton could slip up on you and fry you with an energy blast.

“Because you own me,” he said with a small laugh.

I turned my eyes, wide in amazement to him.

“I...own...you?”

“Heart and soul,” he affirmed.

“But...”

“My people mate for life, Sinopee. There can be no other for me. You are the one to hold my thoughts and my desires.”

I was speechless. I knew that Luster loved me and we had often said that we belonged to each other, but this was total devotion, that’s what it sounded like to me.

“I love you too, Lust,” I managed as I felt tears back up in my eyes.

How could I leave this man? Why had the fates cursed me with a whole year between couplings? A whole year to wonder if I would become pregnant, a year to miss him and wonder what he was doing. A year to hate him for making me love him this way and then leaving me! A year of feeling guilty for my selfish thoughts, then accepting what had to be?

He was mine, but only mine for such a short period of time.

“I know,” he said proudly as I reached out for his hand. “Otherwise the letters would have never brought you to me.”

“Yes, letters.Oh shit !The letters!”

“What?” He leaned down to get a clear view of my face.

“They are gone! The letters aregone!”

Luster reached for his thong, for the pouch that he tied there, and encountered nothing. Emptiness! Space!

“What...?”His eyes grew into wide lavender plates as the realization of what this meant sunk in.

“Before we rolled down the mountain! I heard it fall!”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because,numb-nut, you wouldn’t let me!”

I was getting angry at this point. If he had paused for a second to listen to the magicless thinker, this could have been instantly corrected.

“Numb nut?”

“You refused to listen to me, Luster! Just because I have no special abilities, doesn’t mean that I can’t think or feel or see when a box falls from a pouch!”

“You don’t know what this means!” he said, as the color fled his face. He rose up on shaky legs and stared at me.

“It means that when the sun goes down and begins to rise again, I will probably be sucked into a deep dark abyss of space and die floating in nothingness. Of course I know what this means!”

“It means, too, that I shall die.”

“I hope that the void is not as cold as I think it will be. I am not equipped to deal with torture and death.” Then I brought my eyes to his pale face again. “Did you say die?”

“You own me, Sinopee. I told you that. We mate for life! If you die, then I die as well.”

Chapter Ten

We were walking.

I would have rather been discussing plans to go back out and get the letterbox before anything happened to it, but Luster wanted to plan.

“They will have the box by now, Sinopee,” he said as he pulled me out of his chambers. “Now we have to plan on how to get it back.”

But instead of planning, we were walking.

I was enchanted by the underground land, of that I have no doubt, but I was too scared to give credence of the import of underground rivers and waterfalls.

The people were interesting though, each one so different and yet so similar. I realized that I was seeing the magic in each one. That was the one thing they held in common.

“We each are gifted, Sinopee,” he said as he led me to a vast underground waterfall. “But we can only give our hearts once. Each of us has a mate predestined. Each of us knows who our partner is. You are my partner, Sinopee. I can’t function without you. And though I only have you for one day out of the year, that one day sustains me.”

“Then why do we have only one day, Luster? Why?”

He turned to look at me, his purple eyes direct and serious.

“Since I brought my people here Sinopee, since I helped us to escape that place where they held us; when I decided that I had enough, a few joined me and we went against being held…I thought it my punishment.”

“What?” My eyes widened incredulously.

“My punishment, for going against what surely must have been ordained. The Thinkers, Sinopee, they have always been. They were always there, ordering us, making us do things, hurting the order. The natural order of things, Sinopee. Maybe the gods decreed that we were supposed to be under Thinker rule, but I went against them and showed my people a better way, a free way of living.”

“I always thought that the gods finally agreed with my decision, for my people flourished, something that never happened under Thinker rule. But I could never find a mate, was punished by being alone and hunted. But then I found the waterfall, Sinopee. I found the cavern and the words to the spell, and it brought me you. And now I think that the gods were testing me, Sinopee. I think that they are testing me still. And if I can overcome this latest problem, you will be mine forever. But I must prove myself first. And when I prove myself, you and I will be joined as one forever.”

“There has to be a way to keep me here, Luster,” I sigh as I watch the waters swirl.

I didn’t believe in his gods punishing or testing him, but there had to be a reason for his magic to bring me here. I didn’t want to leave his side, and I just knew he was going to do something foolish to keep me here.

“I know you can’t go home with me because of the Tritons. They would destroy your people and all that you have built here. So the only solution is for me to stay here. I will help you in you battle, Luster. You have a Thinker on your side.” Then I sighed as I realized what I was facing,

“But here, I don’t belong.”

“You belong!”he almost shouted as he turned to grip my shoulders. “You are mine, Sinopee. You belong here with me.”

“But I will never fit in.”

“You can!” he insisted.

“Lust, look around you!”

I pulled away from him and pointed to the waterfall we were admiring.

“Where I come from, there are no pink waterfalls, Luster. Waterfalls don’t exist underground! People are not pastel colors! Where would I fit in?”

He stared at the waterfall for a moment.

Its waters were pink. It fell almost eight feet to the small river that flowed through the Citadel and disappeared again under some rocks, I would assume. It was beautiful and enchanting with its white mists and sandy bank. But still, it was a pink waterfall! An underground pink waterfall!

“You fit in next to me,” he replied. “And nothing else really matters, Sinopee. You are mine, as I am yours.”

His words, the certainty in them, caused me to blink back a few tears as they touched my heart.

Seeing them, he lowered his head to gently lick the salty droplets away.

That set off a reaction in my chest that rippled over my body. I wanted him.

It was easy to dispose of the dress. I tossed it aside, not caring that anyone could venture into this secluded spot.

Hell, the thought of getting caught heightened my arousal. I just wanted Luster.

Groaning, he quickly doffed his boots and pants, and stood before me gloriously naked.

His body seemed to shine in the bright light of the mist as I watched him step near.

“For this time, in this place where you are safe, My Thinker, I am going to fuck you so hard you will never forget your place is with me. And then I am going to love you so that you will always remember.”

I reached for him, but he backed away, beckoning me with his eyes as he backed into the water itself.

“Come to me.”

I was coming!

Chapter Eleven

Lust disappeared beneath the flowing waters of the waterfall, and eagerly, I followed.

As the pink water touched my skin, I let out a gasp of amazement. It was almost thick and had an oily feel to it. And it was very warm.

I giggled as I tried to imagine what he was up to.

Eagerly following, I too stepped through the waterfall and gasped at what I saw.

Behind the flowing pink waters, there was a smaller cavern, almost like the one in our glade.

There, coated in the pink waters, Luster lay back against some pillows and furs.

“What is that stuff?” I asked as I used both hands to pull my wet hair back from my face.

“Healing waters,” he replied. “They keep the Citadel alive and feed the needs of the plants here. It maintains a balance.”

“And this place?” I stepped forward, loving the way the odorless waters seemed to cling and bring heat with is very presence.

“This is the place where I will claim every part of you for my own.”

Before I could blink, he was beside me, the waters shimmering almost purple as his skin began to take on a faint glow.

He placed his hands on my shoulders and applied a gentle pressure until I found myself kneeling, facing the object of my most recent erotic fantasies.

Luster was built thick. His circumcised penis had a large mushroom shaped head that was now leaking precum with his arousal. His ten inches pointed in an almost forty-five degree angle, jutting out from his body like the powerful weapon it was.

Gently, I wrapped my hand around the base and pulled him low enough to run across my lips.

I looked up at him, wide eyed, wanting to see his every reaction, wanting him to know how much I was enjoying servicing him.

His purple eyes beamed at me. They seemed to be lit with an inner light that transformed his masculine face into a thing of beauty. He raised his hands to his hair, to push the wet strands behind those pointed ears, and then he smiled at me.

Grinning back, I stuck out my tongue and ran it along the ridge below his head, tasting him, the slightly salty slightly sweet taste that was Lust.

His hands burrowed in my hair as he began to feed me his cock.

I opened my mouth, covering my teeth with my lips, before I almost inhaled his whole length.

“Gods, Sinopee!” he cried out and his knees began to shake.

Still looking up at him, I placed my hands on the firm globes of his ass and pulled him in tighter. Breathing though my nose, I was able to take him deep in my throat for a few moments. I moved my head up and down along his shaft, encouraging his movements as I sought to please him.

But doing all of this had the desired effect on my body as well.

My nipples began to grow hard and my body clenched in arousal. I could feel the warm pink waters heat the core of my being, adding to the moisture my body produced as I turned myself on by having Lust at my control.

And at my control he was, for any slight motion I made, he automatically adjusted, his eyes telling me that it was my game, for now.

I winked at him before I began to swallow, caressing his cock with the strong smooth muscles of my throat.

Quickly, the lines of power shifted.

Lust pulled himself from my mouth and I found myself on my back in the furs.

Grinning up at him, I cupped my breasts for him, offering him a taste.

His body covered me completely as he spread my legs and made himself a home between them.

His lips latched onto on nipple and held it gently between his teeth as he laved it with his tongue.

Heat rushed through my chest at the small pleasure-pain. His other fingers were gently caressing the underside of my breast, gentling me, before his nimble fingers gripped my nipple and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger.

“Lust? What are you doing?” I gasped. Never had he treated my body so roughly.

I liked it.

“Taking you places, Sinopee,” he growled before he ground his pelvis into mine, making sure that his hard-on skid across my throbbing clitoris.

I arched up into his caresses, loving the feel of his body dominating mine. I ran my hands though his hair, tugging on fistfuls, forcing his head back to my nipple.

But Lust had other plans.

Pulling away, he spread my legs wider as he dropped his head between them.

Inhaling deeply, he buried his face in my crotch.

His hands pushed my thighs wide as be begun to feast on me as if I was pure ambrosia.

I threw my head back, my hands going to my own breasts, tugging and pulling at the nipples as he excited my body in ways he had never done before.

That oral incident at the boulder only heightened my feelings for him, served as foreplay for this event.

Then I felt his fingers come into play, running thought what pink water was left on my body, then invading the hollow of my needy being.

I arched up off of the furs and cried out as I felt his fingers, two fingers, invade me.

Pulling his head up, his lips wet with the essence of me, he asked in a low husky voice, “Do you like that?”

I nodded frantically, wanting only to keep this feeling growing inside of me.

“Want more?”

Again I nodded, knowing if I opened my mouth the screams if passion would emerge.

Quickly his thrusting fingers were removed and replaced by something considerably larger.

I felt he blunt cap of his mushroom head press against me and lifted my legs around his waist, waiting for the pleasure to begin.

But he gripped my legs and pulled them higher still, until my heels rested on his shoulders.

Then, as I felt him begin to sink inside, I felt his fingers tapping at my back door.

“Lust?” I began a bit worried, but the sensations I got from that caress sent sparks flying through my system.

These new sensations coupled with the feeling of him driving himself deep inside my core had my senses reeling and my mouth watering.

My breath began to pant as my hands reached for and clutched at his shoulders, digging my nails into his flesh.

He growled at the pain, so far gone that it was just another sensation to add to his exploding senses.

“Keep going!” I screamed, never having felt this stimulated before.

Tangling my hands in his hair, I shuddered at the feel of his silky strands sliding through my fingers. I clenched it tightly in my fists and urged him on.

Slowly, his finger pressed against my rosebud, then with a slight stinging feeling, it popped thorough the muscular ring.

I jump in shock at the feeling, but his finger stopped moving and he lowered his head to thrust his tongue deep into mine.

My eyes, widened from the pain of this new entry, slowly closed and I moaned into his mouth. There were lots in interesting things going on down there now.

With his finger invading no-mans-land and his cock thrusting strongly in my cunt, I was almost ready to swoon with pleasure. And the more he moved, the better the feeling got.

Soon I was thrusting up, forcing his steely rod deeper into me, then pushing back to let his finger hit nerve endings than had never been touched before.

“You love this,” He purred as his tongue invaded my ear making me arch my breasts up into the wall of muscle that made up his chest.

“You want me to stop?”

“No,” I whined lost in the pleasure, hardly paying nay attention to what he was saying.

“Then beg me not to stop.”

“Please, don’t!” I gasped as he punctuated his request with a deep thrust.

“Say my name.”

“L-Lust!”

“Again!”

“Lust!”

“Again!”

“Luster!”

Hearing that explosion of sound from my throat, Lust bent over me and began to pound into my willing flesh.

Harder and faster he moved his cock and his finger, working in tandem to bring me orgasmic delight.

I felt the tension in me winding tighter and tighter and soon I knew that one more sensation would send me over.

“Come for me” he hissed and I whimpered as my body stiffed underneath his.

“Come on! Come for me!”

I shuddered as the world came to a grinding halt. I felt my body arching against his, demanding that one more move, that one final caress that would send me hurtling to the stars over the precipice infinity.

“Fucking come!”

He slammed home within me one final time and my world exploded into a sea of red-hot fireworks and deafening explosions.

“OhGod !” I screamed as my body was wracked with shudders. I bucked so hard underneath him that he had to use his weight to hold me down.

Vaguely, I was aware of his shout and the feel of his cock growing larger before it too exploded in passion, but I was too far gone, lost in climatic pleasure to pay it more attention.

Finally, the waves of release passed and I collapsed under him, the soft furs beneath and his warm hardness above.

“I love you,” he whispered so tenderly, that tears filled my eyes. “And I will return to you.”

I closed my eyes, wrapped my arms around his sweating heaving body and prayed.

Chapter Twelve

Tears ran silently down my eyes as I watched Luster depart. He did not look back as he made his way to the roots of a large tree.

Glimmer suddenly appeared at his side looking solemn as she placed her hand beside his.

“The tree says that all is clear.”

I didn’t react. Oh, in normal circumstances, I would have had a million questions for that one comment. But I only saw Luster, my man, leaving to travel into what could very well be his death.

“Listen to Glow.” Luster said to me as he closed his eyes and his whole person began to glow. The tree shimmered and shook, then snippily vanished as if it had never been.

He said that he displaced it when I asked before. But seeing and hearing about something is two different things. Still, my sadness took precedence over any burning questions that I could ask. My man was still leaving, to save me, to save us both. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

“My heart beats for you,” he said as he turned back one more time and smiled at me. Then just as quickly, he was gone.

I tried to hold the confident face, the face of the woman watching her warrior go off into battle, the face of the maiden watching her knight battle a dragon. But as soon as he disappeared from view, the smile faded.

My head dropped, my shoulders drooped, and I was just another woman watching her man go away.

I sniffled, trying to hold back the torrent of tears that threatened to break free at any second, but the pressure was too much.

With my sobs echoing through the cavern, I raced towards the area Luster called home, the place where he brought me for safety. Once there, I could give free rain to my tears and cry out all of my grief in privacy.

My bare feet raced over the soft green grass. Ignoring the shocked faces of the others, I ran to his quarters and threw myself down upon his bed. Big mistake.

Lying across his bed, I could smell his special scent. In the warmth of his blankets, I could feel him. If I wrapped them around me it almost felt as if he were holding me once again. My body shuddered and my eyes burned with my tears. My heart had broken and nothing would repair the pieces until he was safe in my arms again.

I never realized when the crying stopped and the ache in my center began.

All I could think about was Luster. His smile, his lavender eyes, his long flowing hair, his body. Every aspect of his being was being broken down in my mind and the pictures whirled around in my head.

I loved the way he touched me, the way my body responded to his touch. I shuddered in memory of our times in the enchanted pool, the water flowing over our bodies, the heat of his skin.

My whimpering became moans as I pictured what he would say to me if he were here right now.

No, Luster would not say anything. He would take me in his arms and he would ravish the anguish right out of my body. ‘Life is for the living,’ he told me more than once, and as I though of him, my body came alive.

I remembered his fevered caresses, the naughty things he would whisper to me and I began to tingle.

I ran my hand over my breast and pressed to the beating in my chest, then gasped that the simple caress would cause so much pleasure when my heart was rent into a thousand pieces.

If I closed my eyes, surrounded by his scent as I was, I could imagine that it was his hand caressing me.

I closed my eyes as a low moan escaped my throat. Lust would love to see me like this. It would make his purple eyes glimmer and his body harden in an instant.

Soon, this wasn’t enough. There was a fire in my blood and it had to be quenched. Even the simple gown I wore was irritating to my skin. I had to have it off! I had to know the feeling of the fur, the Luster scented fur, caressing my bare skin.

The gown was gone in a flash and I settled back, pushing my shoulders into the soft warm fur, rolling my head back and forth, luxuriating in these new hedonistic tendencies.

Hissing in pleasure, I rolled over, dragging the fur over my back and cocooning myself in the essence of Lust.

My hands went from rubbing my breast to the now awakened part of me that wept for release.

Slowly, I spread my thighs, letting my fingers whisper down until I felt the soft hair of my pubic mound.

Should I do this? Could I do this?

Then as my body clenched in remembered delight, I decided that I could.

Slowly, I let my fingers explore, brushing lightly over my clitoris, to the blood engorged lips of my sex.

I shuddered at the feeling.

Instantly I knew what to do to please myself, knew what touch my body needed. (((( Kewl!)))

No one but Lust ever played my body like this, and as I thought of him, I knew which caresses would give me the most pleasure, what would remind me of his possession.

Gently, I outlined the opening to my body, shuddering as fire followed in the wake of my caresses. My lungs fought to bring air to my body. The ragged sound of my breathing, inside the muted world of the fur cocoon, was another turn on.

As I lay on my stomach, one hand locked between my legs, the other pulling at my nipples, I felt that something was missing.

Deciding that I needed more stimulation, I ran the pad of one finger around my hooded clit, pulling back it protective cover to touch the raw essence of me.

I nearly screamed at the sensation flooding though my body. I bit my lip and began to gently circle, stimulating myself gently as thoughts of what Lust’s mouth did to this sensitive part of my body egging me on.

I began to grind into the fur, seeking more stimulation; something was still missing!

I pulled my hand from my breast, stretched it out under Lust’s pillow and it struck something hard and round.

Pulling it out, I discovered that it was a sheathed dagger with a large, etched cylinder for a hilt.

Pulling it closer, I smiled as I realized what I reminded me of.

With a large round smooth tip and a thick base, it looked like a cock!

Inspiration struck as I again closed my eyes and wondered if I should do this thing?

Then as my body gave one powerful lurch, the decision was made for me.

Trembling in fear and longing, I lowered the hilt between my thighs.

I rolled the smooth round tip again my clit, and whimpered at its icy coolness contrasted with my blazing heat.

But soon, it warmed up, took in the temperature of my body as my womanhood bathed it in my hot juices.

Harder I pressed it against me, whimpering as the feelings that flew through me heightened in intensity.

Finally, with one whimpering sigh, I thrust the hilt home.

“Oh God!” I cried out as this replacement cock filled me.

It was not as thick or wide as Lust, but it struck a spot deep within that set my body trembling uncontrollably.

Again and again I ran it over this spot, headless of the noise I was making or how my body bathed the hilt in its slick moisture.

All I knew was that short of having Lust deep within me, this was the best feeling that I had ever experienced.

Lying there, I thrust my new toy deeply into me, stroking that spot, mashing my clit with the bones of my wrist,

Faster and faster I had to move!

This was primal. Faster that anything that Lust and I shared, different, but so damn erotic that I closed my eyes and let my fantasies run wild.

There was Lust, between my thighs, his tongue locked on my clit, drinking my juices as if they would give him life.

Luster, striding naked and powerful in my direction, grinning as his penis thrust outward.

Luster, holding his cock steady as he beckoned to me, calling me over to him so that he could bury his hardness within my softness.

His finger in my...

I never completed the thought!

I screamed as my body exploded around the hilt, clenching at it, stetting off more explosions as its hardness caressed the spot over and over during my climax.

My body shuddered as my thoughts swirled with reality. My body convulsed, sending pleasure shooting tough my veins as I closed my eyes and savored each orgasmic clench.

I groaned as I suddenly became too sensitive to touch and withdrew the hilt to give my body a chance to rest.

My breath still heaving, I brought the hilt to my lips for a quick kiss, before I let my new toy lie beside me.

My body replete and strangely my tension eased, I drifted off to sleep.

Chapter Thirteen

“They have him!”

“What?”

I sat up in the warm firs that cradled me, his dagger still in my hand, and stared at Glimmer.

“I said they have Luster! Are you happy now? They have Luster! Get up you fucking bitch! They have our leader!”

I don’t know if I was stunned more by Glimmer’s words or the news that she brought.

Luster, my Luster was caught!

“Where!” I stammered as I tried to unwind myself from the covers and rise to my feet. “Who has him?”

“The Tritons! Who do you think? They have what they want! The resistance is dead without him!”

“How do you know?”

“The trees! The trees told me! I told Glow and he said to get you, though I don’t know why! Powerless, magicless waste of space that you are!”

I ignored her and I reached for my discarded gown. I had to get to Glow and find out what was going on!

Fear seemed to freeze my heart in my throat as I haphazardly pulled the gown over my head and raced to the door. I absently noticed that Glimmer followed, so did the eyes of all the rebels gathered there.

I could feel their burning gaze; the anger and uncertainty they tossed in my direction. It made my feet move faster. By the time I made it to where a tight knot of warriors sat, I was nearly running. I knew their anger was directed at me, but my guilt was making their mistrust harder to bear.

“Glow!” I all but screamed as I reached what appeared to be a war council. “What is going on?”

“They found the box, Sinopee. They knew that he would come for it. They set a trap.”

“What can I do?”

My heart was pounding, but I pushed back the urge to scream and rant like a mad woman. Luster needed me, needed a plan, and I wanted to help in any way that I could.

“Why is the box so important, Sinopee?”

I realized that Luster had kept that aspect of our relationship a secret. But it was time for the secrets to end. They had to know what was going on! They were risking their resistance for him, for us, and had a right to know.

“Without it, I will die.”

“What a shame,” Glimmer snarled as she shot daggers at me with her eyes.

“And with me, Luster will die. We are bound.”

Glow nodded once, then turned his attention to the gathered warriors.

“What can I do to help?” I asked, my heart, once dead now pounding in my chest.

“You can go and wait.”

I blinked at Glow’s words. What did he mean wait?

“I want to help!” I protested. “Luster is my man, and I want to save him!”

“What can you do, Sinopee?” Glow stated this kindly, but the words still burned. “You have no magical abilities, you can’t track, you are not a hunts-woman. You have no skills that could help save Luster and having you along will slow us down.”

“Yeah,” Glimmer snorted in my direction, tossing the fringes of her blue hair. “You would only get in the way.”

“I can think!” I cried out, desperate to help. “You need me!”

“You can think here,” Glow stated with finality.

Glimmer snickered, damn her blue hair!

“As will you, Glimmer.” Glow added.

“What?”

She turned surprised eyes to Glow, too stunned to do anything but stare at him.

“You will get in the way, Glimmer. You are to stay here and...guard.”

“But I talk to the trees! The plants hear me! I can be of help!”

“Glimmer,” Glow sighed with a long-suffering look. “You are too young and full of yourself! You need to learn control. Maybe Sinopee can teach that to you while we go and get Luster. But for the hours that she has left in our world, you will be with Sinopee.”

That said, Glow motioned to his chosen men and they began to prepare for battle.

“But I can help!” Glimmer wailed as she watched the warriors and their departing backs.

Saying nothing, I turned and made my way back to Luster’s room. I had plans of my own and I needed a moment to organize my thoughts for my attack.

“This is all your fault!”

Glimmer’s words followed me down the hall, but I ignored her. I had more important things to think about.

“I am talking to you!”

I felt her hand around my arm and reacted without thinking.

I gripped her thumb and yanked it backwards, towards her wrist. While she was gasping in unexpected pain, I drove my elbow back into her stomach, knocking the air from her lungs, then using her weak grip on my arms, I slammed her into the wall.

“Don’t fuck with me, bitch,” I found myself snarling as I reached out to grab a handful of her hair to pull her face to mine.

She was still gasping, trying to get air into her oxygen depleted lungs, eyes wide with shock.

“I have to go and get my man.”

Snorting in disgust, I released her hair and gave her a little shove, just to drive my point home. Then calmly, I turned and made my way back to Luster’s room.

“What do I know?” I asked myself as I paced in silence. “What do I need.”

The Tritons would be easy to find, maybe. All I had to do was let myself get caught. But once there, what to do?

I stopped pacing and sat on the bed.

“Think Sinopee!” I berated myself.

First I had to take my problems one at a time. That way, I would not get confused and screw up too badly. One at a time and very scientific.

Identify the problems. Easy enough, I thought. The Tritons who wanted to wipe these people out of existence for some unknown reason just managed to catch the rebel leader.

Problem: How to rescue him without loss of life; mine or anyone else’s.

Problem: How to get the letterbox back. Fuck finding a way to keep me here! If I could get the box back and we could have another year’s long wait, I would be content! I just didn’t want him to die!

Solutions: None withstanding.

Sighing. I again tried to get my mind to work, to get over the shock of not having Luster here.

The only thing I could think of was to allow myself to be caught.

Once captured, I would figure something out! The most important thing was to go to Lust.

Decisions made, I leapt to my feet and began to search his room. He had to have footwear here somewhere. That and I needed a weapon, other than that dagger. That dagger was special.

I had no magic to defend myself, so I had to rely on good old reliable steel!

As I was rummaging through his chests, I heard footsteps behind me. I had no idea how long I had been thinking and searching, but it had to have been a long time. When I tried to stand upright, my back ached and my muscles pulled.

Turning, I was stunned to see Glimmer there, tears rolling down her cheeks.

“What do you want?” I asked, at my coldest.

“To go with you! To help you! I have to help the man I love, even if it means teaming up with you.”

Chapter Fourteen

Stealthy, we made our way to the hidden exit of the Citadel.

When I earlier showed my shock that we could find a way to leave, I mean Glimmer couldn’t move trees with magic and I had none, she laughed at me.

“We all can’t move trees, Sinopee. In fact, Luster is one of the few who can. So we all need an alternative route to get in and out when our leader is not with us.”

Smart, I thought. But then I never thought that these people, these rebels, were a stupid lot. They were just ignorant about some things, like the positive use of science and analytical thinking.

Glimmer motioned for me to follow and I brought my mind back to more important matters. Like sneaking past the guards.

They were rebels to the last one, but Glow, Luster’s second in command had given the order that we say inside. They would probably do everything short of killing us to make sure that we stayed inside.

Glimmer led me to the exit, touching roots that we passed along the way. I knew that she was gleaming information from them. But still her earlier words bothered me. She was in love with... Luster?

No. She didn’t say Luster, but the man she loved.

I was puzzling over this when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“We have to move if we are going to make it past the guard. Privacy break.”

I nodded in understanding and we both scurried up a narrow path that led to the roots of a large tree.

“If you had any powers, you could be of some help. But since you don’t, you had better start to climb.”

I said nothing, but sighed deeply, then began to look for handholds in the roots.

Climbing wasn’t easy and Glimmer seemed to almost walk through the roots, knowing where to place her hand or foot next. But slowly, I managed to make the muscles of my arms strain and pull until I felt a gap where the stone wall should be.

“This is it,” Glimmer whispered as she disappeared into the hole. “Come on!”

Saying nothing, I forced my way through the crevasse, reminded sickly of the abyss in which I was sure to plummet through if we didn’t retrieve those letters and soon.

It took mere seconds to pull myself through the damp warm place, but soon the heat of the waning sun caressed my face.

“How much time do I have left?” I wondered out loud as I stared at the sky, watching the deepening blues and purples as the sun began its decent.

“About six hours and then you go back where you come from.”

Glimmer didn’t know about the restrictions or the letters, or had paid no attention to what I had told Glow. Or just didn’t believe me. I bet she thought I sent Luster out on a feminine whim.

Again, I was silent as we began out journey through the forest.

“Where are the Tritons?” I asked. “What do they look like?”

“No one knows,” she said, side stepping over a few fallen branches and piles of leaves.

“Then how can we find them?”

I realized that as we walked, we were getting closer and closer to the area where the tree line ended.

“I’ll think of something,” she said as she pushed aside a young leafy branch from a low hanging tree aside.

“What?” I questioned, feeling like an idiot and following her. “Oof!”

I narrowed my eyes and glared at her as the branch swung back, striking me a stinging blow to the chest. That would leave a welt.

“You have to watch what you are doing,” She sniffed at me as she moved on. “And stop making so much noise. I want to surprise them and not have them surprise us.”

“I’ll noise her,” I mumbled, rubbing my chest as I pressed onward. “Right on top of her blue head!”

For a short time, we marched onward, Glimmer flinging bits of earth at me and me doing my best to dodge them and not kill her.

By her actions, I knew that she had to want Luster. Too bad! He was mine, and I was not going to give him up for a spoiled little girl! But my animosity made the trip easier. I used my anger towards her to keep moving through the strange and foreign land that my home once resembled.

Finally, we reached the sandy hillside where Luster, Glow, and I came under attack from the Tritons. All was quiet and that worried me.

“Where are the animal sounds?” I whispered as the falling sun cast shadows across the land. I had become so used to the sound of birds and other small animals, that I instantly noticed their silence.

“Hush!” she hissed.

“But...”

“They are near.”

Deciding that it was prudent to listen to her, for now, I held my voice and waited.

We didn’t have to wait long.

There was a gravely sound, like metal on stone, and then deep voices.

She pointed to the right, towards open land.

I gasped as I tried to make sense of what my eyes were seeing! This couldn’t be right!

I half rose to my feet, stopping only when Glimmer’s hand latched onto my arm, pulling me back into the hiding spot.

“This can’t be right!” I whispered. “No!”

But the truth was right before my eyes. I knew what the Tritons were!

Chapter Fifteen

“This is not right!” I breathed. “This is impossible!”

The Tritons! They were wearing...

“Get out there!”

Before I could gather my wits, Glimmer shoved me out into the open.

Stunned, I froze while the two men, dressed tunics, the male style of tunic, turned in my direction.

Like a specimen caught in the high beam light of a microscope, I froze. The two men turned to me and one of them smiled.

“Get her!” one shouted and my feet finally decided to take action.

I turned away from the two and ran towards the trees. Glimmer, that traitor, was behind me and they were blocking the only way out!

Almost screaming with frustration, I tried to dart past them. Remembering some old forgotten footage of some game played with a pig-skinned ball, I rushed the men, hoping to force a break in their duel barrier.

It worked. For a minute, that is.

Then they were both diving at me, driving me to the hard unforgiving ground.

“Get off!” I bellowed, but my answer was a sharp prick in the neck and them the world began to swirl in a mass of pretty colors.

“Why,” I whispered as the edges of my vision began to darken and my throat refused to work.

But I didn’t know if I was asking Glimmer why she had done it, why the men were dressed in clothes from my world, or why my life had to be so damned hard.

* * * * *

I woke up, with my hands tied above me and a dull ache in my head.

No, I was awakened. It was the voices that pulled me back from the black void and now my mind struggled to sort out what was being said.

“I brought her, as promised.” Glimmer was saying. “Now release my man!”

“We did have a deal,” the first man said. “So I guess it would be fair of me to actually own up to what I said.” The other man chuckled. “Okay, your man may go free, but it doesn’t matter. It’s only a matter of time before we have all of you...abominations back where you belong.”

I had no idea how long I had been out, but it seemed that someone else was doing a bit of thinking while I had been trying to hatch a plan of my own. Glimmer, blue hair and all, proved to be more cunning than any thinker I had ever heard of.

I slammed my eyes shut as I heard their steps approaching me.

“Where are they?” Glimmer was sounding nervous. Good to be nervous when you made plans with the devil.

“Let them go!” I heard someone call. “Because of this one, we will have the whole lot soon enough!”

Then I heard a voice that I thought I would never hear again.

“Glimmer!” it called and then the sound of rushed footsteps. “What did you do?”

“I had to do it!” I heard her say. “The trees told me what happened, how you were ambushed. Then they told me of the ultimatum. Her for you! What else could I do? Without you, the resistanceis at an end!”

“But at what cost, Glimmer! What is the cost?”

“I had to!” she cried desperately. “Forour future, for ourchild .”

That brought my eyes open. Glimmer was pregnant?

“Oh, I see you are awake,” a voice said and I knew that I had given away my opportunity to gather more information. “Did the happy reunion wake you? We must teach them to be silent.”

I glared at the man in the tunic as he continued to examine me.

“What kind of creature are you? You don’t look like the others. You look...strange.”

Well, you ain’t no picnic yourself, I thought! But I only snorted and turned my head so that I could see the two people lost in each other.

Glow wore a shocked expression on his face as he stared at Glimmer who had tears running down her blue tinted cheeks.

So that’s who Glimmer was in love with, and apparently the feelings were returned.

A baby, I thought. Is there any justice in the world when a blue haired idiot like Glimmer got to be reunited with her love and have a baby? Probably not. Suddenly, the gods testing Luster was not such a farfetched idea after all.

“Jealous?” the guard asked, and I had to turn again to look at his ugly face. “No matter, you will soon be reunited with that freak of yours. We have been waiting a long time for this.”

“Sinopee,” Glow spoke, his voice raspy. “We will succeed.”

He had Glimmer under on arm, placing her body behind his, as he stared at me, helplessness in his eyes.

“I had to!” Glimmer tried to explain, her body shaking with sobs that she tried to hold in. “I had to! We are going to have a baby! I just had to save him!”

I understood, but I was still pissed.

I stared at her and then at Glow, then made a gesture I was extremely proud of.

I wiggled my wrists until I could get my right hand forward, then I shot her the bird.

Immature, I know, but my head was aching, my arms were going numb, and I wastrapped with no way of saving my man!

All things considered, I was pretty eloquent.

Glow snickered and Glimmer gasped, but then Glow turned and pulled her out of the clearing. Almost instantly, it seemed that they disappeared into the growing shadows.

And growing, the shadows were! The sun had set while I was out and torches were now lighting the area. The day, and my time, were almost up.

Chapter Sixteen

They carried me over bare ground and soft grass. It seemed like hours, they carried me, but never complaining about the distance or the journey.

I now sat in a cage, my hands tied above me, as I swung in rhythm to their walking.

It was a good time to think.

Part one of my original plan was in effect. Now I had to quickly come up with part two.

I was knocked out of my reverie by the sound of raised voices.

I sat paying attention now, as I was taken to a huge building hidden in some trees.

Camouflage! That is how the Tritons survived, but it was also how the rebels outsmarted them for years!

As we drew closer, I saw several more men and women, all dressed in tunics and carrying of all things, lab equipment.

One woman held a radiation guide and another had a doctor’s kit. Several carried small weapons strapped to their belts, the source of the Triton lighting. They were using laser guns, the very same guns that were outlawed several years ago.

It seemed that I was not the first of my world to invade paradise! Like the serpents, they despoiled paradise and it seemed they were determined to make a mark here.

“Very interesting,” a voice said in front of me, and drew my attention. “She is not like the others. The board will be intrigued.”

The board? What the hell was going on?

Before I could formulate a response, I was carried into a large building and my cage placed beside a large examining table.

More people swarmed into the room and I found myself pulled from my cage, hands still bound, and placed on the table.

I tried to struggle free, but before I could even move, hands were strapping both legs and down and my arms above my head.

I gasped as my eyelids were peeled back and a bright light shined in.

“Hey!”I protested, but the person spoke out loud to the room at large.

“Brown eyes. This is a variant. Must be a genetic throw back.”

“Throwback?Ouch!”

I felt a syringe plunge into my arm, drawing blood.

“No phosphoresce in the skin. Plain brown. Possibly lacking in the mutated traits and heightened abilities?”

“Are you sure that this is his mate?” This voice boomed from behind me. I twisted to get a good look, but I could only move a few inches. I saw the hem of another tunic, but the voice spoke with authority.

“The other would not lie. She wanted her mate back too badly. You know that the control alteration malfunctioned with that one. Instead of making them easier to control, it made them more aggressive. The only good thing about that little mistake is that we can use it against them if we can catch one of a matched pair.”

“What is going on?” I finally managed. What were they talking about? Mutations and alterations! Who were these people?

“I suppose we should show the male that we have his mate. That may make him speak up about where he found the box and the words for the voice command.”

Voice command?

I struggled to look around, to see who these people were, but I had no luck. All my wiggling did was earn me extra tight restraints and more attention.

“Run the DNA tests,” the large voice mused. “That will show us where we stand. If this creature is a throw back, we may have a weapon against the fugitives.”

Fugitives?

“Ah, good! Bring him over.”

Him? Then I felt his presence! They were bringing me my Lust!

“Luster!” I gasped feeling his presence ever stronger as he drew closer.

They turned the table, and them I could see him! My Luster!

He was hanging from his arms, his hands encased in some material, his ankles strapped to the sides of the large square frame on wheels. He was completely naked and hung limply, but his eyes when he raised his head, were full of defiance and anger.

“Now, Luster, will you cooperate? We have your mate and you know that we take no pity on those who defy us.”

“She is not my mate,” he said, his eyes warning me before he dropped his head again.

At first my stomach plunged into my feet as I took in his words, then my mind began to work. Of course he would deny me. If he reacted in any way, it would prove that I was his mate and they would have power over us both.

“Why do I not believe that?” the voice said.

“Maybe because not only do you lack magic,” Luster sneered, “you lack eyesight as well. I have no mate. You knew that when you had my people imprisoned. The same holds true this day.”

“Luster,” laughed the man. “You were always the clever one, more Thinker than the rest. But I believe science will prevail.”

“Damn your science!” he snarled.

“Very good, Luster. Damn us all. But I know something that you do not. When in the presence of your true mate, you will have an incredible urge to bond. All I have to do is leave you in the room and your body will tell me the truth.”

Damn! That was why Glow was sporting a very good hard-on when he returned from the shadows after warning Glimmer! His body was not reacting to the erotic things that Lust and I were doing. He had been in contact with his mate!

As I stared wordlessly at Lust, I knew that we were in deep trouble. There was no way to keep his body from reacting.

“Put them in the cage.”

“No!”I screamed as I was wheeled into another room. I could hear the wheels of Luster’s frame following.

I felt the bindings on my ankles release and the ones holding my wrists above my head.

I heard Luster grunt and knew that they had let him out of the platform. Then I heard the rapid retreat of footsteps and the closing of a door. We were alone, yet being observed.

I raised my head off of the table to stare at this new cage. Three solid walls and one made of glass. I would bet my last hour here that it was a two-way mirror. Science, at its observant best.

“What are we going to do?” I whimpered as I turned to face my man.

But it was too late. He knelt on the floor, where they left him, his cock raising and throbbing with his every breath.

“Give them a fucking show,” he growled.

I gasped and shook my head, even as my body reacted to the sight of his.

“They want to observe us, Sinopee. This is what your science does. So we are going to show the sexless band of love starved bastards just what they are missing. Come to me!”

I shook my head and tired to back away.

“Come to me!”

I whimpered as I felt my body clench and start to grow wet. The idea of being observed was starting to turn me on.

Why shouldn’t we give them a show? Soon we would both be dead and why should I deny myself this last chance to have Lust?

“Come to me!”

I took my first step towards him.

Chapter Seventeen

As I drew close, Lust raised his hands up and wrapped them around my waist, burying his face in my stomach.

I wrapped my bound hands around his head, tangling my fingers in his hair, holding him close to me.

I could feel his breath waft against the naked skin of my stomach.

Silently, he rose to his feet, keeping my arms locked around his neck as he easily lifted my weight.

He carried me as if I weighted less that a moment, less than a memory, over to the table that I had been strapped to.

As he placed me on my back, he shot one look at that the glass window, knowing that their eyes were on us.

Grasping my hands, he pulled my arms from around his neck, but held them over my head. Silently he looked into my eyes, his glance saying more than mere words ever could.

Lowering his head, he closed those magnificent lavender eyes as his lips brushed against mine. There was tenderness in his touch, tenderness and love.

I arched my body up against his automatically. It was like my body knew where it belonged. Sighing deeply, he pressed me against the table while using his thigh to spread my legs.

Once settled on his knees between my thighs, he held my hands down with one hand while the other slowly began to explore my body.

I knew that they were watching, and I felt a blush turn my face red, but the feel of his hand caressing my cheek, my neck, and trailing across my breasts made me disregard them as unimportant.

I raised my knees, exposing my woman’s center to his touch and he smiled at me.

We both knew that it was a matter of trust for me to open myself for him while others were watching, but as his nearness increased my arousal, I found that I could deny him nothing.

I made a mewling sound as his fingers trailed across my stomach, gently circling my navel before stopping just at the top of my mound.

I saw him look over his shoulder, glare at the glass, then turned the fierce expression to me.

He rose up as his hands spread my thighs wider. He looked down and leered. I knew the pearly drops of my essence already coated my flesh, and I only needed his touch to start that trip to the stars.

His fingers, hard and blunt, invaded me, ran across my swollen lips, spread my moisture around.

I cried out, I couldn’t hold it the sound in, and arched into him.

Taking this opportunity to reposition me, Lust pulled both of my legs high on his thighs before his hands gripped my waist and pulled me into an upright position.

My bound hands went over his head and around his neck as I tried to gain my balance. This new position placed his swollen cock right at entrance to my womanhood.

But instead of plunging home, he again lowered his face to mine.

“I love you,” I whispered, my eyes staring intently into his.

“I know, lover,” he whispered as he placed gentle kisses on my eyelids, the tip of my nose, my chin.

I felt a warmth sweep over my body that had little to do with arousal or embarrassment. Luster was showing me how much he loved me, showing them, defying them, and taunting them with what they would never have.

I tighten my grip on him as he lowered his head to mine.

His tongue gently lapped at my lips, tracing the outline before running along the crease.

Automatically, I opened, inviting him inside, wanting to taste him as he was tasting me.

One of his hands reached up to cup my cheek as he gently invaded my mouth, running his tongue along my teeth and the roof of my mouth, gently exploring what I so eagerly offered.

I felt his moan more that heard it, and the sound reverberated through my body.

I tightened my legs around his waist. I urged him closer, flattening my breasts against his chest, feeling his hardness press against my softness.

His skin was hot and moist. I realized that passion was slowly taking over, that soon he would join with me, complete me, make me whole again.

“Sinopee,” he breathed, “Hold on.”

The suddenly, he switched positions; sitting on the table and having me ride his waist.

I felt empowered as I looked down and saw his hardness pressed against my stomach, throbbing. Yet we continued to kiss.

He broke away and buried his face in my neck as he whispered, “Sinopee, I love you.”

The feel of his hot breath across my neck caused me to shudder and moan.

This was Luster who was touching me, Luster who was loving me. I relished every moment even as I damned those who were watching, safe from all emotions, behind the glass.

“Are you ready?” he asked as the fingers of his right hand trailed down my stomach to cup my femininity.

I gasped and knew that he had to feel how wet I had become. His body was an erotic delight for me, no matter what, no matter where.

“Yes,” I breathed my eyes glassy as I stared at him. I knew he was ready, I could feel it in his rock hard cock, the head that wet me with its free flow of precum. “Please now.”

With an incredible show of strength, Lust lifted me up, positioned me over his throbbing member and slowly let me slide down.

I gasped as I wrapped my arms tighter around his neck, as I buried my head in his damp hair, as I accepted Lust into my body.

He felt like hot hard steel wrapped in a velvety cover as I slid to his base. Once I was fully seated on him, we both let out a small groan of pleasure.

He leaned his forehead under my chin as his arms tighten around my waist and I was gently lifted and lowered on his body.

“Harder, Lust!” I cried out, inpatient with his slow motions. Did he know how much I needed him?

In my mind, I could picture those behind the glass, watching, panting drooling. And it made my arousal reach a new plateau. I had what they wanted, what they could never have! It made me feel powerful.

Tightening my legs around his waist, I began to grind from side to side, mashing him deep, massaging my clit on the hard base of his cock and his pubic hair.

“Oh, grind it, lover,” he purred as he leaned back and arched into my movements, giving me an upward thrust to complement my side-to-side action.

I threw back my head, my moan filling the room as I began to ride him with the aid of his hands moving me faster up and down his pole.

Then his hands slipped down to kneed my ass and urge me to grind faster.

Soon the sound of our wet bodies sliding against one another filled the room. The raw scent of sex suffused our senses and I was becoming light headed as lightening began to explode behind my eyes.

Faster and faster I moved, my moans and gasps supplying the background for this loving.

Like a machine, Lust pistoned faster and faster, never tiring, always striking that special spot deep within my walls.

Lust began to get louder, his movements jerkier as he drew close to completion. His panting increased and suddenly, he threw back his head, his eyes wild, his face a mask of twisted agonized pleasure.

I screamed as I felt the tension deep inside me break! I felt him swell even larger then bellow out as he erupted deep within me.

“Sinopee!” he screamed, his hair flowing wildly around him.

I felt my inner muscles milking him, pulling the energy out of him as my mind took flight from my body!

This is why I was created! It was for this purpose that I was here! Luster was mine! My man! And no one would ever take him away from me.

I sobbed out my pleasure as Lust’s arms tightened around me, prevented me from falling back bonelessly.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice a whisper in my ear.

“Fine,” I managed to gasp. “God I love you.”

I leaned forward and took his lips in a demanding kiss, plunging my tongue deep into the cavern of his mouth, savoring the flavor of him.

From him, I drew my strength. He was my light, my partner, my equal in this strange world, and in my own. I needed him as much as he needed me.

Then glancing over his shoulder, I once again saw the glass window, and knew that there had been intruders to our love.

I felt my anger rise up in me and begin to take away my weakness. This anger had to have a release! As I stared at the glass window, the spy window, I felt my anger take over!

Chapter Eighteen

“Learn something, you bastards?” I screamed as I pulled myself off of Lust’s body. “Maybe you should take notes!”

There was silence behind the window, but I swear I could hear the confused murmuring of the scientists behind the glass.

Almost sobbing in frustration, I turned back to Lust, who took my still bound hands into his.

“This is the way of the thinkers,” he sighed almost sadly. “Next they will poke and prod and steal blood and take away what is left of our privacy for the sake of...science.”

In that moment I could only hate what my people had done, what I was, what my people were doing here.

“Do not!” he insisted as he easily read the look on my face. “This is not your fault. None of this is your fault.”

I sniffed and nodded my head, but inside, I knew that I was a part of the problem. Everyone like me, a thinker, was part of the problem.

In one day, I had started as a Plain Jane in a dead world and had been transmuted into a thing of erotic beauty. Then I was once again a Plain Jane, only as good as her mind. But how could that help when it was the mind, the Thinkers, who have caused so much pain in the first place?

“How?” I asked as I forced my eye up to meet his. “How did this happen?”

“The Thinkers have always been, Sinopee. From the moment I awakened as a child, the life I knew was behind these glass walls.”

“Luster...” My heart was breaking for him.

“Shh, Sinopee Mine,” he breathed as he cradled me against his chest. My legs naturally went around his waist and I settled myself in to him, knowing that the people outside were probably still watching.

“I watched them poison our bodies and our minds. I watched them break up mated couples to test a theory, and watched as they withered and died away. I watched friends, good friends disappear without a trace, only for the thinkers to come back and take more of us. Then one day, I got tired of watching. When the head Thinker took me to take more blood, I managed to hit him over the head. I have no idea where the knowledge comes from, but I just knew what to do. I knocked him out and I freed the others. We all have an affinity for nature, all of our magic is based on nature, and we fled to the woods.”

“You were lucky.”

“The gods smiled down upon us,” he agreed. “And the Thinkers have been chasing us ever since. They were chasing us the day I stumbled onto the magic mirror under the waterfall and read the words that brought you to me.”

He hugged me tighter as he said this. I hugged him back, knowing that that day was the most important day of my life.

“And if I had not been sitting in front of that mirror going over my parents...”

I stiffened as a thought accrued to me.

“The mirror! You spoke the words on the mirror.”

“This I have said many a time,” he said, a confused expression on his face.

“It has to be a link!” I hissed as I bent low to his ear, conscious that they may be listening to our conversations right now.

“What?”

“The man who caught me! He said something about the voice activation device! There has to be a link!”

Before I could say more, the door was flung open and several men I could classify as guards entered the room.

“Miss, please come with us,” one of them said, trying to keep his eyes off of my bare body. Like he hadn’t already gotten an eyeful!

“What do you want?” I hissed as I felt Luster tense beneath me.

“Please, come with us.”

“No!”

Then I saw them raise their guns.

In a flash, Lust threw me off of him, rolling us on the table until I was completely covered by his body.

Then before my amazed eyes, I saw him launch himself at the three guards, taking them by surprise and knocking two off of their feet.

“Run!” he roared at me as he leapt to his feet to take out the third.

The other two were slow to rise, unused to any physical activity, so it was easy for me to slip by them.

But the third man, he pulled his gun and prepared to fire.

“No!” I screamed.

His eyes flashed towards me, giving Luster a split second to react.

Diving low, he grabbed the guard by his knees, bringing him down with a thump. Before the dazed guard could move, Luster’s fist was plowing into his face, knocking him out cold.

The other two were rising to their feet when Luster scooped up the defeated guard’s laser and pointed it in their direction.

“Do not move.” His cold words sent shivers down my spine.

“He can’t operate it,” one man said to the other.

“But I am betting I can,” I sneered as I stepped to Luster’s side and placed my hand over his.

They two froze in their tracks.

“I am betting that it takes a certain DNA sequence to operate this gun, gentle man. And I am also betting that I have the sequence.”

There was silence.

Chuckling, Luster relinquished the gun without argument.

“We will be leaving now,” I said as he began to back towards the door. “And I can honestly say that I haven’t enjoyed this visit, thought there have been high points.”

“Time to go!” Luster hissed as be backed out of the cage and slammed the door shut.

Smiling, I let out a small cry of joy and jumped to place a kiss on his cheek.

“Why wouldn’t the weapon work?” He was finally showing some signs of curiosity. Maybe he was starting to believe that magic wasn’t the whole of the universe. He reached out and snapped the bindings holding my wrists and I flexed them, glad to be free.

“DNA,” I said as we crept from the room.

I knew that we had taken a chance that the entire outer room could be filled with scientist equipped with lasers and data gathering equipment but our luck was holding. The room was vacant.

If they had run the DNA tests on my blood, I figured there was a lab full of confused long tunics right now.

“DNA?”

“It’s like...” How do you explain DNA to a person who believed that all things come from magic?

But as I tossed ideas back and forward in my head, Luster was leading me through the room, searching in corners and around doorways, taking us to the exit.

“Well?” he asked as he pushed me into a side room that was filled with tunics. Supply room, I guessed. He raised his eyebrow at me as he tossed me a tunic.

As much as I loved the sight of his naked body glimmering in the artificial light of the rooms, it probably wasn’t a good idea to try and escape butt naked. Besides, his skin was beginning to shine and glow. As I said before, he was well named.

“Remember you said that each of us had different gifts that it made us unique?”

“Yes.”

I sighed in disappointment as the tunic covered his body. But them I got serious. We had to move to if what I believed was true.

“Well, DNA is what gives us those differences. It is like a signature that tells all about us.”

He looked at me and blinked his eyes twice.

“The thing that gives Glow the power to hide in the shadows or Glimmer the ability to talk to the trees, or me the power to move things?”

He had it!

“Yes! That is it!”

“Then your DNA is not like mine,”

“Not like anybody’s!”

“But your DNA allows you to fire the weapon?”

“Yes.”

“Because you are one of them?”

Chapter Nineteen

I froze at his statement. Now how do I explain this to him?

“I am not one of them, Luster! I don’t even know who they are! But they are like the people from my world.”

“How is this possible?”

“I don’t know!” I sighed in frustration as I paced in the small supply room.

“How did they come here? Are there more magic mirrors?”

“I don’t know!”

Luster growled in frustration, then walked over to me. He jerked me into his arms and held me tight.

“We have to find out.”

“I know,” I said. I felt like crying! I knew that we only had a few hours left, maybe less than that and the prediction in the letters would come true.

“We have to get to the magic mirror.”

“Yes,” I agreed as I rested my head on his strong chest. “But we have to get out of here.”

Luster let me go and walked over to the rack of tunics. Pushing them aside, he touched the wall behind them.

“This is wood.”

I nodded as I examined the texture of the wall. “Looks like it to me.”

Then smiling at me, Luster pressed his hands against the wall. It shimmered for a second, then simply ceased to be.

“I can displace natural substances.” He held out his hand to me.

Smiling, I took his hand and we stepped out into the cool night.

He glanced back and the wall reappeared. My bet is that they would be wondering how we managed to escape.

I looked up and noticed that the moon was almost at its zenith. Time was almost up for me and I didn’t have any answers or the letterbox that I needed.

A tear rolled down my face as I felt a feeling of helplessness overcome me. But then if there was anything that being here taught me, it was hope. I had to keep hope. I pulled myself together and followed Luster thought the camp.

It was easy, almost too easy. It seemed in seconds, we were following the trail back towards the forests.

I noticed that Luster reached out and touched a branch or a tree trunk from time to time, but we were steadily moving.

“I think the answers will be at the water fall,” I ventured as I followed his lead. “What do you think?”

“I think I understand why we could never use the weapons that we captured.” He said quietly as he moved us from shadow to shadow. “And I think I would give my nipple ring for a good sword.”

Just like a warrior, I thought in amusement.

Almost before I was ready, we were at the waterfall, the place where I had come through the mirror, where all of this had begun.

“My parents left me that letterbox, Luster, before they disappeared doing some weird experiment.

I looked around the clearing that had become so important to me, and almost wept to think that I would never see it again.

“The answer is in the box.”

In reply, Luster stepped through the waterfall and vanished behind a curtain of clear flowing water.

I knew he was retrieving the mirror. I knew that my time here, that our time together, was almost up.

I looked around at the peaceful glade, remembering the nights when I fought back tears as I prepared to leave my love for another year. This glade brought both joy and sadness to my life.

I sat on familiar rocks and waited.

“Mom, dad,” I sighed in true regret. “Why did you leave that box with me?”

“Because they were trying to stop us.”

I whirled around, almost falling off of my rock, as I faced the voice for the first time.

“Who are you?”

He raised a torch, and I gasped in shock. It was the guard from the room. No! This man was taller? Surrounding him were several of the armed guards, yet they all looked alike!

Then another man entered the clearing.

“It can’t be!”

I was staring at my father!

Chapter Twenty

Your touch, only the touch of your hand,

The caress of your fingers

The sound of your voice

Shall save me

From the letter box

“Daddy?” I gasped, tears falling from my eyes.

“Not quite.”

I stared, my vision blurry from my tears as the man that so resembled my father pulled out the wooden box.

“I should have guessed he would hide it here.”

“He?” I slowly rose to my feet. “Daddy, what are you talking about?”

“I am not your father!” the man bellowed! “We just share the same DNA.”

But he looked like my father! He sounded like my father!

“When we found a female Gen Ex 1 with my DNA type, I figured out what my predecessor had done.”

I was stunned into immobility! I stood there and listened to the thing that wasn’t my father and my mind reeled! There was only one explanation that I could come up with!

“Clones?”

“I prefer the term genetic twin, actually.” My father-not my father said.

“What were you doing here?”

“Where is the time machine?” he countered.

“Time machine?”

“Don’t play dumb, you foolish girl! I may resemble the man who sired you, but believe me, I have no loving daughterly feelings towards you. Give me the time machine or I will relish causing you a great deal of pain!”

“Time machine? This is not another world, another dimension?”

Both men laughed at that.

“You have been reading too much fiction, dear girl! Wake up and join the real world. You are no longer in 3009, this is the year 5009.”

My legs gave out! Instead of landing on my rock, I slipped off and hit the ground.

“I guess the old man never told her much,” The guard look alike said to the monster in my father’s skin.

“Listen up, for I will tell you this once. Your father and his team made a time machine to come to the future to replenish the past. Problem is that all the radiation from your time polluted the fauna and flora. To take such species back would cause many environmental disasters. But while we were here, we discovered that several of the plants were not breeding. They were multiplying by some form of chemical cloning. They were replicating their DNA and adapting to the environment they found themselves in. Naturally, we had to try this process with human DNA. The results are these so-called rebels that have gotten away from us. But we will get them back, and with the time machine, we will make our way back to the past and take our places as rulers of that dung heap.”

“My father would never agree that!” I breathed my voice horse with shock. “This would have never occurred to him!”

“That is why his constituents eliminated him and your mother, and the Triton was born.”

“Eliminated?”

“You don’t have to be alive to gather DNA, young one. The only unfortunate thing is that your parents managed to destroy our time window. We knew that they had to have another one, but you mother and father expired before they could tell us where they hid it. So we remained trapped like the Original Triton, the rulers of heaven and earth.”

“The Tritons were defeated by their offspring,” I whispered as I stared at the thing that shared the same DNA as I. I was ready to throw up

Both men laughed.

“Too bad we need you alive. I would enjoy seeing you bleed,” my fathers clone said, all amusement suddenly washed away.

I stared at him, but a glimmer of some kind caught my attention. Was there someone creeping up beside the two men? I quickly returned my attention to him, not wanting to give any notice that the men may be in for an ambush.

“What about the people who live here? The rebels?”

“That is what you get when you cross the DNA of a brilliant human with those of some of the plain life here. Play around with their structure, mutate a few genes, and you have the perfect solider. Too bad they refused to listen.”

“You used brilliant minds,” I added, trying to keep him talking. “What did you expect? If you didn’t want independent speakers, you should have used a lesser quality DNA.”

“We used what we had, because of your father trapping us here. But the time for our captivity is over! Like the mythical Tritons exploded out of Tarturus, we shall leave this rotting jungle and turn the barren wasteland of earth 3009 into our home.”

“Not if the mirror is broken.”

They turned to look beyond me, and there was Luster.

From the expression on his face I knew that he had heard everything the men had to say. I also knew that he had figured out something while I was distracting them.

“Look! It’s your son!” my father’s look alike crowed.

Then the final piece fell into place.

Luster could activate the time window because he had something of the other’s DNA within him!

It wasn’t the letters or the box that had brought us together! It washim touching the mirror! His DNA and his voice activated the portal.

In his hand, Luster held the mirror. It was a longish affair wide enough to pull a body through, but rather plain, like the one on my dresser.

But Luster held it in such a way that we all knew that he was going to throw it.

“You don’t want to do that,” The guards look alike said. “It is our window out of here, boy! Think of it! A whole new world! You have conquering in your genes! I planned you, Luster. I created the mixture that runs through your veins! It is in you to conquer!”

“We will,” he said and the guard clone smiled. “Conquer you.”

With that, he threw the mirror with some force against the rocks that stood beside the waterfall. The mirror shattered into countless pieces of glass.

“No!” both clones wailed, but their screams of denial were drowned out by the loud battle cries of the rebels in full battle mode.

“Like in legend,” I growled as I rose to my feet. “The Tritons will be overthrown by their offspring.”

I pointed and the men turned and paled.

There before them, a brilliant rainbow of glowing color, were the children that they themselves had created.

The men backed away in fear, wanting to run away but having no place to turn. And their children were closing in for the kill.

Epilogue

With your touch you teach me

You take me to new worlds, show me things that I never imagined.

Touch me again, teach me all

So that others will learn from us

Be their guide, My Love

Show them the way!

From the letter box

I lay huddled against Luster, still in quite a bit of shock.

We had returned to the Citadel after the clones and their men disappeared under the wave of brightly colored warriors, all out for revenge.

But there was still a lot that we didn’t understand. I figured that some things would never be explained.

“How did you know that I wouldn’t be sucked into the void?” I asked as I snuggled against his chest.

I wiggled as his large warm hands worked their way down my back to cup my ass. I held in a squeal as a wondering finger eased over the hidden rosebud there, making my body grow wet where I began to grind against his thigh.

“You said it Sinopee,” he laughed as I wiggled closer to that exploring finger. “It was my voice and my touch.”

I murmured in shocked delight as that finger pressed inward and invaded my tight hole. His other hand moved around to pluck at my clit.

“Your touch,” I gasped as my whole body quivered in delight. I could feel my juices flowing over his hand as he began to play with my body.

“Pay attention,” he laughed as his finger burrowed deeper, wrenching a moan from my throat.

“I am,” I insisted as my hand slid up his chest to grasp his nipple ring. He groaned as I gave it a tug, his whole body shuddering in pleasure-pain.

“Well, yourparents gave you the letters in the box knowing that nothing would make you part from them, knowing that you would sit in front of their mirror and touch the paper, that you would feel connected to them that way.”

He closed his eyes as my hand left his nipple with its ornament and slid down to grip his cock at the base.

“Go on,” I insisted and purred as two fingers invaded my wet cunt.

“So it was a safe bet,” he breathed as he slid me to my back and hovered above me. “That the stuff about disappearing into a void was a threat to make sure that if you ever got here, you would not let the box fall into wrong hands.”

I felt a slick trail as the head of his cock, leaking precum, slid across my thigh and pressed against the damp fur guarding my weeping womanhood.

“Yes,” I breathed arching against him, trying to force his finger and his erection deep into me.

“So that if you ever got here, you could show us how to use the things that the Triton left behind.”

I froze at that.

“The stuff... Oh shit yes!”

As I paused, Luster took this opportunity to drive his cock home deep!

“The... Stuff.” He punctuated each word with a thrust.

I screamed as my legs flew up to wrap around his waist, driving him deeper into me. His finger began a counter thrust that almost over-stimulated me, almost brought me pain. But I screamed and begged for more. The lines between discomfort and ultimate joy were blurring! Right now, any sensation added to the sensations crawling thought my body.

My world shifted, consciousness dropped away as my being became a thing of complete orgasmic delight.

Colors swirled behind my closed eyes and each of his movements rocked me higher and higher.

I could feel the sweat pouring off of me, felt his weight as he shifted to the side a bit to grind against me, mashing my clit against his soft pubic hair and adding yet another thrill to my convulsing body.

His thrusts became rougher, harder as he grunted above me, setting a rhythm that my body had no choice but to follow.

I began to shake as tension built and built. I trembled as I arched up against him, every muscle straining for completion!

Then it broke!

I screamed as my body began to convulse around him. I felt the muscles in my ass clench around his finger as my inner walls tightened around his cock, milking him intently, trying to drain the life out of his body.

He, too, cried out as orgasm took hold of his body, making him writhe and quake above me.

I felt the hot splash of his seed and it soothed me.

“Sinopee,” he gasped as he settled, shaking in reaction atop my still quivering body.

I felt him ease his finger free of me, and then I was engulfed in a tight embrace, our body trembling together as we both began to calm.

“Teach me to be a thinker,” he gasped as he rolled to the side, keeping our bodies joined even as he pulled my head to his chest.

‘You want me to...use my gifts?”

“Yes,” be breathed. “This science thing has to be understood.”

“But what about the magic? Have you given up on it?” I asked, as I stroked my hand across his damp back. His muscles still trembled.

“I will never give up on magic, but I see the merit of science.”

“Really?” I chucked weakly. Damn, these sessions with Lust left me totally drained.

“Yes,” he replied as he bent low to take my lips with his. “How else will you explain us both touching the mirror at the same time or how you just happen to be my true mate?”

I couldn’t argue with his reasoning. I couldn’t say anything anyway. I was too busy eating at his mouth, taking in his unique flavor, playing catch-me with his tongue.

Besides, who could explain the greatest bit of magic ever created?

Who could explain love?

The Quest: Hunter’s Passion

© Marilyn Lee, 2002.

Chapter One

Jemi Hunter stood in the middle of the dilapidated shack, shivering. A cold, damp wind whistled through the many holes in what was left of the walls of the only building still standing in the whole so called town. Coming there had been just plain stupid, not to mention superstitious. This was a hell of a way to spend Valentine’s Day: alone in a long abandoned mining town several hours from home and the romantic evening her boss, Mark LeFarr had wanted to spend with her.

Used to women falling over themselves for the chance to be showered with diamonds, spend longweekends sailing on yachts in the New England harbor, and enjoying European vacations, the middle-aged telecommunications multi-millionaire found her attitude strange. Such delights were only enjoyable in the right company. The right company was no longer available to her. She sighed; at leastnotoutside of her dreams.

Not that she ever dreamed of Cody anymore. Her dreams lately had taken on frightening and inexplicable dimensions. In them, she had a new lover, whose face was never revealed, because he always took her from behind. His huge, hairy bronze body brought her incredible pleasure and joy. When she woke after one of those dreams, she always wished it could have gone on long enough for her to turn and see the face of her dream lover.

This hardly seemed the place to fulfill fantasies, but this was where the letter, Cody’s letter, had instructed her to come. This was definitely not a good idea—unless, of course, the letter really was from Cody.

Glancing around the interior of the building with its rotting floorboards and broken parts of tables and chairs, she decided it had once been a restaurant or a place where miners had spent their leisure time gambling or whoring. Why would Cody want her there? More to the point,how could Cody want her anywhere?

Five long, lonely years had passed since the accident. She’d watched in helpless desperation as Cody struggled to recover. In the end, the massive injuries sustained in a police pursuit gone wrong had taken their toll. She’d lost him after just two short years of marriage. Before he lapsed into the final coma, when he knew he wouldn’t survive, he had promised to find a way to return to her. Now, according to the letters, he had.

Remembering the anguish of losing him, she shivered again, her eyes filling with tears. She had spent weeks sobbing uncontrollably, unable to fully accept the condolences of Cody’s colleagues because she couldn’t accept that he was lost to her forever. It had taken a full year before she could talk about him without dissolving into helpless tears. Slowly, with the help of her friends, she had moved on with her life. Then, just as she was on the verge of deciding maybe her next-door neighbor, Jeff, could be more than a part-time lover, the dreams had started. Shortly afterwards, the letters began arriving.

She had come home to find the first letter with no stamp or postmark in her mailbox at the beginning of the previous November. On recognizing the writing, her heart had begun to pound wildly. The letter had said simply:I miss you. I’m working on a way for us to be together again. Get ready . After that, a new letter had arrived each week. After each letter, she would experience another of the dreams where her dream lover came to her. Before long, she’d been living for the letters and had begun to embrace the dreams. Two days earlier, the last letter arrived.

Her dream lover had ravaged her all that night. She had lain in her bed, shuddering with pleasure as he filled her with a huge, impossibly long cock and fucked her to oblivion. She had clutched her pillow to her face to silence her screams of pleasure when she came. When she opened her eyes, she’d screamed at the sight of the face of her lover who was definitely not human.

The next morning she’d awaken tired and shaken, unable to recall what her lover had looked liked or why she’d screamed. As she ate breakfast, she had sat staring at the two rose like long-stemmed flowers with purple petals and red and green centers that had come with the letter. The letter had instructed her to come to this place on Valentine’s Day and ended with the promise:

The time for us to be together again has arrived, Jemi. Our being together again will require that you be very brave and trust that I would never ask you to do anything that would cause irreparable harm. It will also require a great sacrifice of you. If you long to be with me as I do with you, come to me here on February 14^thand we will enjoy a wonderful and exotic Valentine’s Day that we can both cherish forever.

Cody, who loves you still.

She opened her long wool coat and looked down at the dark brown leather outfit she wore. With its short skirt, halter-top, and long dark boots, she looked like something out of a Hercules movie. She grimaced. Well, she would if her thirty-six-year old body was more buxom and buff. She had let herself go somewhat after Cody’s death. Well, hell. It was too late for regrets that she hadn’t started working out more vigorously sooner. She’d have to work with what she had.

She smiled. Cody had always loved her in short, tight leather outfits with no panties. He hadn’t minded the fact that she had a slight tendency to be overweight. He used to say he liked his woman to have a little meat on her bones. When she’d complained that her butt was too big, he’d grin and tell her it was perfect for clutching as he ate her. He would then proceed to bury his face between her legs and give her the most delicious oral sex she’d ever had.

She had come here today, hoping that somehow Cody had found a way to be with her again. She shook her head. That was crazy. Cody was dead. Long dead. She was going to go home and go straight to Jeff’s apartment. They would spend the night together and once and for all, she would put thoughts of Cody and what they’d lost out of her mind and heart. And that went double for her dream lover.

A loud crash sounded behind her and she spun around. The wooden door hung open on one hinge. In the fading light she saw a huge cat with the body of a beautiful bronze panther but the dark golden mane of a lion crouched in the threshold. And she knew why she’d screamed the night before.

Every muscle in her body, including those in her throat, froze. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t think of anything except the fact that she was about to die.

Then, without a sound, the big cat leapt at her. Her legs gave way and she collapsed onto her back. In an instant, the animal straddled her body. The big head lowered. She felt the hot breath on her face. Looking up into the green slitted eyes, her throat muscles relaxed and she opened her mouth to scream.

Jemi, don’t be afraid. It’s me, Cody. Trust me, Jemi.

The words were projected directly into her mind. This strange, huge cat could not be her Cody. Yet, he felt familiar. He smelled familiar...he looked familiar...the long, bronze body with the rippling muscles and the Hunter green eyes.

It’s me, Jemi. Trust me.

“But...how?”

Trust me.

“Cody, I do trust you. What should I do?”

Trust me. I’m going to lay on you and cover you completely. It will be frightening,but when you awake, we will be together again in a special place.

Heart thumping, she closed her eyes and held her breath as the big cat lay its body on hers, covering her completely; suffocating her. When she opened her mouth to scream, it was too late.

* * * * *

His sleek, thick cock emerged from its sheath. In the act of draping his big body over the back of the female he held between his forepaws, he paused, his big maned head turned to the side. Jeroni, propped on her elbows in the damp grass several yards to his right in the clearing of the forest, got a good unobstructed view of his pink-headed cock. Now why couldn’t she meet a two-legged male with a foot and a half long dong? It was all well and good having a flexible, contracting pussy, but no matter what the elder women of Volter said, when it came to cocks, bigger and thicker was definitely better than small, short and slender.

Hunter settled over the female. Through the psychic bond she shared with the big cat, Jeroni felt Hunter’s pleasure as he slowly pushed his length into the feline’s warm, tight passage. Sighing softly, she lowered her upper body until she could rest her chin on her folded arms and watched Hunter’s lean flanks pumping his length deep into the female’s tunnel. Ever since she could remember, watching Hunter mate had provided her with a secret sexual thrill like no other. Now that the time for her life mating was at hand, watching the big cat mate gave her an ever-increasing erotic high.

She licked her lips and smiled. Nothing Hunter liked better than a good, hard fuck. Fuck? She frowned. What did fuck mean? She dismissed her confusion as she sensed Hunter’s pleasure. Smiling at the sounds of the two cats mating, Jeroni rolled over onto her back, pushed up her short leather skirt and touched a finger to the small knob above her mating passage. Moving in time with the thrusts she felt through their bond, Jeroni dipped two fingers between her thighs. The muscles of her cunt tightened and the walls shortened until her passage fit like a glove around her fingers.

Through the bond, she felt the passion building in Hunter. His big balls tightened and he bit into the smaller cat’s neck. With her eyes tightly closed, Jemi’s fingers took on the outline of a big pulsing shaft. She felt the sweet impact of every movement, driving the satisfying length home with bruising force. The sweetness of the mating drove Jeroni to the edge of delight. The walls and muscles of her tunnel clung greedily to his thick hot dick. Delicious waves thundered through her. Her lips parted and she shuddered as if she’d been pumped full of hot tasty seed.

She collapsed back against the grass, slowly withdrawing her fingers from her moist passage. Smiling and drowsy, she rolled over onto her stomach. She was going to have to mate soon or the next time Hunter unsheathed his monster cock, she was going to be hard pressed not to grab it and get some for herself. Admittedly, the fact that it was forbidden for a Volterian woman to mate with one of the fabled carnivores from Tern Terra, only added to her desire to do just that.

Hunter withdrew his sated cock from the beige cat and dismounted. On the other side of the path, under a tree, lay a tall, slender female with long legs and pale skin. In the light just before dusk, he could see the curly brown mat of hair between her open legs. He sniffed the air. He could smell her need. She would have to mate soon.

His hunger temporarily satisfied, he padded across the trail and looked down at the human female. He looked at her legs: they were long and strong. They had to be. He had an impression of another human female and a huge tan cat. His parents. Straining to reach the memory, he vaguely pictured his mother using her arms and long legs to cling to his father’s flanks in an effort to keep her body pressed tight against his underbelly as she slowly, but gladly accepted the huge cock being steadily pressed, inch by inch into her.

Gripping the memory firmly, Hunter remembered how his father’s tail would whip wildly and his head would toss from side to side as he rutted his long, thick cock deep within Hunter’s mother’s human pussy. His mother’s legs would tremble and shake, but she would hold on to his father’s body. She would sob uncontrollably as she came.

When the trembling, growling, and sobbing subsided, his parents would exchange quiet words of pleasure. Then, with his cock still firmly embedded in his mate, his father would gently lower his big tan body to the ground, roll onto his side, and they would fall asleep, still coupled.

Just before sleep took them, Hunter would approach. His father had been inclined to growl at him after mating, wanting to be alone with his mate, but his mother would reach out to him, stroking his head. Through her touch, the pleasure and joy his parents found in each other would settle over him, making him feel happy and safe.

Allowing the memory to drift away, Hunter growled softly. That was the way it was supposed to be between a Tern Terrian and his mate. That’s the way it should be between he and his Jeroni. Now that Cody andshe were with them perhaps, the time when he could mate with her was at hand. If not, he would learn to shape shift and then he would mate with her.

He glanced down at the woman lying near his paws. Already he could see subtle differences in her. Her behind was more padded and her hair, usually dark and straight, was lighter and showed a tendency to curl. Hunter felt a stirring in his chest. After all the months of strain and struggle, it had finally happened.She was really there—not quite as he’d seen her in the mist, but close enough.

But she wasn’t aware of him yet. He’d need to go slowly so as not to frighten her again. He looked down at Jeroni. She breathed in slow and deep, but he knew she was still awake. He laid his big body along side hers.

Hmm. Hunter, that was so hot,she sent the drowsy thought his way. She was so tight and hot. Forest cats have good pussy.

Good pussy,he echoed, his mind wandering toher . Bringing his thoughts back to Jeroni, he had to resist the urge to lap at her sweet passage before burying his tongue and his cock in her. Once, many seasons past, when he had come upon her in the forest after her first mating, the smell of her seed filled cunt had driven him into a mating frenzy. With no foreknowledge that mating with her would be forbidden, he’d dipped his tongue into her warm, creamy cunt.

After the first startled squeak of surprise, she had parted her thighs and lifted her slim hips, granting his tongue easier access to her sweet pussy. Her smell and taste had been incredible. Even now, his cock stirred in its sheath as he recalled that first satisfying taste of her hot, moist pussy. As he had lapped and stabbed at her wet cunt, their psychic bond had formed. When she had come against his tongue, his cock, hard, hot, and heavy with need, had popped out of its sheath.

Tioni, The Seer, had come upon them just as he had gone down on his hunches in preparation for sliding as much of his throbbing cock into her pussy as she could handle. Tioni, her green eyes blazing, the dark brown pelt covering her body, bristling in the night breeze, had descended on them like a whirlwind, her right hand extended. Hunter, with the big head of his cock pressed at the entrance of Jeroni’s pussy, had felt a sudden paralysis seize him.

“Hunter, stop immediately,” The Seer had demanded. “Jeroni Teyer, close your legs! You two must not mate.”

They had both obeyed the seer’s demand. Still, Hunter had never understood why it was okay for him to eat her pussy or to bottom mate with her, but wrong for he and his Jeroni to cunt mate. They both enjoyed her soft sweet lips on his cock and he loved pushing his dick into her small bottom on their special occasion. His unselfish Jeroni always pleased him, even when he didn’t come. Still, they both knew the natural order of things was for them to cunt mate.

As a Tern Terrian Carnivore, his natural and preferred life mate was a human female. But Tioni had warned that if they mated, they would set forces in motion that would affect not only all of Volter Terra, but his home Tern Terra as well. Over the succeeding seasons his desire to mate with Jeroni and her desire to accept his cock had mounted, but they had abided by the promise they had made Tioni not to.

He tossed his big head, shaking the memory clear. He eyed the human lying beside him. It was difficult to think of anything but mating around Jeroni when her fragrant cunt gave off her mating aroma. She was tired. He’d let her rest for a short time then they would return to the hut stop so she could mate. While she did, if he could control his jealousy, he would watch and through their bond know some of the bliss of being in her sweet pussy.

His sensitive nostrils full of her mating aroma, he settled down into an uneasy sleep.

Chapter Two

The sound of the rain beating softly against the thatch of the roof roused Jeroni. Lifting the animal skins from her naked body, she opened her eyes. She felt her mating passage twitch as her gaze lighted on the tall, nude figure of the man feeding wood into the dim embers of the fire alcove across the room.

The typical Volterian warrior, he was tall with broad shoulders, narrow hips, a tight butt, and a shaft that was almost always hard and ready for action. Just the way she liked her mating partners. Of course, like most Volterian males, his dick was only average sized. She released a soft sigh. A starving woman couldn’t be too choosy and he was bigger than most males. It was just that after having experienced the absolute delight of being filled to the brim with a big, hard, luscious cock for well over two wonderful seasons, these average cocks paled in comparison.

Over three seasons of a big, hard, luscious cock? When had she ever had that pleasure? She frowned. When would she ever know that pleasure? Where had that thought come from? She shook it off. It must be the fever. As Tioni was fond of saying, putting off the mating bought nothing but misery and fever. Soon, her extended ceremonial mating ritual would end and she must start the journey to Terra where she would spend the rest of her life mating with just one man. One man. She felt the streak of rebellion Tioni was always warning her against, rising to the surface.

What was the point of being the only offspring of a Liege Lord if she were held to just one life mate like any other Volterian woman? Especially when everyone said that man had to be Tuteri, only son of Lord Liege Siano of the kingdom of Terra? Terrian men were notorious for their small dicks and their lack of mating expertise. It was rumored that their fabled mating inadequacy had lead to the breakup of Volter Terra into two separate kingdoms many hundreds of seasons pass. How could she, who lived to mate, be expected to choose such a man as a life mate? The Gods of the Mountains couldn’t have intended that.

Come to that, why was any Volterian woman held to one life mate anyway? If the Gods of the Mountains hadn’t intended women to mate with whoever stirred them sexually, why had they gifted them with a pussy that could either contract or expand to the contours of a male cock regardless of the size?

Why did Volterian women enjoy mating so very much if they were intended for just one male? And why did that mate have to be human? She thought of Hunter’s mighty dick and shivered. He gave her such pleasure when he tongued her or bottom mated with her. Still, she knew unimaginable pleasure awaited their cunt mating. Oh to have her pussy on the receiving end of that magnificent cock. Gods of the Mountains. How could that be wrong? As Tioni was fond of saying, questions for another time. Watching Hunter mate had driven her to a frenzy of need and now she needed to mate herself. She tossed back the skins and lay on her back.

“Dioni,” she said softly.

The male turned and looked over his shoulder at her, his dark eyes taking in the firm sensuous contours of her lithe body. Dropping her gaze to his shaft, she saw it twitch. He knew the significance of the pink tips of her breasts tightening. “My Lady Liege?”

“Leave the fire. Come attend me and we will make our own heat, my mighty warrior.”

She licked her lips and watched eagerly as he came across room, his hard cock bouncing in front of him. Her passage moistened. When he paused at the side of the narrow skin covered platform that served as the bed, she sat on the side, her legs parted.

Palming her breasts, he dropped to his knees and buried his face between her thighs. A nice jolt of pleasure shot through her as he began to lick at her sensitive flesh with a skillful tongue. If it was one thing Volterian males were good at, it was tongue mating. His tongue probed inside her, seeking out the secret spots just inside her inner lips that sent pure lust bursting through her body. Within moments, she collapsed back against the bed, her legs clamped around his head, her hips jerking upwards. He brought her to several orgasms before lapping up every drop of her juice.

Hmm. What a talented tongue. Dioni was almost as skillful at tongue mating as Hunter had shown himself to be that one blissful eve he had tongued her. But memories of Hunter’s pleasing tongue weren’t going to help her now. Now, she needed to cunt mate.

As she lay on her back, her legs spayed open, Dioni rose above her. Settling himself between her legs, he shoved his hard dick in her expanded, gaping tunnel.

Dioni was a mighty warrior, but she could barely feel him in her. She sighed. She was going to have to work hard to enjoy this mating. She ran her hands over his muscled torso and encountered a jagged scar on his left shoulder. He had received that wound when he’d leapt in front of her to protect her from a spear cast by one of the Terrian raiders who had abducted her mother. Though only twelve seasons and new to mating, she had rewarded him with an all night cunt mating that they had both thoroughly enjoyed. Her ever-loyal Dioni deserved his pleasure. She would give it to him.

He lay his warm body on hers, flattening her big breasts under the muscles of his chest. Her sensitive tips encountered the thick hair covering his chest muscles and she sighed happily. Nice. He slipped his hands under her and cupped her butt in his palms, wigging his hips against hers.

“My Lady Liege. Please,” he begged, flicking the tip of his tongue against the big nipple nearest him. “Contract.”

She lifted her legs, bending them at the knees. The coarse hair of his groin brushed against her sensitive clit and she shivered. Gods of the Mountains, but she needed this mating. Closing her eyes, she slowly began to tighten and shrink her cunt until it fit snug around his cock.

“There,” she told him softly, stroking her hands down his strong, taunt butt. “Is that better, my faithful Dioni?”

“My Lady Liege,” he gasped. “Yes.”

His firm butt quivered under her hands and she smiled. That weak, pleading voice was music to her ear and balm to her aching cunt. Nothing sweeter than hearing a male beg for the pleasure she could give him. Well, nothing sweeter short of being stuffed with a big hard cock that had belonged to a big, handsome police detective.

What was a police detective?

She frowned. The thought must have come from the off worlder Hunter had said had come. Why had she agreed? Because he had asked it and she could deny her bond mate nothing in her power to grant him.

“My Lady Liege?”

Dioni’s plaintive voice interrupted her musings.

She realized that her tunnel had reverted to its natural slack state. She quickly tightened it around his shaft. He moaned and shuddered in appreciation and pleasure.

“You like that?” she teased.

“Yes, My Lady Liege,” he groaned, his voice full of mating need.

“And how does the mighty Dioni find my pussy?”

“Sweet, My Lady Liege,” he moaned. “Hot, tight, and so sweet.”

“And would you like more of my hot, tight, sweet pussy?”

“Yes. Please, My Lady Liege.”

“Then show me,” she commanded softly. “Show me you how much you like my pussy.”

“Yes. Yes, My Lady Liege.”

He shuddered and began pumping his shaft into her tightened passage. Each time he dove into her shortened channel, he groaned. Jeroni wrapped her arms around him, closed her eyes, and let reality slip away.

She was no longer Jeroni Teyer of Volter, daughter of Liege Lord Donoun. She was someone else...an off worlder called Jemi of a distant world called Earth. The cock swelling and wildly propelling into her was much bigger and thicker...hotter...more powerful. The arms holding her stronger. The face of her lover, smooth and dark...the eyes a surprising and beautiful green. The body big, sleek, and dark. Cody. Her lover. Her love.

It had been so long. So long since she’d felt the wonder of the forceful, demanding cock quickly conquering her pussy. She clung to him and they fucked each other wildly, biting and hissing as they fought for their pleasure.

When she felt him shuddering, about to come before she was ready, she expanded her inner walls, lengthening her pussy. One of her regular stable of lovers, Dioni knew what to do. He pulled up hard on each upward thrust, brushing roughly against her clit, while hungrily sucking at her breasts.

As her own pleasure thundered through her, she contracted and shortened herself around his cock. She used her inner walls to massage and cling to his hot organ, pushing him to the edge. Holding him tight within her body, they came together. Shuddering and groaning, he pumped a full, warm load into her satisfied body.

Hmm. Nice. Very nice. She expanded her pussy and he pulled out of her. She turned on her side and curled into a ball. He moved behind her, pressing tight against her. She felt his still hard shaft between her cheeks as he pulled the skins over their sweating bodies. She drifted to sleep in his arms with a smile on her face. Gods of the Mountains, she loved mating.

* * * * *

Although awake, Jemi kept her eyes firmly shut. Every time she opened them and looked around, she imaged herself in some strange room with no electricity and a curtain where the door should have been. An unusually large, paneless window occupied one entire wall. Heavy dark curtains were pulled back to reveal what appeared to be a verdant forest.Animal skins covered her naked body. Her naked, satisfied body. Someone had made love to her. She sniffed the air. Recently.

The small room, bare except for the bed, a huge chest by the window, and a chair, was redolent with the scent of satisfied lust. Candles sat in brass holders on the stone floor on either side of the bed.

Who had she slept with and where was she? The last thing she remembered was making the long drive to the abandoned mining town Cody’s letter had directed her to. Things were blurry after that.

This was all a bad dream. If she lay still long enough, she would fall back to sleep. When she awoke again, she’d be in her own bedroom—alone with her hunger for Cody that still sometimes hurt like a fresh wound.

Only she knew this was not a dream. She was here, wherever here was. Lying there in a fetal position with her eyes closed wasn’t going to help a whole lot. Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes again and looked around for something to put on. Near the window, draped across a low wooden chair lay a leather outfit even skimmer than the one she had worn on Valentine’s Day. How long ago had that been?

A hazy memory of a big cat teased her. The cat in question had been at least ten feet long. It had the sleek beautiful body of a panther, an unusual bronze coloring, the striking dark golden mane of a lion, the height of a horse. She frowned. Cats did not grow that big, nor, as far as she knew, did panther-like cats have manes of any color.

Jemi.

Her lips parted in a soundless scream. The head of the big cat from her memory appeared in the open window. Oh, God! She scrambled off the bed. Her feet got caught in the skins and she sprawled full length on the cold, stone floor. She heard a swishing sound. She turned on her back in time to see the huge cat leap through the window.

In seconds, he stood over her, his green slitted eyes staring down at her, his hot breath brushing her face. Oh, God, was he going to kill her again? That was it. He’d killed her once...suffocated her and now she was...dear God this wasn’t happening.

Jemi. Don’t be afraid. I know this body is frightening, but it’s me.

Jemi blinked up at the cat, confused. “Me who?”

Cody. It’s me, Jemi, Cody.

“Cody? But...how can this be? You’re a cat. You can’t be Cody. I’m losing my mind.”

The big head dipped and she sucked in a frightened breath as the cat’s tongue emerged from his mouth and he slowly, deliberately licked each breast, making her nipples immediately harden, much as they’d done when Cody did the same thing during their love making.

You still taste sweeter than any wine I ever tasted, my delicious darling.The big head moved lower and sniffed her groin area.You’ve mated. Did he please you?

A hot wave of embarrassment covered her nude body. “Did who please me?”

Dioni. I watched you mate with him. Volterian males…their cocks are so small.

Okay. This was too crazy. She was naked in a place that looked like it belonged in some medieval movie with a huge cat standing over her, sniffing her crotch, and talking to her about sex. Not exactly talking, but somehow communicating with her. First, she had to get away from this cat, then she had to find out where she was and what the hell was going on.

You’re with me, Jemi. It’s taken me a long time, but I finally found a way for us to be together again. I’ve missed you.

The tip of the warm, wet tongue touched her clit and she had to bite hard on her bottom lip to keep from gasping with pleasure. “Please. Don’t do that again,” she begged. Or she would dissolve into a helpless mass of need as she did when her dream lover tongued her before making love to her.

The head rose and the green gaze met hers.I’ve waited five long years to taste you again, Jemi. I’ve missed you and the hot, sweet love you surrendered so warmly. All I’ve thought about during that time was making love to you again. Loving you. Licking your big, beautiful breasts, plunging my cock into your sweet cunt. See how much I need you.

A chill shot through her as a huge, thick shaft with a big pink head emerged from the sheath on his belly. God, almighty, she’d seen that cock many times over the last few weeks. She’d seen it in her dreams, felt it being thrust repeatedly into her body. Oh, lord, she was looking into the visage of her dream lover. Panicking, she gasped and began trying to wiggle away from him on her back. A big paw on her chest, immobilized her.

“Oh, God, please!” She pleaded. “Let me go!”

<Let you go? Look at that magnificent cock. How can you turn that down? Stay still and open your legs. We can handle every inch of that sweet prize.>

Jemi froze. That was a new voice, a female voice. She looked up at the cat. “Please. Who was that?”

<Jeroni Teyer of Volter>the female voice answered.

“Jeroni Teyer, kindly get out of my head!”

<No one speaks to the daughter of Liege Lord Donoun in that disrespectful manner. I will have to show you the consequences of your folly! >

To Jemi’s horror, even when the big paw was removed from her chest, she had no control over her body. The huge male moved forward, bringing his cock closer. She couldn’t stop her legs from opening or her hands from reaching for the huge bronze cock hanging over her head.

Jemi would have given anything to wake up back home. But in order to wake, she first had to be asleep. And she was very much awake. There was no way she could have dreamed all this.

She looked up at the cat. “Cody! If somehow that’s you, please make her stop.”

Jeroni, leave us.

<Leave you? Who are you? What have you done to Hunter? If you’ve hurt him, there will be no place on the plant that will be safe for you.>

I’m here, Jeroni. Cody has not harmed me.

<Who is Cody? And who is this female in my mind? Hunter, what’s happening?>

Have no fear, Jeroni. We both have much to learn about my abilities as a Tern Terrian Carnivore. Cody is the body sharer from another place beyond the Mountains of the Gods that I told you about.

<A place beyond the Mountain of the Gods? There is no place but Volter, Terra, Tern Terra, and the Mountains of The Gods.>

There are other places. I have seen them in the misty place. Cody and Jemi are life mates from beyond the mountains. They’ve been separated for long seasons. I encountered his wandering spirit in the misty place and I have vowed to share his spirit in return for the gift of his body. Let’s leave him with his life mate.

<But Hunter, if he’s in your head, he has no body.>

He has none now, but my memories of my race’s abilities are beginning to surface. Given time, I think I’ll be able to shape shift into his original body. Then, my Jeroni, you and I can finally cunt mate.

<You know how much I want that, but I can feel her in my head and in my body, trying to control it. How can we leave?>

Through our bond. Reach out to me, Jeroni. Touch my mind. Feel my thoughts. Come with me to the misty place.

<But you and Tioni said I should avoid the misty place.>

You will be safe there with me. The misty place is of Tern Terra, as am I. Trust me.

<Always, Hunter, but you said your mother used to warm you to stay out of the misty place.>

I am older now. There are many pleasures and dangers there, but together, we will be safe. Will you come?

<Yes.>

Chapter Three

Jemi felt the knot of tension that had formed at the base of her skull dissolve, then the voice was gone from her head and she and the big cat was alone. She stared up into the green slitted eyes that were so like Cody’s. The sense of well being she’d always felt with Cody swelled within her. Oh, God, could it be? Had Cody been her dream lover after all? It hadn’t felt like Cody. Could her Cody be trapped in the body of this strange, yet beautiful cat?

The big paw was removed from her body.Not trapped, Jemi. Hunter is the only Great Carnivores from Tern Terra in all of Volter and Terra.

“Tern who? Cody, I don’t understand. Where are we? What’s going on?”

This time when the big head dipped, she felt no fear. The warm, moist tongue lapped lazily at her breasts, making her nipples tighten. The head drifted lower and her cunt began to pulse as the rough edge of the tongue licked slowly at the outer lips of her pussy. She sucked in a deep, aching breath as he flicked at her clit.

The big, golden head lifted. Her gaze met his green one and she knew that no manner how improbable, she was lying naked on her back with her beloved Cody, housed in the body of the huge cat, crouching over her. However, she also instinctively knew that Cody had not been her dream lover. “Cody!”

Yes, it’s me, Jemi.

“Oh, Cody!” She reached out and clutched at the leg nearest her. “I don’t understand.”

I don’t fully understand it either, but we can talk later. Right now, I need to taste you?

“Taste me? You mean…?”

“I need to taste you.”

“I…oh, yes, Cody! Please.”

Brushing his big head against her crotch, Cody swiftly stabbed his tongue into the depths of her hungry pussy. Oh, Lord, how she’d missed that sweet, hot tongue of his. She moaned, allowed her legs to fall apart, and closed her eyes. Icy heat enveloped her whole body as the tongue delved repeatedly inside her.

Her cunt seemed to be super sensitive. Every inch of her inner flesh his tongue touched sent tiny, involuntary shivers through her pussy. She gave herself up to the quick and intense explosion that rapidly approached. Her inner muscles tightened and pulsed and then to her shock, she began...ejaculating. Cody slurped up every drop of her moisture, gave her clit one final flick with his hot tongue, and slowly backed away.

Jemi lay gasping, stunned by the force of her orgasm, not to mention the fact that she had just ejaculated into his mouth. Not just come, but actually ejaculated. She opened her eyes and her gaze was immediately drawn to the big cock hanging down from his belly.

Gods of the Mountains what a lovely sight. At ten inches erect, Cody’s cock had been a thing of absolute beauty. Hunter’s cock was awesome. Her pussy began to cream all over again as she contemplated parting her legs further, lifting her hips, and inviting him to drive that sleek bronze monster as deep into her pussy as he could get it.

Okay, Jemi. Granted, you’ve accepted the fact that this is Cody, but he’s inhabiting the body of a cat with a cock that looks at least fourteen inches.

<Eighteenlong, thick, lovely inches.>

Jemi shook her head, aware that the last thought had been Jeroni’s rather than hers.

Listen up, Jeroni. Forget it, she shot the thought back at the unseen nympo sharing her body and her mind.Okay? It’s not gonna happen.

Oh, damn, Jemi, are you sure? I’ve waited so long to feel your hot pussy around my cock again.

She blushed at the thought of having her body invaded by Cody’s now alien cock. “But Cody, it’s not your cock and I’m not even sure this is my body,” she protested weakly. This body felt tighter, firmer. Her breasts felt bigger, her nipples larger and more sensitive. Her cunt felt…different. It felt alarmingly big and open...as if it actually could accommodate Cody’s new, even more scrumptious looking cock.

This is my cock, Jemi and that was your sweet pussy I just tongued. But you’re not ready to accept all you need to know. Put your clothes on and walk with me in the forest and I will try to explain everything.

As she rose onto unsteady legs, Cody’s head dipped and he flicked at her clit.

“Stop that,” she moaned, leaning into his side.

Your pussy tastes sweet. I want to mate with you.

Jemi gasped and jerked away. That thought had felt different. It hadn’t been Cody speaking. “Who…who is that?”

There were several moments of absolute silence.

That was Hunter,Codyfinally said.

“Hunter? Who is he?” But even as she asked, she knew the answer. Hunter was her dream lover who came to her in dreams and fucked her senseless.

This is his body. He wants to fuck you.

“So I gathered,” she quipped, amazed that the thought didn’t entirely displease her. Why should it when she’d been lusting after him for weeks and apparently the feeling was mutual.

After giving Cody, or was it Hunter, one final, long lick at her cunt, she stepped into her skirt.

Outside the small hut, there was no other name for the small building, Jemi looked at Cody. “Where are we? How did we get here? Are you real, Cody? Or am I dreaming again?” She glanced down at the body she was “in.” This body had large, firm breasts, long legs, a rather shapely, padded behind, and a very flat, taunt belly. Nice body. Too bad it wasn’t hers.

Walk with me, Jemi.

Cody turned and slowly padded down the dirt and leaf covered path in front of the hut nestled in the clearing at the end of a forest trail. Happy, but confused, Jemi followed the big male, enjoying the smell of the forest after a spring like rain. Her Cody. Her lips twitched. How fitting that Cody should come back to her in the body of the huge bronze cat.

You always said you liked your men tall and dark,Cody quipped.

And Cody had been that. She glanced at the cat stalking beside her. He was that. “I like you anyway I can get you,” she told him softly.

He responded with a soft lick to her cheek.Tell me about your life since we parted, Jemi. How have you been? Have you been happy?

She sighed. “I was miserable for a long time after…but I tried to do as you asked, I went on with my life. I’m the executive assistant to a telecommunications multi-millionaire and I live in this really ritzy apartment complex and drive a custom outfitted BMW. I have some really good friends and life is…okay.”

Your love life?

She thought of Jeff with his warm smile and understanding blue eyes. “I started dating a guy in my complex about a year ago.”

Do you love him?

If she had, she wouldn’t have come running in search of Cody or been so fascinated with her no longer faceless dream lover. “No, but I am fond of him. He’s warm and sweet, and so kind.”

Would you miss him if you never saw him again?

She stared at him. Did that mean she wasn’t going back home? She was afraid to ask the question. “Yes, but not in an unbearable way as I missed you.” She looked around. “Where are we? What is this place?When is this place?”

I have no idea whatsoever if we’re still on Earth or not. Sometimes I think this must be Earth at some point in time or space. How else could you or I haven’t gotten here? But I don’t even knowwhenwe are. From what I’ve gathered we’re in a feudal society with two dominate kingdoms, Volter and Terra, both ruled by Liege Lords. We’re in Volter, which is ruled by Liege Lord Donoun. Terra is across the valley beyond the Volter Terra River.

“How did you get here? Cody, I know you’ve always believed in life after death and that there was life on other places beside Earth, but. . .you’re dead.”

Not any more,he responded, sounding amused.

She shivered and bit her lip. For all she knew, she might be dead now too. She pushed the thought away.

As to how I got here, I don’t know. After I…left you for the last time, there was nothing but darkness and despair and a hopelessness that I’d never see you again. Then suddenly I was in a misty place where everything I wanted I could have. I just had to think about it and it was mine. I had everything I wanted, except you. My psychic path crossed with Hunter’s. He was there hoping to find information on a way back to his home. When he was ready to go, he convinced me that I needed to leave too.

“Why, if everything you wanted was yours there?”

There was an extended silence before he finally answered.There’s a price to pay for getting everything you want. You lose a little more of yourself each time you enter. When I pointed out that I had no body and couldn’t leave, Hunter said I could share his.

“And that was all it took?”

We both wanted it, so it was. At first, I felt frightened and trapped in his body because we couldn’t communicate outside the misty place. It took awhile, but Hunter and I finally learned to communicate. After that, we found a way to reach you.

Hunter had done more than “reached her. She wondered if Cody knew Hunter had entered her dreams and become her dream lover.

“How?”

I’ve not sure. I think it has something to do with Hunter’s being one of the Carnivores from Tern Terra. They’re said to have all kinds of mystic powers. Hunter is unable to tap into his fully because Liege Lord Donoun’s hunting party captured him as a cub and his memories of his race are limited to vague impressions. But Jemi, it’s rumored that his race has the ability to shape shift. If that’s true, he might one day be able to shape shift into my body.

The breath caught in her throat. “Do you mean there’s a possibility that you can regain your own body?”

I’m not sure if I could actually regain it permanently because Hunter’s not sure. However, I’m fairly certain that, given time, Hunter can shape shift into it for a time. All the same, don’t get too excited. This may be as good as it gets, Jemi. Can you learn to love a big tan cat?

She leaned into his side and kissed his shoulder. “Actually you’re more bronzed than tan and like I said, I’ll take you anyway I can get you. “ She frowned. “What about me? This body is very young and very tight. I’ve been trying to keep in shape lately, but this is not my body, Cody. I’ve never had breasts this big or nipples this sensitive.”

No, Jemi. It’s not your body. It’s Jeroni’s.

“I...see,” she said softly, trying to come to grips with all that had happened to her. Again, she was afraid to ask the question uppermost in her mind: where was her body?

Her breasts are large, but incredibly firm. Her nipples are ripe and sweet to the taste. Her behind is firm and round and have you ever seen such long, beautiful legs. It’s a rather…stunning body, don’t you think?

Judging by the admiration she heard in his voice, he clearly thought so. “Cody, my pussy...Jeroni’s pussy feels so…big.”

Big enough to mate with me?

Jemi felt the sheer lust behind Hunter’s question. She glanced up at Cody.

He gave a mental shrug.Hunter and Jeroni are natives of a society that sets large store by pursuing sexual gratification. Hunter, as you know, has a huge cock and an almost insatiable lust for pussy. Jeroni’s sexual appetite is a match for his.

Jemi licked her lips, her heart thumping. “Are you saying that she and Hunter are...lovers?”

They’d like to be, but they’re forbidden.

“It’s just as well. She could never take him.”

Actually, she could. She has a unique vagina.

“Unique how?”

It can expand or contract to conform to her lover’s cock, regardless of the size. In its unaroused state, her vagina is huge compared to a human woman’s. It might be a tight squeeze, but she can definitely take us.

Us, huh? “And just how do you know so much about her pussy? Have you...Cody, have you been with her?”

No.

She bit her lip. There was no mistaking the regret in his voice. “No?”

No, but I know what Hunter knows. Well, some of what he knows. There are portions of his mind shielded from me.

Like a little fact that he’d been dream fucking her for weeks? She shook her head and concentrated on what Cody was saying.

He and Jeroni have been together since he was a cub. From him, I know she’s sweet, kind, and giving.

Sweet and kind? Not exactly the impression Jemi had formed of her host. A sudden, irrepressible need to suck Hunter’s cock seized her. “Cody, are you sure Hunter has never fucked her?”

Yes...at least not with his cock.

“Then how?”

With his tongue. After her first mating, he tongue mated with her. Five seasons has passed since then, but he still remembers and cherishes the experience as much as he did when it first happened. Once a season, on their bonding date, he reams her.

Jemi had a vision of Jeroni lying naked on her back in the bow of a low standing tree. Her legs were up and her behind thrust out. Hunter approached on his hind legs, his magnificent cock out of his sheath aiming at Jeroni’s bottom. A flash of remembered pleasure battered Jemi’s senses as the first few inches of Hunter’s warm, pulsing cock tenderly pierced Jeroni’s eager bottom. Gods of the Mountains.

Damn, this body and mind sharing was getting to be a bit much. She had “felt” his cock sliding intoher behind. What’s more, it had felt damned good. She shook her head, dismissing the memory.

She glanced at Cody, her face burning. “When does that happen?”

Once every season.

“Every season?”

Did I say season? I meant year. Sometimes being with Hunter gets confusing. Our thoughts and desires sometimes intertwine.

She nodded. “Oh, I can believe that all right. But how can she let him...?”

I know the thought shakes you up, Jemi, but this is a different world with completely different cultures and mores. Remember your Sociology 101. Don’t try to judge Volter by Earth standards. Here humans and the Great Carnivores have been mating for many thousands of seasons. It’s the natural order of mating. That’s why the women of Volter have such large vaginas—they were intended to accommodate the cocks of the Tern Terrians. You should know that Hunter and Jeroni enjoy their rare matings.

“Yeah, I’ll bet he enjoys it, but how can she? Cody, do you know how big and thick that...thing he calls a cock is?”

Actually, I do.It’s my cock now too. The only one I have,he reminded her.

“Oh, don’t misunderstand. I’m not judging them or their culture. I’m just having a problem understanding how she can she possibly take him in her behind.”

Easier than you think. Her behind, like her pussy, is expandable.

“What?”

Volter is like one of those pleasure planets from sci-fi movies with a healthy dose of wars and raiding parties thrown in.

She shook her head. “What a place. So, she let him tongue her?”

Yes and they both thoroughly enjoyed it. Although they don’t call it love, they are in love with each other. They want to fuck…just as I love you and want to fuck you again, Jemi.

She frowned. Although Cody said all the right words, he didn’t say them with any real feeling; at least not with her. When he talked of how sweet and stunning Jeroni was, there had been a wealth of passion in him. When he talked of wanting to fuck her, his tone was clinical, as if any cunt would do. On the other hand, when Hunter spoke of fucking her, she felt the heat and passion of his desire striking an answering chord in her.

She bit her lip. She was probably being too sensitive. Of course, Cody still loved and wanted her, as she did him. “You cannot begin to imagine how much I want you, but Cody, I…you’re in the body of a cat.” Even as she protested, she couldn’t deny a lecherous thrill at the thought of the big bronze cock torpedoing into her pussy. If Jeroni could handle Hunter in her behind, she could certainly take Cody in her cunt. That is,if she could she get past the thought that Cody was now a cat. Granted, he was a big, sleek, handsome cat, but he was still a cat.

You have to get past it because it’s me, Jemi. I need you and your beguiling pussy.

Again, his declaration lacked the passion and fervor Hunter would have put into the same words. Still, she had gone to that small mining town to be with him. Of course, she hadn’t counted on his being a cat.

He bent his big head and she instinctively turned and brushed her lips against his face. This was her Cody and she would take him any way she could. Sighing, she pressed her lips against his mouth. His whiskers tickled her nose as his tongue snaked out. Gulping, she parted her lips and closed her eyes. His tongue touched hers and a shock of pure lust shot through her whole body. She moaned and linked her arms around his neck. “Oh, God, Cody, I’ve never had such a…delicious kiss.”

There’s more where that came from. I’m sharing this body with Hunter, but it’s been so long and I need you, Jemi. Soon.

She pressed her cheek against his head. “Bear with me, Cody.” Still, even as she spoke, she knew it was only going to be a manner of time before she found it impossible to hold out against her need for him, even if his need for her wasn’t as strong. But how could she possibly allow him to put that huge alien dick in her?

I’ll be gentle,he promised.

“With a weapon like that, you’d better,” she warned and released her hold on his neck.

As they started along the path again, he suddenly stopped, rose on his hind legs, and reached up to the branches of a tree above his head. He settled back on all fours and extended his head. Between his teeth was the same rose like flower with the red and green center that had accompanied his Valentine’s Day letter.

Be my Valentine?

Tears welled in her eyes. “Oh, Cody! Of course I will.”

Happy Valentine’s Day, Jemi.

Smiling, she accepted the flower with one hand while linking the other arm around his neck. He turned his big head and they shared a long, sweet kiss. Oh, God, help her, but she had missed him. “Oh, Cody! Happy Valentine’s Day to you, my, love.”

Your pussy smells sweeter than a forest cat’s. Don’t make us wait too long.

Placing the flower in her hair, Jemi turned a mock frown on the cat. “Hey, buster, get something straight, if it ever happens, and with a cock the size of yours that’s a big if, it will be me and Cody, not me and you. So you save your lecherous lust for your Jeroni.”

Cody and I share a cock,Hunter pointed out. If he gets to mate with you, it will be my cock filling your pussy, Jemi, darling—this time for real.

She gasped.

That’s right. Those sweet dreams have given me quite an appetite for you…I will feel and enjoy every movement of your sweet pussy closing around our cock. When you come, I will feel your hot juice raining over my cock. Then I will come in you like I’ve never come before and fill your cunt with my seed. You’ll like that. And trust me, my darling Jemi, I will get some of what Cody calls your sweet ass too. I’m going to love filling all your openings with my seed. You’ll love it—just as you did in your dreams.

The image created by his lustful words sent a wave of heat and hunger through Jemi. She had loved it in her dreams and she wanted it now. The need to lift her skirt and exposed herself to him was hard to resist. Worst yet, she knew he could sense her thoughts and desires. “That’s just plain Jemi to you,” she told him coolly. “Now do you mind? Cody and I were talking.”

You mustn’t mind Hunter,Cody told her.Mating is very important here and Hunter spends a large amount of time satisfying his huge sexual appetite. Three nights ago, he ravished three mountain felines, one after the other. Earlier today he had two forest cats. The last one had the best forest pussy he’s ever had. Still, no matter how good the sex, he wants to mate with Jeroni.

And me, she thought with a secret thrill. “Yeah? Well, maybe she’ll let him one day.”

Chapter Four

“My Lady Liege.”

At the sound of the male voice, Jemi turned and found a tall, well built man with a deep tan, naked accept for a Tarzan type loincloth, trotting towards them. Noting the sword scabbard hung across his nicely muscled chest, she drew back against the comfort of Cody’s body.

It’s all right, Jemi. It’s Dioni, Jeroni’s personal guard and favorite lover.

Lover? Was there anything or any male her horny host didn’t do or want to do?

The man halted in front of her and went down on one knee, his head bowled. “My Lady Liege.”

“What is it?” she asked wearily, not sure how to address him. Where was Jeroni when she was wanted?

He rose to his feet and lifted his head.

A sudden delicious memory of this stranger lying between her parted thighs assailed her. As he’d greedily sucked at her breasts, he’d clutched her behind in his hands and pumped her clinging cunt full of hot, creamy seed. God, Almighty. Her pussy moistened recalling just how good cunt mating with this man was. It was all she could do not to reach out, brush his scanty covering aside and fondled the semi-hard dick she knew was hers, or rather Jeroni’s, for the taking.

“Yes?” she said weakly.

“Tioni, The Seer is at the hut stop. She says you and Hunter must return there immediately, My Lady Liege.”

“Tioni?” She turned towards Cody, seeking guidance.

Hunter replied.Tioni is the seer, he informed her cryptically, in an amused voice.

She cast a surprised look at the big cat beside her. In addition to a raging lust, the damn thing had a sense of humor. “Thanks, Hunter, that was very...helpful.”

My pleasure, Jemi, darling,he shot back.

“Will you go ahead and tell her we’re on our way?” she asked, turning to Dioni.

“Will that be all, My Lady Liege?”

“Yes. No.”

He’d bowled his head and started to turn away. He stopped and turned back. “My Lady Liege?”

Unable to stop herself, Jemi put her hand between the folds of his loincloth and tenderly fondled him. She hefted his warm, pulsing flesh in her hand. His cock and balls had a nice feel and weight. Oh, damn. Nice. Very nice, indeed. No wonder she’d awakened feeling sated after having been with this handsome hunk. She tightened her fingers around his cock and felt it harden against her fingers. Several drops of moisture fell from the tip. She removed her hand and smiling at him, she slowly licked her fingers. Hmm. Nice.

“Would My Lady Liege like me to…attend her?”

She recognized the eagerness in his voice; it mirrored her own. What had she started? Now he was going to want sex—and rightly so. Hell, she wanted sex. Or should she say some more sex?

Hey, Jemi. What are you doing? You are not sleeping with this guy. Stop thinking with your pussy. She jerked her hand away from her mouth and stepped back. “Not right now,” she muttered, not quite meeting his gaze. “Later.”

“As you wish, My Lady Liege.” He bowed again and trotted off.

You should have fucked him,Cody said, surprising her.

“What? Cody, he’s a stranger!”

“He’s not a stranger to Jeroni. He’s totally devoted to her and she finds him satisfying and skillful in bed.”

“What? I can not believe you asked me to come here and now you’re encouraging me to sleep with a strange man.”

“Jemi, you have to quickly come to the realization that this is a different place and time. The rules we lived by don’t apply here. They can’t. Here you and I will do and enjoy things neither of us would even have considered doing back home.”

She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. Was that his way of telling her he planned to lay other women? She wasn’t ready to think about that. She gave a little shake of her head.

“Ah, just who is Tioni, The Seer?” she asked quickly, afraid Hunter or Cody or even Jeroni would comment on her engaging in what would have amounted to a sexual assault back home. Lord, what was happening to her?

“If it’s all the same to you, Hunter, I’d prefer it if Cody responded,” she said.

Tioni is Liege Lord Donoun’s medium, but after Jeroni’s mother was taken in a raid several seasons pass, Tioni was assigned to help prepare Jeroni for the mating.

“What mating? And what do you mean by raid?” She glanced around, suddenly uneasy. So far the countryside seemed particularly barren of both people and dwellings. The forest trail they moved along could be harboring all manner of hostiles for all she knew.

Don’t worry, Jemi. This section of Volterian Forest is set aside for Jeroni’s exclusive use and is well guarded by order of Liege Lord Donoun. Any Terrian attempting to reach this enclave would have been swiftly captured long before they’d penetrated this deep,Cody assured her.

“But you said Jeroni’s mother had been captured in a raid.”

That was before Liege Lord Donoun set up warrior parties around the boundaries of Volter. There hasn’t been a successful raid here since Jeroni’s mother, Lady Teyer, was taken.

“Was Jeroni’s mother returned?”

No and Liege Lord Donoun has never been the same.

“I don’t understand. Didn’t he send warriors to rescue her?”

He wanted to, but both Volterian and Terrian raiding laws forbade it.

“Raiding laws? They have laws that govern raids?”

There are laws that govern nearly everything here. It was the only way to stop the Blood Wars. Of course, if Jeroni doesn’t life mate with Liege Lord Siano’s son, Tuteri, they may very well start again.

“Life mates? As in forever?”

Yes.

“But you said she’s in love with Hunter. Yet, she has to mate with this Tuteri? I hope she at least likes him,” she said, as the hut came into view.

They’venevermet, Cody told her.

“What? She’s expected to marry a man she’s never met and might not even like, forget about loving? Volter is definitely in the dark ages. No wonder she has such a huge chip on her shoulder.”

You think she has a chip on her lovely shoulders?

Lovely shoulders? She tightened her lips. Why didn’t she hear that same passion in his tones when he thought of her? “You think she doesn’t?”

I know she doesn’t.

He didn’t seem to notice her coolness. She shook her head. Men could be so easily blinded by passion. She no longer doubted that Cody had a real passion for Jeroni. “Trust me, Cody. She’s carrying around a chip the size of the Rock of you know what on those lovely shoulders of hers.”

You haven’t been here long enough to see the real Jeroni. She’s young, tender, trusting and very, very sweet.

Yeah. Right. “How young?”

She’s seventeen seasons.

“Seventeen? She’s just seventeen?”

Seventeen is not the same here, Jemi. She’s packed a lot of living in those years. She first tongue mated when she was eleven and then she cunt mated when she was twelve.

She stared at him, her eyes wide. “Cody! Twelve?”

Everything is different here, Jemi. You must remember that. Some Volterian females mate as early as nine. She was ready.

<And Jeroni Teyer needs no pity from you, off worlder.>

Sensing the unhappiness behind the haughty retort, Jemi softened. “I’m sure you don’t,” she said.

I should warn you, Jemi, that Tioni is like no one you’ve ever met. It’s rumored that, like Hunter, she is from Tern Terra.

“Like Hunter, huh? You mean she’s a huge, lustful cat with a smart mouth?” she asked, sending an amused thought Hunter’s way.

I’ll show you lust, Jemi, darling,Hunter zinged back.When you let me...do what Cody calls fucking...when you let me fuck you. He tells me it’s the best pussy in the world. I’m going to get some of that good pussy for myself, Jemi, darling. You are going to give me some. Soon. Aren’t you?

She stopped in front of the hut, breathing deeply. The sheer magnitude of his undisguised desire for her made her so hot. Gods of the Mountains she needed release. Now.

Then let me give you some release, my sweet Jemi, darling,Hunter urged.My cock is big, thick, and hard, just like you like cock. My tongue ain’t bad either.

Jemi sucked in a breath. Damn if he didn’t make the thought of surrendering to him overwhelmingly irresistible. Unable to suppress her growing hunger, she lifted her skirt and parted her legs. Hunter’s tongue snaked out. He lapped eagerly at her cunt several times before sinking his long, pink wondrous tongue deep within her. She moaned, shivered, and backed against the wall of the hut. Hunter moved closer and began jabbing his tongue into her. She grabbed his mane and pushed her cunt against his face. Gods of the Mountains, but that felt so good.

Does my darling Jemi like this?Hunter asked softly.Is it as good as it was in your dreams?

Lord, yes! Yes! Oh, God, Hunter, your tongue is wonderful. Oh, please don’t stop.

Not until you come, my Jemi, darling. Come for me, Jemi. Come in my mouth. Let me taste the real thing. Come for me.

With his tongue thrust deep within the confines of her cunt, he gently nipped at her clit with his upper teeth. She let out a silent, helpless scream of sheer ecstasy and began ejaculating into his mouth. While she whimpered and tried to calm herself, he leisurely licked her pussy clean of her juices.

Hmm. Good juice. Good pussy,Hunter told her and slowly withdrew his tongue from her.

“Oh, God,” she moaned softly. She linked her arms around his neck and they shared a quick, sweet kiss. Oh, Lord, that had been wonderful. Even sweeter than in her dreams. No doubt about it. This male was definitely going to become her real time lover—soon.

I can hardly wait, he told her.

<If you are finished enjoying a pleasure that was not rightly yours, we should go in,>Jeroni snapped suddenly.

Blushing, Jemi dropped her skirt. “It’s your pussy he tongued,” she said guiltily.

<But it was you he tongue mated with.>

She couldn’t deny that what had just happened had been solely between her and Hunter. No Cody, no Jeroni. “I’m sorry,” she said.

<Oh, forget it,>Jeronisnarled,thenJemi felt her softening. <It’s all right. Hunter is so majestic and sweet. How could you not want him? And he has a very nice tongue.>

“Lord, yes!” Jemi moaned.

She sensed Jeroni’s amusement and Hunter’s male pride. Males. They were alike the universe over, she thought.

<AndsomedayCodyandIare going to have some of these fucks you and Hunter keep talking about,>Jeroni informed her casually.

She bit back a jealous snarl and remained silent. How could she complain after what she’d just let happen?

<Wemustgoin,>Jeroni said. <The Seer must not bekept waiting any longer.>

Jemi nodded and stepped through the open door and into the first of the two rooms of the small dwelling Dioni had called a hut stop.

Dioni, standing on the other side of the fire alcove, went down on one knee. “My Lady Liege.”

Jemi blushed and cast him a quick, embarrassed smile. “Dioni.”

The woman who stood by the small alcove in one wall that seemed to serve as both a source of heat and fire for cooking, turned to face her. Jemi blinked. Perhaps woman was the wrong word. Granted the being in front of her was definitely female and stood on two legs, had two arms, and a head. Instead of clothes, a dark brown pelt covered her body, including her small breasts, which had tiny pink nipples. A brown throng covering her crotch area was her only confession to clothing. Her face had a light covering of hair. Her mouth was wide, her eyes green and silted, like Hunter’s. She was one of the most stunning creatures Jemi had ever seen.

There was an air of authority intermingled with a tenderness in her voice and manner when she spoke. “Jeroni Teyer, the time has come.”

Jemi, still shaking from the realization that she fully intended to mate with Hunter, tried to withdraw. She was blocked by the fact that Jeroni had beat her to it. <Coward,> she sent the word toward Jeroni’s fleeting consciousness before turning to face Tioni. “I don’t quite know how to tell you this, but—”

Tioni frowned, locking her gaze with Jemi’s. “Who are you? Where is Jeroni?”

Jemi nodded her head towards the door. “Last I felt of her, she was heading for the hills.” Or maybe the misty place.

“And who are you?”

“Me? Well, I’m—”

Tioni extended a fur-covered hand and the muscles of Jemi’s throat froze. She knew The Seer was exerting a psychic influence over her. Somehow, she didn’t feel threatened—even when she approached and placed a long-fingered palm over her heart.

The Seer closed her eyes and bent her head. “You are Jemi Hunter of...Earth?” She removed her hand and looked at Jemi. “What is this Earth?”

Jemi shook her head. “I don’t where we are in relationship to Earth so I don’t know how to explain it.”

“No matter. The time for the march to Terra has arrived. Our Lord Donoun has sent a message that Liege Lord Siano has sent an ultimatum: the time for your life mating has passed. There are raiding parties approaching Volter borders. Either you begin the march for Terra, or Liege Lord Siano will attempt to enter Volter and take you by force of arms in accordance with the treaty signed five seasons past by Liege Lords Donoun and Siano.”

Jemi, sharing a fleeting memory from Jeroni, had a disturbing vision of fierce warriors bursting through the breeched walls surrounding a large, stone building. After battering a tall, handsome man unconscious, they had carried off a beautiful woman with sad dark eyes.

She knew it was Jeroni’s memory of her mother’s abduction from her father’s arms when Jeroni was twelve seasons.

She shook her head. “She wants to help, but she doesn’t want to mate with this Tuteri,” she told Tioni.

“It is her destiny.”

“No. Her destiny is her own to make,” Jemi countered.

Jemi, this is not the time for your equal pay for equal work doctrine,Cody warned.Jeroni must make her own decision.

She made it when she left me in charge of her mind and body, Cody,she retorted.And even if she is willing to mate with this Tuteri, I am not.

It was my need for you and my will that got you here. You belong to me,Hunter added. I might let Cody have an occasional fuck, but your pussy is going to be mine.

Dream on,she told him. Then smiling with feminine satisfaction at the sheer lust behind Hunter’s words, she turned to Tioni. “Jeroni isn’t here. It’s just me and I am not going to mate with this Tuteri.”

Tioni emitted a sense of menace. “Then the Blood Wars will start again. Are you so selfish that you would condemn all to the Blood Wars just to avoid doing your duty to your people?”

Jemi shook her head. “Wait a minute. These are not my people and I have no duty to them. I don’t even belong here.”

“Then relinquish control of Jeroni Teyer of Volter now.” The Seer’s eyes narrowed and she extended her right hand.

Off to her right, Jemi saw Dioni start and whip his sword from the scabbard on his back. He only managed one leap in The Seer’s direction before she swung around and extended her palm in his direction. Gasping for breath, he dropped to his knees, his sword clanging to his side.

“Dioni!”

Before she could rush to his assistance, Tioni turned back to her, her right hand thrust out. Jemi felt as if something hard and cold had reached into her body and pulled out all her vital organs. Gasping in agony, she collapsed to the floor.Cody! Cody, help us.

With her ability to breath fading fast, she felt rather than saw Hunter spring pass her and bound towards the seer. His big body brushed against the seer’s arm, knocking her outstretched hand aside.

Feeling as if a vice had released her lungs, Jemi sucked in several gusts of sweet, blessed air.Thank you, Hunter. She sprang to her feet, instinctively snatched a knife from a sheath on the outside of her right boot, and went into a crouching position, extending the six inch bladed knife in front of her. What she wouldn’t give for her sword, but she hadn’t expected to need it in her special place.

Dioni retrieved his sword and staggered to his feet, breathing hard. Jemi felt Jeroni’s concern for her favorite lover. “Dioni? Are you all right?”

“I am, My Lady Liege.”

He was clearly still shaken. She narrowed her gaze and turned her attention back to Tioni. “How dare you hurt him?”

The Seer, knocked off balance by Hunter’s bulk, had swung around with startling swiftness. She faced Jemi with both hands at her side, her eyes narrowed. Hunter sprang around and put his big body between the two of them.

Tioni, Chief Seer of Supreme Liege Lord Donoun, of Volter, Jemi of Earth means no harm to Jeroni Teyer. She has not and will not hurt her. My Lady Liege fled of her own accord and does not wish Jemi of Earth hurt.I,Hunter, elder offspring of Seeker, Sire of Tern Terra, do not wish her hurt. I will not allow her to be hurt. Stand down and make no further attempt to incapacitate her.

Listening to Hunter’s impassioned defense on her behalf, Jemi’s eyes filled with grateful tears. She kept the knife extended, uncertain if Hunter would-be able to hold the seer off. Although there had been no malicious intent behind Tioni’s sudden attack, there had been tremendous power. It was a power Jemi did not wish used on Hunter.

She placed a hand on his flank and stepped around him.It’s all right, Hunter. Thank you, but she doesn’t want to hurt me. She just wants to make sure Jeroni is all right.

She felt a knot of tension at the base of her skull and then Jeroni was back. She released her hold on their body and yielded the dominant consciousness to the other woman.

Jeroni slid the knife back in its sheath, squared her shoulders, and faced the censure in Tioni’s eyes with an icy look of her own. “Seer,” she spat the word out. “I will deal with you in a moment.”

She crossed the room to Dioni and touched his chest. “My faithful Dioni.”

“My Lady Liege.” He bowed his head and would have dropped to one knee, but she grabbed his arm. “No. You’re too weak.” She caressed his cheek. “Always ready to protect me.”

“I would gladly give my life in your defense, My Lady Liege.”

“How well I know that.” She reached down and gently cupped his cock and balls. “But I prefer you alive and well. I value you, Dioni, both as a faithful protector and as my favorite lover.”

He lifted his head and she saw a warmth in his dark eyes he’d never allowed her to see. “My Lady Liege honors me beyond my deeds,” he whispered in a husky voice and despite her efforts to stop him, he dropped to one knee.

She stroked her fingers through his soft hair, aware of a sensation that had nothing to do with the usual mating desires she associated with her need of him. But thoughts for another time.

“Rise, Dioni.”

He rose, but kept his head bowed.

She touched his head again and swung around to face Tioni.

“I, Jeroni Teyer of Volter, sole heir to Liege Lord Donoun’s Dominion, am here, Seer. Before you speak, understand this: as long as you are under my father’s subjugation, never, ever lift a hand against my faithful Dioni again. I will not have him hurt.”

“Nor would I,” Tioni said, surprising her.

She watched The Seer turn her dark gaze in Dioni’s direction. “He is a stalwart, faithful warrior and a generous, unselfish lover.”

Jeroni stared at her. Was that tenderness in The Seer’s voice for her Dioni?

Before she could decide, Tioni turned back to face her. “Who was that Jemi of Earth? What have you done, Jeroni?”

“She’s the life mate of Hunter’s body sharer, Cody. She meant no harm.”

“Assure her that I intended none either. Had I intended to harm her, I would have.”

I would not have allowed it, Seer,Hunter interjected.

Jeroni stared at him. There was something different about Hunter. She’d never heard him speak with such authority to Tioni.

To her surprise, Tioni made no effort to admonish Hunter. That too was different. Tioni had been remonstrating with one or the other of them ever since she had arrived in Volter.

“Would you have this world thrown into a Blood War on your account, Jeroni Teyer?”

Jeroni tossed her head, sending her dark hair cascading around her face in an angry cloud. “Would my father have me life mated to a Terrian male against my will?” she demanded.

Tioni’s gaze softened. “Jeroni, The Liege Lord’s love for you can not be doubted, but you took an oath to life mate with Tuteri.”

“That oath was taken five seasons past when I knew not the full import of taking it. I can not go through with it. I will not go through with it.”

“The cost of not following your oath would be catastrophic to both Volter and Terra, Jeroni Teyer.”

“And following it will be catastrophic to me, Tioni. Does that matter to no one?” Jeroni demanded angrily.

Tioni raised her left hand and Jeroni fell silent. “The caravan with your mating regalia will arrive in seven sunrises. You have that long to reconsider your position, Jeroni Teyer of Volter. I will leave you to think.”

She watched The Seer stop to speak to Dioni. After a moment, she gently stroked her hand down his muscled arm before sweeping out of the hut stop.

Jeroni slumped back against Hunter’s bulk.<What am I to do, Hunter?> She turned and wrapped her arms around his neck. <IwilldiebeforeIgiveyouup!>

I would not have you dead,he told her.Go, if you must.

<Without you? Never. I will not spend the rest of my life without you and my faithful Dioni. What is the point of life without happiness and comfort?>

Chapter Five

That night while Tioni and Dioni slept in the hut stop, Jeroni and Hunter, longing to be alone, walked the forest trails lit only by the full moon and the stars. The night was filled with the nocturnal sounds of stalking predators and their fleeing prey. Although her only weapon was the knife in her boot, Jeroni was unafraid. The other predators gave Hunter a wide berth and he had no natural predators except man. No Volterian male would dare to hunt Lady Liege Jeroni’s bond mate.

When they tired, they found a big tree and bedded down under its branches. It was a cool night and she shivered.

Hunter, lying on his stomach, rolled onto his side.Come close, Jeroni and share my warmth.

Needing no other encouragement, she scooted close, burrowing against Hunter’s soft under side. She immediately became aware of his shaft hardening in its sheath, just under his skin. She could smell his need.

She shivered again, this time from mating hunger. If she were going to be forced to live in Terra without her beloved Hunter, she at least should get a chance to mate with him before they had to say goodbye forever.

She extended a hand and touched the opening from which his cock would pop out when he was aroused. Closing her eyes, she enjoyed feeling the pulsing of the big thick cock mere centimeters from her eager fingers.

Jeroni, The Seer said we mustn’t,Hunter warned, his thoughts and voice unsteady.

She continued to touch him. The head of his cock popped out and her heart began to pound so fast, breathing became difficult. She reached a hand down and stroked herself.<She doesn’t need to know.> She pushed up her skirt and rubbed her bare cunt against the head of his cock. He shuddered, growled softly, and his whole glorious dick popped out and bumped against her pussy. Sucking in her breath, she clasped the big beautiful prize in both hands, guiding it towards her aching cunt.

“Jeroni Teyer. Hunter. Does your word mean nothing? Stop. Immediately.”

The two would be lovers froze as The Seer appeared out of the forest and stood over them, her right hand extended, her cat like eyes glowing in the dark night.

“I have to have him,” Jeroni protested. “I will have him.”

“It is forbidden for you to mate with him.”

“I will mate as I like! I want Hunter. He wants me. If I am to spend the rest of my life with Tuteri, I will spend my last free nights filled with Hunter’s cock.”

“You will not. It is forbidden.”

“By who?”

“You know that once you have cunt mated with Hunter, you will be of no value to Tuteri or any other human male.”

“Then I will be of no value to Tuteri.”

The Seer’s hand moved slightly. Jeroni’s hands opened against her will and Hunter’s big lovely cock fell from her grasp.

“It is forbidden for you to mate,” Tioni said again. “I will not allow it.”

Leave us, Tioni. I will not mate with her, Hunter promised. Then, ignoring his agony of need, he drew his cock back into its sheath.

“Give me your word as elder offspring of Seeker, Sire of Tern Terra and I will leave you alone with her.”

You have it.

Tioni sniffed the air. “I can smell both your need and hers, but you must not cunt mate with her.”

I have already given you my word, Seer.

Tioni dropped down to all fours, and trotted back into the night.

Feeling angry and full of frustrated desire and need, Jeroni tossed herself onto her belly and allowed the tears to spill down her cheeks.

Jemi, feeling her pain, she reached out to her. “Are you all right?”

<No! How can I be all right? I either have to go to Terra or risk being the cause of the Blood Wars starting again.>

“Why did you say you would go?”

<I was twelve seasons, my mother had been abducted, and I did not realize the full import of what agreeing to go would mean.>

“What would it mean? What’s the worst that could happen?”

<I’ll never see Hunter again.>

A jolt of revulsion shot through Jemi at the thought of never seeing Hunter again. “Isn’t he going to go with you?”

<No. If he were, the leaving would not be so wretched.>

“Why isn’t he going?”

<Tuteri would not allow it.>

“Why not?”

<Terrian males are not very well-endowed. That is why they value Volterian women so highly.>

“Don’t Terrian women have flexible pussies?”

<No. I know not why because once many hundreds of seasons past, Volter and Terra was one land and the path to Tern Terra, Hunter’s home, was open. When the Great Carnivores came down from Tern Terra, they would life mate with the women of Volter Terra. These matings were so blissful that soon every Volter Terrian woman wanted to life mate with one of the Great Carnivores. Volter Terrian males with their average sized cock couldn’t compete for women with the Tern Terrians. Soon, the men of Volter Terra, jealous and fearful of losing all their women to the Tern Terrians, began to hunt the Great Carnivores.>

<The Great Carnivores were near extinction when a warrior woman named Jeroni Mier of Volter Terra arose to try to save the remaining carnivores. The Volter Terrian men objected and Volter Terra split into two kingdoms, one with the men, and one with the women. The remaining Great Carnivores escaped back to Tern Terra and sealed the path. Still at war, both Volter and Terra residents took mates in raiding parties to rebuild their individual sovereignties.>

<After Jeroni Mier’s passing, the two kingdoms started mating without raiding parties, but remained two separate sovereignties. Then strange warriors came down from beyond the mountains to war against both kingdoms. Volter and Terra formed new defense alliances and talk of formally uniting the kingdoms again by means of marriage arose. My father and Liege Lord Siano signed treaties and I was informed that it was my duty to marry Tuteri.>

<So you see, Tuteri, who is rumored to have an abnormally small cock, would view Hunter as a threat. He would never allow Hunter to accompany me to Terra.>

Jemi took a deep breath. “Then why don’t you spend the next few days mating with him, if you want?”

<Because it is forbidden,>Jeroni sobbed. <Once a Volterian woman cunt mates with one of the Great Carnivores from Tern Terra, her pussy permanently conforms to the contours of his cock, so that they both receive the most incredible pleasure from mating imaginable. She would no longer be capable of providing mating pleasure to a human male. >

“So this Tuteri would know if you mated with Hunter?”

<Yes. And once I go through the mating ritual with Tuteri, I will never know mating pleasure again.>

“Why not? If he’s such a bad lover and you’re forced to mate with him, you’d be perfectly justified, in my opinion, in mating with someone else—like Dioni.”

<If that were so, the leaving would be bearable, even without Hunter. It is not so. While the male can go on to cunt mate with other females with pleasure, while her life mate lives, a Volterian woman can only experience mating pleasure with him. After I life mate with Tuteri, I will no longer be able to enjoy mating with Dioni and he’s been my favorite mating partner since we first cunt mated five seasons past.>

Wonderful, Jemi thought sourly. Here they were in another place and time, and the deck was still stacked in the male’s favor. Some things never changed.

“So what are you going to do?”

<What can I do but what I must? Volter has suffered much and I must not be the cause of bringing more blood and grief to my father, who mourns my mother still.>

“Like I said, Jeroni, with all respect to your father and your culture, I am not life mating with this Tuteri.”

<You have no choice, off worlder. What I do, you do.>

“Yeah? Then you’d better prepare yourself to mate with the only Great Carnivore left in the land because I fully intend to mate with Hunter.”

<You mean Cody.>

“No. I mean Hunter,” she said defiantly.

Jemi, darling. When?Hunter asked, beginning to pant.It’s forbidden for me to mate with Jeroni, but not with you. Oh, I want your sweet pussy.

“Oh, God, Hunter, I want your cock!”

Now?

Hmm. Delicious thought. “No. Not now, Hunter.” She reached out a hand and stroked his sheath. His cock popped out and she took it in her hands and gently began pumping him. “Soon,” she promised. “Very soon, I’ll have to have this lovely cock inside my pussy.”

As she spoke, she continued to gently massage him. Just the feel of the big warm dick is her hands was a turn on. A shiver of need ran through her as she began to sense his pleasure through the bond he shared with Jeroni. She smiled and leaned down to kiss the area around his sheath.

He purred low in his throat.

You like that?She asked softly, using feelings and thoughts to speak to him rather than words.

Yes. Yeeesss!

His big dick began to pulse and shake in her hands and she knew he was about to lose control. Pushing her skirt up, she positioned herself close, and parted her legs, exposing herself to him.

When he came, the first spurt hit her clit. Gods of the Mountains that was nice. She parted her legs further and directed his big shooting shaft between her legs. His cum, shooting in a strong stream, blasted directly into her mating tunnel.

Knowing she was full of Hunter’s seed was enough of a thrill to set off a nice sensation in her pussy. Moaning and shuddering to a climax, she collapsed against his warm underside, kissing his belly and wrapping her arms around his body.Oh, that was nice. I think I could easily fall head over heels in love with you, she told him.

There was a surprised silence from Hunter, then...Is this falling in love a good thing?

It’s a very good thing, Hunter.

Then I could easily fall head over heels in love with you too, Jemi, darling. Like Dioni would die protecting Jeroni, I would happily die in your defense.

I’d rather you lived to mate with me,she said, making no effort to hide her shameless desire for him.

She curled against him, rubbing his slowly deflating cock against her pussy’s sensitive outer lips.What a lovely cock.

Lovely pussy,he told her.Hunter’s pussy.

Gods of the Mountains, yes!She wanted to mate with him then and there, but she’d experienced too much in one day. She was too weary to attempt to take on Hunter’s big cock. She was drifting into to an exhausted sleep when a sudden thought startled her back to wakefulness.

“Cody? I hope you don’t misunderstand,” she said anxiously. “I still care for you, but...Hunter...I could easily love...him.” Could? Who was she kidding? She was already there—had been for weeks. “Can you understand that?”

I do.To her relief, he didn’t sound bitter.And now I know you’ll understand that just as Hunter loves Jeroni, and yet longs to fuck you, I love you, but long to fuck Jeroni’s tender, young pussy. It’s all part of this body and mind sharing.

Feeling relieved, Jemi nodded sleepily, even though she had a sneaking suspicion the passion and lust she felt for Hunter had nothing to do sharing Jeroni’s body.

As my need for your sweet pussy has nothing to do with Cody sharing my body,Hunter assured her.

Aren’t you going to tell me my pussy is tender?She teased.

It won’t be tender for long once I get in it.

She laughed, feeling thoroughly wicked and loving it.Promises, sweet promises. One of these days, Hunter, it’s going to be you, me, and that big hard cock of yours in my pussy sending me straight to paradise.

Pounding your pussy.

Gods of the Mountain, yes!

Soon.

Very soon, Hunter.

* * * * *

A warm moist tongue licking her face woke Jemi. Opening one eye, she saw Hunter standing over her.

Are you awake?

“I am now,” she grumbled, gave him a quick kiss, and got to her feet. She stretched leisurely and stood admiring the clear, crisp morning. To her left, in the far distance, she could see a beautiful range of towering, blue-capped mountains. With its fresh air, beautiful flowers and exotic birds, Volter was a beautiful place.

Hunter butted her with his head.

She turned and squinted at him. “What?”

Give me a kiss.

A thrill danced through her at the masculine demand. “I just gave you one,” she pointed out.

I want another one—a longer one this time. I like kissing you,he confided.

Incredibly, she liked kissing him too, tickling whiskers and all. She turned and linked her arms around his neck. They shared several long, deep kisses. It was during those blistering, uninhibited kisses, that made her wet that she decided she would let him make love to her the first chance they got.

He drew his tongue out of her mouth and growling softly with pleasure, backed slowly away from her. He tossed his maned head.I like that. I want another kiss. Kiss me again.

She grinned at him, but shook her head. “I’m not going to spend all day kissing you. Get over it.” She ran her hands along his flank. “I’m hungry.”

For my cock?He asked, his voice hopeful.

She laughed and lightly slapped his right hind quarters. “For food!” She looked around. “And I need to use the facilities.”

Whatfacilities?

“Hey, come on. You know.”

She felt his puzzlement and blushing, she told him what she meant.

They walked back to the hut stop where Jemi headed for the small crude storage like wooden shed behind the other building. When she emerged, her hair and body damp from her brief wash, she found Hunter pacing back and forth in front of the small building.

What took you so long?

“Hey, I had to go and wash. The facilities here leave a lot to be desired. Anyway, what’s the rush? What do you want?”

A kiss.

“Hunter, I can’t go around kissing you all day.”

Why not?

“Look, this is your last kiss,” she told him, linking her arms around his neck.

To her surprise, he used his head to push her back against the side of the outhouse. “Hey, what are you doing?”

Kissing you as much as I want,he said triumphantly and brought his head close to hers.

Jemi closed her eyes and parted her lips. As his tongue snaked into her mouth, she shuddered and leaned closer. Lord, but he made her so damn hot. When they emerged for air several minutes later, she pressed her face against his neck and caressed his flank. “Hunter, please, no more kissing today.”

Why not?He sound confused.Don’t you like it?

“I like it a lot and that’s the problem.” She stepped away from him, her breathing labored. She glanced at his body and saw that the head of his cock was visible. She licked her lips and quickly looked away. God, how could she want this cat so much?

He’s more than a cat. And you need to remember that you’re inhibiting the body of a female who was designed to breed with his kind.

She swung around. “Cody! Where have you been?” she demanded. As she asked the question, she suddenly realized that until that moment, she hadn’t felt Jeroni. Her lips parted and she stared at Cody. “Oh, my God! You’ve been with her. You’ve fucked her.”

She felt a wave of guilt emanating from him and caught an impression of a long night of sweating, thrusting bodies spent in a place with swirling mists. “All night? You fucked her all night?”

Don’t be angry, Jemi. She has a very sweet, tender pussy and I was so hungry for some.

“But how...? Hunter and I were here in the bodies. How could you two do anything without us?”

One of these days, you have to get Hunter to take you into the misty place. Within the mists many things are possible and all things are enjoyable.

So, she could get Hunter to take her into the mist, could she? She swallowed her jealousy and turned away. “Where’s Hunter?”

I’m here.He sounded subdued and she wondered if he too were jealous.There’s someone I want you to meet after you feed, he told her.

“Speaking of feeding? What can I eat?”

He indicated a large fruit-bearing tree across the narrow trail.That’s your favorite morning feed in the forest.

She walked across the path and plucked what looked like an apple from the lower branches. She cleaned it on her top and bit into it. The meat inside was sweet and juicy. She smiled at Hunter. “This is delicious.”

So are you,he told her, flicking his tongue at the juice running down her chin. She ate two more pieces of the fruit and gave Hunter a sticky kiss. “Now. You wanted me to meet someone?”

“Does My Lady Liege wish me to accompany her?”

She turned in surprise to see Dioni standing quietly in the door of the hut stop. She smiled at him. “Good morning, Dioni.”

He bowed his head. “Good Morning, My Lady Liege.”

She looked at Hunter. “Should Dioni come?”

No. I want you all to myself.

“Hog.” She looked at Dioni again. “I’ll be fine with Hunter, Dioni.”

“I will follow at a distance.”

“No. There must be something you need to do for yourself.”

“I live to protect, serve, and attend you, My Lady Liege.”

She walked across to him, touched his cheek, and leaned up to kiss him softly on his mouth. His lips were warm and gentle against hers. Smiling, she pressed closer for a longer kiss. He surprised her by jerking back.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“My Lady Liege does not kiss her slave on the lips.”

“No?” Jemi cupped a hand against the back of his neck and moved her body against his, allowing him to feel her breasts hardening against his chest. “That’s her loss. In case no one told you, I am not Jeroni and I quite enjoy kissing you,” she said and kissed him again.

After a moment of resistance, she felt his lips softening and moving eagerly against hers. As their tongues met, she reached down and fondled him. He hardened against her fingers and she surrendered to lust. Still kissing him, she managed to get her skirt up and moved back against the outhouse. “Attend me.”

“My Lady Liege.” He brought his cock from his throng and holding it in his hand, he looked at her. “Here?”

“Right here.” She spread her legs. “Attend me.”

He went down on his knees in preparation of giving her oral sex. But she was already so hot from kissing Hunter, that she didn’t need anymore foreplay. “Rise, Dioni and fuck me.”

He looked confused. “Fuck you?”

Impatient, she grasped his now fully erect dick, directed it at her cunt, and swallowed him in one thrust. “Fuck me,” she urged. Wrapping her arms around him, she kissed him, sucking gently on his tongue as she slowly tightened her inner muscles around him.

“My Lady Liege,” he murmured into her mouth and began to make sweet love to her. He was a passionate, yet kind and gentle lover. He caressed her clit, sucked her breasts, and kept a hand cupped over her buns so that she didn’t have to worry about splinters in her rear end. He did everything he could to pleasure her. She came first, sinking her teeth into his shoulder as she exploded around him. When he followed soon after, she held him.

“Oh, Dioni, you are such a sweet, sweet, lover,” she told him.

He shuddered and moaned into her neck. “My Lady…My Lady…so sweet and so very good…so good...too good for your servant.”

Aware of Hunter’s growing impatience, she gave him one last kiss and pushed gently at his shoulders. “You are not my servant, Dioni, and you are very, very sweet.”

He lifted his head and looked down at her, the warmth and devotion in his gaze almost bringing tears to her eyes. “My Lady Jemi. I pledge my body and life to you. I would willingly die in your defense, as I would for My Lady Jeroni.”

Jemi stared up at him in dismay. Oh, Lord. Was it possible to be in love with three males at the same time? Or was she just in lust with Hunter and now Dioni?

“Like Jeroni, I prefer you alive,” she told him, cupping his cock.

He hesitated, took a deep breath, and bent to kiss her.

She linked her arms around his neck and returned his hungry, passionate kiss. She pressed close and felt him hardening against her.

“I beg your indulgence, My Lady. You have such sweet lips. Forgive my impertinence?”

“There’s nothing to forgive. I like kissing you.”

“Would My Lady like me to atte—fuck her again?” he whispered, trembling against her.

Although she was tempted to surrender to him again, she didn’t think Hunter would stand and watch them make love again. “Maybe later.” She reluctantly drew away from him. “Do something nice for yourself.”

He bowed his head. “As you wish, My Lady.”

Chapter Six

She expected Hunter to be angry, but if he were, she could feel no signs of it as they left the hut stop.

Why should I be angry?He asked.Dioni is a fearless, loyal servant. He has no lover but Jeroni. He deserves his pleasure. Did you find him pleasing?

“Yes,” she said, averting her gaze. She longed to be able to blame her sudden shamelessly on being in Jeroni’s body, but part of her had always longed to be wild and uninhibited sexually. She’d just never had the nerve to do it—until now. She had wanted Dioni and she still wanted Hunter. What was more, she was going to have him.

As they walked along the trail, the forest began to thin and the landscape flattened. She saw a water hole around which many animals, lay. Several lions and tigers rested in the shade of the trees to one side of the water. Seeing the big cats made her realize just how huge Hunter was by comparison.

Never having seen any big cat outside of a zoo, she jerked to a halt, and pressed back against Hunter’s big body.

“Hunter, I don’t think this is a good idea. Those are…lions, tigers, and God only knows what else.”

They won’t harm you.

“Says you. I’m not going a step further.”

Okay, I’ll call them to us.

“No!”

Jemi, I want you to meet Slayer.

She felt a warmth and deep affection emanating from him and turned to look at him. “Who is Slayer?”

He is my elder offspring.

Jemi was aware of a particular breathlessness at the revelation. “Your offspring? You have a son?”

Slayer is my elder offspring.

Great. So he had more than one kid. She looked back at the watering hole. Most of the lions and other cats were dozing. There were several cubs who squatted and growled playfully at each other. One cub, with a sleek tan coat and a striking dark mane, caught her attention. Nearly the size of a pony, she knew immediately that this frisky cub was Hunter’s offspring.

“He’s beautiful, Hunter,” she told him in a soft voice.

He is an offspring worthy of his grandsire, Seeker. I want you to know him. I’ll call him.

“Wait a minute. What about his mother?”

Meka is his mother.

She had a brief impression of Hunter sliding his cock into a beautiful brown feline and turned back to look towards the watering hole. The cat in question sniffed the air, stood up, and began padding towards them.

Jemi gasped and ran around Hunter’s body.

Hunter made a series of low grunts in his throat. The lioness stopped and reluctantly went back to the watering hole. Slayer broke away from the other cubs and came charging across the ground. Hunter turned and trotted to meet his cub. When the two cats met, Hunter butted the smaller cat with his head several times, then stood still while his cub jumped at him, licking his face.

Jemi watched, then turned her attention to the lioness looking on, making low growling noises. The streak of jealousy she felt caught her by surprise. Why should his having a mate surprise her? With his sexual appetite, he probably had several mates.

After allowing the cub to swat at him several times, Hunter growled and started back towards Jemi, who had retreated to stand with her back against a tree with a bow low enough for her to leap up into should the need arise.

Jemi, don’t be afraid,he told her.Slayer won’t harm you. I’ve told him you are my mate.

“In your dreams,” she told him in a teasing voice, but kept her tense gaze on the approaching cub.

Slayer bounded up to her and put his head under her short skirt.

“Hey,” she protested, drawing back. “Stop that.”

It’s almost time for his first mating,Hunter informed her.Hewants some pussy.

“Well, he’s not getting any off of from me,” she said, pushing at the cub’s head.

Making a plaintive growl low in his throat, Slayer cast a pair of green eyes up at her.

She stared down at the cub. His coat was sleek, his mane luxurious. Like his father, he was beautiful. She hesitated before extending a tentative hand. Slayer butted her hand with his head, gave her cunt another sniff, and lay down at her feet.

They spent half an hour there by the watering hole, during which time Slayer jumped and growled at them both with youthful glee. After a time, Jemi got up enough courage to allow Slayer to sprawl across her legs. He looked at her with green eyes full of wonder.

When she and Hunter left the water hole, Slayer followed, until Hunter turned and grunted at him. Giving a mournful growl of his own, Slayer turned, head down, and slowly padded back to the watering hole.

“He’s a delight,” she told Hunter when they were back in the vicinity of the hut stop.

He is an offspring worthy to bear the blood of Seeker, Sire of Tern Terra.

She sensed the quiet pride behind the words. “And his mother? Is she a mate worthy of Hunter?”

She sensed his confusion at her strident question. She paused and took a deep, calming breath. “Does she have good pussy?”

Yes. Very good.

She turned and stared at him. “Really? Well, why don’t you go back there and get some because you’re sure as hell not getting any of mine after that remark.”

Why are you angry?

“Because you’ve just told me what good pussy she has!”

I should have lied?

“No.” She ran a hand through her hair. “No. I don’t want you to lie to me.”

He butted her with his head.Kiss me.

“No. No more kisses, Hunter. Where is Cody?”

He is with Jeroni in the misty place.

He maneuvered her to this God forsaken place and then he abandoned her and went off to mate with some over privileged teenager in a place he’d told her was not healthy? Great.

He didn’t maneuver you here. I did.

“What?”

When I met Cody in the misty place, I saw you in his mind and I wanted you. At first he did too, then he started to want Jeroni more. I still wanted you. You’re here because I willed it. Don’t be too hard on Cody. He’s spent too much time in the misty place. He’s not the same man you knew.

“What are Cody and Jeroni doing in the misty place?”

They are mating. Kiss me?

Well, Cody wasn’t the only one who could go fuck someone else. She looked at Hunter. “I’ll do more than kiss you. I’ll fuck you.”

She felt the absolute joy washing over him and felt her anger subside. She was going to mate with Hunter. Not out of anger, jealously or revenge. She was going to do it because they both wanted it so badly. She looked around. “So. Where do we do it?”

At the mating tree,he told her in a quiet, awed voice. I want to mate with you at the mating tree where my great grandsire first mated with his human mate.

Knowing there was no turning back, Jemi’s breath came in deep, aching gasps as she followed Hunter along the trail and deep into the woods. Finally he paused by a large tree with a moss covered trunk and a low bow.This is the mating tree.

She put a hand on his flank and got a vivid flash of another human and feline couple mating there many seasons earlier—Hunter’s parents. He was part human.

Does that matter?

“No,” she admitted. She suddenly knew that the only thing that mattered to her at that moment was mating with this big beautiful male. She’d worry about the consequences later.

Heart thumping, she looked around. She couldn’t see anyone else. “Are we likely to be interrupted?”

No. It will be just you and me, my Jemi.

Her hands shook as she quickly removed the skimpy leather outfit and her calf length boots. She stood in front of him naked, her pussy pulsing as she noted the head of his big cock peeking out of his sheath as he slowly panted.

He padded towards her. She took several steps back until she came up against the tree. To her relief, the moss felt soft and yielding. Good. It would act as a cushion against her buns. He moved in and extended his head. She linked her arms around his neck and they began kissing. There was a different quality in their kisses now, an awareness that these sweet, numbing kisses were a prelude to their first fuck. As they kissed, she stroked her fingers through his mane and caressed his throat. Then leaning back against the tree for leverage, she lifted a foot and began running it lightly back and forth against his belly, near his sheath. Within moments, his cock, hot, hard, and fully erect popped out.

Growling softly, he broke their heated kiss. Bending his head, he began lapping gently, leisurely at her cunt. He kept it up until she was soaked and moaning with anticipation of a greater joy awaiting her at the end of his big dick.

I’m going to fuck you now, Jemi darling,he told her.Forreal ,finally .

“Oh, God, yes! Please!” she moaned and parted her legs.

He growled softly, rose on his hind legs and approached her. She got her first daylight view of his fully erect cock. She could actually see the veins pulsing under the thin bronze skin covering his shaft. It was huge and beautiful, like the rest of his body. An uncontrollable rush of fresh moisture filled her cunt and she knew she was in for the most incredible fuck of her life.

She reached out and clutched him in both hands. Barely breathing, she pushed her hips forward. The big head of his cock pressed against her cunt and she bit down on her lip at the thrill that shot through her body. Oh, Lord, this was going to be so good.

She pushed forward again and the first few precious inches of Hunter’s big, beautiful dick pierced the outer lips of her pussy and brushed along her sensitive inner flesh. “Oh, God!” she gasped and closed her eyes. Making grunting noises low in his throat, he gently pushed forward, driving even more of his hot cock into her cunt. With half his shaft embedded in her, she lost control.

He remained still, poised over her, his front paws braced against the trunk of the tree on either side of her body , sending her soft, warm psychic messages of affection and pleasure as she shuddered and came, gushing over his cock. When the tremors subsided, she opened her eyes and looked down. The sight of Hunter’s thick, sleek shaft glistening with her juices and half buried in her stretched pussy was nearly enough to send her into another orgasm.

She leaned forward and kissed the underside of his shoulder. Encouraged, he pushed forward, easing more of himself into her. She moaned and clutched at his sides. “Hmm. Hmm. Oh, Lord!”

A quiver radiated through her cunt. He growled, tossed his mane and pushed gently against her. His big, warm balls slapped against her buns, and she realized that every last inch of his cock was buried deep in her body. The breath was forced from her lungs and she clung to him, kissing and licking at his under belly in a frenzy of half crazed passion and desire.

She was stuffed so full of him, she could barely breath and despite the fact that she had already come once there was barely room for his cock to move inside her. She could sense his anxiety and fear of hurting her. To encourage him, she tightened her cunt around him. His big, powerful body shuddered and he began to make love to her, moving his huge dick slowly and leisurely in and out of her body. Occasionally, he would bend his head and lick at her neck and breasts while pushing deeply back into her.

She had expected him to rut in her, hurt her, come in her, and quickly pull out of her. To her delight, it soon because apparent that he was determined not to hurt her anymore than necessary while he gave her as much pleasure as possible. The pleasure was almost more than she could bear. His cock, pulsing and throbbing deep within her pussy caused awesome and intense sensations of pure bliss in her. The warm, loving emotions and feelings he sent to her along the psychic bond they shared was as erotic and arousing as their physical act of mating.

It was during that long, slow, sensuous, sinful and forbidden fuck when she lost track of how many times her pussy convulsed and detonated around his huge plundering cock, that she fell deeply and hopelessly in love with the big, handsome carnivore so devoted to pleasing and cherishing her. Feelings, wonderful and all encompassing suffused her.

And when he finally came, spewing what felt like a river of hot seed in her receptive body, she had yet another, incredible orgasm that shook every particle of her being, filling her heart, mind, and body with complete and utter joy. Gods of the Mountains. Pure, unadulterated paradise.

You are mine, Jemi Hunter of Earth,he told her, as he slowly withdrew his cock from her sated pussy.Mine.

Her legs gave out and she collapsed against the tree trunk, gasping and moaning. When he lowered his head, she weakly grabbed his mane and kissed him. He opened his mouth and she sucked at his tongue.Yours, Hunter, she moaned.

Mine to kiss and mate with as often as I like.

Yes, Hunter, yours to do with as you please as often as you please.

Did you enjoy our first fuck, my Jemi?

You know I did.

It was good?

Oh, Lord, good doesn’t begin to describe how wonderful it was.

It was wonderful, but it wasn’t enough. I want more pussy. Now.

God, help her, she wanted more of his cock.

He lowered his big body to the ground next to her, rolling on his back, his legs up, his cock, still hard and out of its sheath. She climbed onto his body, mounted him, and slowly began riding his cock. He purred and thrust his powerful hips up, pushing himself deep within the confines of her body.

She looked down and saw the outline of his cock under the skin of her taunt flat stomach. Gods of the Mountains, she had been born for the sole purpose of loving this particular male. Hovering on the brink of yet another explosive orgasm, she fell forward against his belly, causing his cock to shoot even deeper inside her. His tail whipped around her waist and held her like an arm.

The sounds of his grunts and soft purrs fueled her passion. She stretched out a hand to palm his big, hairy balls. She gave them a gentle squeeze and he exploded inside her. In a matter of moments, they were both writhing in ecstasy.

When the world righted itself, Jemi lay sprawled on Hunter’s belly with his cock still buried inside her. She whimpered softly and kissed his belly.Oh, Lord, I’ve never felt anything half as good as that, she moaned, rubbing her cheek against his body.

Purring softly, he rolled onto his side, being careful to keep their bodies locked tight together.Hunter has the best cock in the world, he told her with a complete lack of modesty.

She laughed and kissed his under body again.I don’t know about all that, but it’s certainly the best I’ve never had, she admitted.

Better than Cody’s?

The question broke the mood and brought Jemi back to an awareness of what had just happened. Sociality 101 notwithstanding, she’d fucked a cat. Twice—and loved it, even when it hurt. His tail was still wrapped around her waist, his cock still firmly in her pussy—and she loved that too.

Jemi darling?He sounded confused.

“Hunter, let me up.”

I’m not keeping you down.

“You have your tail wrapped around my waist and your cock still in me,” she muttered, her whole body suddenly burning with embarrassment. “Please remove your tail.”

She felt the tip of his tail brush against her buns, making them quiver before it slipped away from her waist. “And your cock. Please remove it.”

I like it inside you. It’s good. Sweet. It makes me…happy.

“Please. Take it out, Hunter.”

But Jemi darling, if you want it out of you, you only have to move away from me,he pointed out.

She placed her hands on his underbelly and slowly lifted her hips. It seemed to take forever for the last inch of his dick to clear her body. When it did, a rush of their combined juices gushed out of her and onto his belly.

Blushing, she got to her feet. He bounded to his and came to stand by her, watching her as she scrambled for her clothes. When she straightened, still naked with her clothes in her hands, she saw Dioni standing across the narrow forest path. One look at his crestfallen face and she knew he’d seen everything.

“I’m not Jeroni, Dioni,” she said quickly, trying to soften the blow.

“You’re in My Lady Liege’s body, My Lady Jemi.”

“But I’m not her.” She shook her head and bit her lip. Oh, God, she had a feeling she’d made a mess. She knew from the way Dioni had looked at her after their love making, that he was in love with Jeroni. It must have hurt him to see Jemi, in her body, mate with Hunter, knowing she’d never be able to mate with him again. She looked at Hunter and sensed his confusion. She couldn’t regret making love with him, no matter what.

“Dioni, I know my pussy—Jeroni’s pussy can no longer give you pleasure.”

She saw the devastation in his eyes and sucked in a breath. God, she hadn’t intended to hurt him. She walked across the path to him and touched his cheek. “I’m not her.”

“You granted me the great honor of attending you too, My Lady Jemi.”

“I know and I enjoyed it as much as you did.” She reached out and fondled his cock and balls as she nibbled at his sweet lips. “There’s still our ass,” she whispered.

His cock pulsed against her fingers and his breathing increased. “My Lady Jemi’s ass belongs only to Hunter,” he murmured against her lips.

“Maybe Jeroni’s ass belongs only to Hunter, but my ass is my business and I’d be pleased to have you fuck me there sometime.”

He drew back and stared at her. “You honor me, My Lady Jemi.”

She smiled and gave his balls a gentle squeeze. “I’ll be looking forward to introducing your cock to my behind, but right now, Hunter and I need to talk. I’ll see you later.”

“I live to serve and protect you, My Lady Jemi.” He bent his head and walked away, disappearing into the forest.

Still naked, she walked to Hunter, dropped her clothes, and leaned against him.

You’re sorry we fucked?

“No,” she admitted. “I’m not. I just wish Dioni didn’t have to get hurt.”

I wish that too.

He tongue lapped gently at her breast. She smiled. That was nice. Then to her total surprise, he enclosed one breast in his mouth, gently sinking his teeth into the fatty part, while allowing his tongue to brush against the nipple. Her legs shook and her breath came in gasps.

He released that breast and gave the same attention to the other before extending his head towards her. She linked her arms around his neck and they kissed, long, slow, kisses of passion, desire, and devotion.

When they finally broke apart, her legs shook so badly she had to lean against his body. “I need to go wash,” she told him. “In that small pond or lake we passed on the way here.”

Why?

She wrinkled her nose. “Because I smell.”

He sniffed at her. You smell like pussy.

“That’s why I have to wash.”

Why? I like the smell of your pussy.

She looked at him and saw his cock had popped out of its sheath again. “Well, you’ve had all the pussy you’re getting today,” she told him. She dressed quickly and started towards the water.

Despite Jeroni’s expandable pussy, she felt sore and achy, but wonderfully happy. At the water, she undressed and dove in. She leisurely swam several laps before turning onto her back. With her eyes closed, she floated, a huge smile on her face as she thought about what had just happened between her and Hunter. Hunter. Lord what a wonderful lover he was. Of course, with a cock that big, it would be difficult not to be a fantastic lover. Still, the size of his cock and his sexual prowess notwithstanding, he was the most exciting male she’d ever met and he couldn’t get enough of her. Heady thought.

She heard a splash. She rolled onto he stomach and saw Hunter swimming towards her, his green eyes dark and lecherous. She dived under the clear blue water and saw his big, thick cock out of its sheath. Damn, didn’t he ever get enough?

Still, she swam towards the swallow water and lay on the bank. Smiling, she slowly parted her legs, revealing her moist and ready passage to his gaze. “Still hungry, lover?”

I need your pussy. I’ve never had such good, hot, sweet pussy.

“Then come get some more of my good, hot, sweet pussy,” she invited.

He swam over to her, went down on his hunches and aimed his cock at her lower body. He was so hard and stiff that his dick went in without any guidance from her.

She moaned with pleasure, tossed her head back, and braced her arms against the ground behind her. Groin to groin, they had a quick, rather hard fuck on the bank of the water that hurt like hell. Despite what Jeroni said, a human cunt wasn’t made to take so much cock, especially when it was repeatedly thrust into untouched depths with such fervor and unrestrained passion.

His lust flowed over her in a series of wild tidal waves, totally submersing her in its tempestuous wake. Her senses drowned in the wildness of their mating. How sweet and wonderful to be so desired by this big, handsome, sexy male. How fantastic to be able to satisfy his consuming lust.

I am your woman, Hunter. Want me. Need me. Have me. Love me. Fuck me. Fuck me long and hard.

Oh, God, how he fucked her—hard and rough, purring deep in his throat, his tail whipping wildly as his climax approached. She moaned and stroked franticly at his sides. She thrust back at him and shuddered both with pain and pleasure each time he slammed back into her. Suddenly, there was a burst of stars inside her closed lids and she had the wildest orgasm of her life. When he came, he roared and lay his big body over hers, thrusting deep and hard in her, hurting and nearing suffocating her. She didn’t care. His sweet cock got better every time he slipped it in her. She dug her nails into his sides and cried out like a cat in heat as he blasted his seed into her quivering body.

Finally, panting softly, he drew out of her. He gave her a gentle, tender kiss.I love you.

Smiling, she licked weakly at his mouth, crawled further up the bank, and fell into an exhausted sleep, secure in the knowledge that Hunter, her lover and protector would watch over her.

Chapter Seven

Jemi woke on the bank of the water. She lay on her stomach with Hunter’s lower body draped over her back, his hard cock nestled between her buns.

Are you finally awake?He asked eagerly, his cock beginning to pulse.

Like a woman could sleep with even part of your big body crushing her? You must weigh close to…I don’t even want to think about how much weight is crushing me. How about getting the hell off me?

Later. Right now, I want some pussy.

Damn, did he intend to fuck her until she couldn’t walk?You mean some more pussy.

All right, I want some more pussy. Give me some. Now.

Hey, didn’t anyone ever tell you that cats spend most of their time sleeping, not mating?She asked, even as she wiggled her behind suggestively.

Cats in your world must be strange. I prefer mating to sleeping,he told her, grinding his groin against her buns.Give me some pussy. Now.

What a one-track mind. You know Earth women like a little romance with sex.

All right. I’ll learn what this romance is and I’ll give you all you want. Now get give me some pussy.

Sighing with a combination of resignation and desire, she lifted her hips. Then she reached back and guided him to her cunt. He carefully entered her from behind and immediately engaged her pussy in a sweet, tender fuck.

Feeling his huge cock moving and rubbing against the inner hotspots in her pussy, she moaned and thrust back at him. His big balls slapped gently against her clit each time he drove his cock home. She wanted to talk to him, but she couldn’t find the words to describe how being totally filled with his hard, ravenous cock made her feel. It wasn’t just the physical sensations of extreme bliss that affected her so. There was also a sense of oneness, as if making love with this male made her whole.

Sensing some of her feelings, he purred softly in her ear.Love you. Want you. Need you. Then he gently bit into her neck and shoulders, being careful not to break the skin as he thrust steadily but tenderly into her. Knowing she was being made love to by the male she loved beyond reason, she surrendered body, mind, and soul to him.

Fully joined in all aspects, they moved in complete concert, his cock an extension of her pussy. Their orgasms built slowly and deliciously, gaining momentum until it hit them simultaneously and they exploded together as one. Afterwards, a feeling of contentment like she’d never known settled over her, infusing her with a wonderful and nameless glow.

They lay on the bank for a long time, still joined, exchanging soft words of devotion and need. Although sore, she loved that he remained in her after their love making, loathed to separate before he finally withdrew from her. When he did, she turned and looked up at him.You’ve ruined me, she told him.How can I ever find pleasure with another male after mating with you?

He gave her a long, possessive kiss.That’s as it should be. You are my mate, my woman.

She couldn’t deny the truthfulness of his assertion. Still, it was a sobering thought to know she now wanted to belong to him solely. Where did that leave Cody and Jeroni? Not to mention poor Dioni?

I’m starving, but not for your cock,she said quickly, sensing his excitement at her statement.

She had a brief swim to try to sooth her sore body, washed, and quickly donned her clothes before Hunter could get any ideas. They started towards the hut stop.

“I’m not going to Terra,” she told him. Apparently, Jeroni wasn’t either because neither she nor Cody had been heard from for hours. They were probably in the mist screwing each other senseless. She suspected that they, like she and Hunter, had fallen hopelessly in love, or was that lust? Whatever it was, it was too good to resist or analyze.

No. You are my mate and I will not give you up.

“What are we going to do?”

We’ll get Slayer and go to Tern Terra. We’ll be safe there and we can be together.

“But I thought the way was blocked.”

It is, but we’ll find a way in.

“How can you be so sure?”

I found a way out as a cub.

“What about the Blood Wars?”

Volterian warriors are strong. They can repel the Terrians. Once we reach Tern Terra maybe we can get a raiding party to help. With sunrise, we will go for Slayer and leave for Tern Terra.

“Won’t Meka object to your taking Slayer away?”

It’s time for his first mating when he would leave her anyway.

“What about your other offspring?”

She felt a sadness in him.They did not survive. There is only Slayer.

“Oh, Hunter. I’m so sorry.”

So am I, but there will be others.

He looked at her as he spoke and she blushed. Oh, Lord, surely he didn’t expect her to…he couldn’t mean that.“ What about you?” she asked, quickly. “Will you miss Meka?”

Not while I have you. When we get to Tern Terra, I will teach you to mate with me like my mother mated with my father.

She closed her eyes and had an impression of a human female clinging to the underbelly of a huge tan cat with her arms and legs while the cat thrust wildly into her, causing both their bodies to shudder and shake with their combined pleasure.

“I think I’m going to like that,” she said smiling. “What about Dioni?”

He can come with us. In Tern Terra there are she cats with pussies made to please human males. He’ll find a mate worthy of him there.

“What about Tioni? She’s going to be angry. We promised not to fuck.”

I promised not to mate with Jeroni and I haven’t. I didn’t say I wouldn’t make love to you.

“She’s going to be furious. She may stop us, Hunter.”

He stopped and turned to look at her.She can’t stop me. I am of Tern Terra, just as she is. I am elder offspring of Seeker, Sire of Tern Terra. I have ways to stop her if need be.

She thought he was dismissing Tioni far to easily, but remained silent. After all, surely he must know more about Tioni than she.

As they approached the hut stop, Tioni appeared in the doorway, her eyes dark and stormy, her right hand extended menacingly. “What have you two done?” she demanded. “What of your promise not to mate?”

Jemi shrank back against Hunter’s body at the other female’s fury, her hand hovering over her right boot where her knife was sheathed. She was really going to have to don her sword from now on. She frowned. She didn’t know squat about wielding a sword. Jeroni was the swordswoman, not her.

I kept my promise,Hunter told Tioni.This is not Jeroni Teyer. This is Jemi Hunter of Earth. I have taken her as my life mate, as is my right as a Tern Terrian. Stand down, Tioni of Tern Terra. I, Hunter, elder offspring and heir to Seeker, Sire of Tern Terra command it.

Oh, damn. He’d done it now, Jemi thought. They were both going to be on the ground gasping for breath in seconds. When poor Dioni, sworn to protect her and Jeroni, felt compelled to intervene, he’d be quickly incapacitated too.

To her complete and utter amazement, Tioni dropped her hand, bowed her head, and dropped to all fours. “As you command, Sire.”

Rise, Tioni,Hunter said after allowing her to kneel before him for several moments.

She rose, but kept her head bowed, much as Dioni did when he was in Jeroni’s presence.

Leave us.

“By your leave, Sire.” Tioni murmured deferentially and retreated to the hut.

Jemi stared at Hunter. “What just happened?”

He sent her an amused thought.I am Hunter, heir to the title of Seeker, Sire of Tern Terra.

“Are you telling me your father is a king and you’re some sort of crown prince?”

He was silent and she felt him reaching out to Cody for guidance. After a moment, he gave a mental shrug.I am elder offspring of the Sire of Tern Terra. When Seeker is no more, there will be Hunter, Sire of Tern Terra.

“And what will that make me?”

My woman. Is that not enough?

“Yes. Actually, it is, Hunter or should I say Sire or My Liege?” She grinned at him. “Should I go down on my knee as Dioni does with Jeroni?”

It is customary,he told her with no trace of humor in his voice.

“Oh, it is, is it?” She demanded, feeling her cheeks burn with agitation. “Why you arrogant, high handed…if you think I’m going to bow to you, you’ve got another think coming!”

It is customary, but I would not wish it,he told her his voice a mixture of condescension and amusement.

Oh, it was just her luck to fall for a big-headed male with delusions of grandeur. “I’ll bow to you when hell freezes over,” she told him angrily.

Her outburst seemed to amuse him.We’ll discuss it when I return.

“When you return? When you return from where? Where do you think you’re going?”

That is hardly the proper tone to take with your…crown prince,he told her, his voice alive with amusement.

“If you don’t answer me, you’re going to be a crown prince all right because I am going to crown you with the first heavy object I can lay my hands on,” she threatened.

Mating makes me hungry. I’m going hunting. I will be back tonight to kiss and fuck you some more.

She shivered at the thought.Just see that you don’t mate with any forest cats while you’re gone, she warned.

My cock is all yours, Jemi darling,he told her meekly.May I have a kiss before I go?

No.

Please?

Is the Sire Apparent of Tern Terra begging?

Yes. May I have a kiss?All traces of merriment had vanished from his voice.

Flushing, she nodded. He used his head to push her back. When she felt the wall of the hut stop at her back, he kissed her leisurely, nipping her tongue with his teeth. Then using his tail to push her skirt aside, he rose on his hind legs and shoved against her. She gasped at the big, pink head of his cock pieced her pussy lips.

She pushed against his sides, trying to wiggle away. “Hunter! Wait! What do you think you’re doing?”

He grunted and sent his entire hard length into her body, impaling her on him.Showing you how much I love you.

She wasn’t prepared for him and when he began to fuck her hard and rough, it hurt. Balling her hands into fists at her sides and gasping for breath, she felt the tears fill her eyes and spill down her cheeks. When he bent his head to kiss her, she turned away.Hunter, please. Stop. This hurts too much. You have to stop. Now. Please.

As abruptly as he’d entered her, he pulled out. He backed away from her. I did not mean to injure you.

She felt his confusion and regret.I know, but Hunter, you can’t just back me up against a wall and ram into me. You’re far too big for that. I have to know you’re coming so I can get ready.

You’re angry.

I’m sore and tomorrow I probably won’t even be able to walk properly. Go hunting and while you’re out, you’d better get some forest pussy, because I can’t take anymore tonight.

He kissed her gently.I don’t want any forest pussy. I want you. I’ll wait and I won’t hurt you again. I promise.

She nodded, brushing her nose lightly against his. “I know. Go hunting. I’ll be waiting when you get back.”

I love you, Jemi Hunter of Earth.

She smiled.And I love you, Hunter, elder offspring of Seeker, Sire of Tern Terra, my crown prince.

We will discuss your duties as my subject when I return,he told her, sending an amused, but affectionate thought her way.

“Dream on, buddy,” she retorted, smiling.

He made a low, rumbling noise deep in his chest and she realized he was laughing.

“Hunter, you’re laughing. How?”

Why not? My mother is a human,he reminded her.When we reach Tern Terra, I’ll learn to shape shift into a human and mate with you in that form, as my father used to do for my mother.

She surprised herself by shaking her head. “That might be nice, but it’s not necessary. I can and do accept you, just as you are, Hunter. You don’t have to change anything about yourself for me. You’re big, handsome, super sexy, and I love you just as you are.”

Are you sure? I know that in your world humans and carnivores don’t mate.

She sighed. Cody had been right about just being here changing one’s perception of things. “No, they don’t,” she acknowledged, “but then carnivores in my world can’t communicate with humans. Nor do they share the same level of intelligence with us, as you do. Anyway, we’re not in my world. We’re here where Tern Terrians and humans have blissfully mated for many hundreds of seasons. I can’t help or change how I feel about you, Hunter. I love you and I don’t care who knows it.”

Her statement was greeted with a long silence. Finally, he bowed his head.You honor and humble me, my darling Jemi.

She leaned forward and they exchanged a long, tender kiss. She caressed his head and drew back, grinning. “I like you better haughty and horny as hell.”

As you wish, my sweet Jemi.

“I’ll be waiting for you when you return, my handsome prince.”

He turned and trotted off.

Man, but she’d never been so sore in all her life. But then she’d never made love so physically or so many times in one day before. What she wouldn’t give for a Jacuzzi or a removable, massaging shower head. Still, as she watched Hunter disappear into the forest, her smile widened. She’d had a great Valentine’s Day after all. She didn’t know if or when she could return home. It didn’t matter because there was nothing waiting for her there. Her only regret was that she hadn’t said goodbye to her friends or Jeff.

Cody had always believed that things happened for a very specific reason. She looked around her. Maybe he was right because no matter what happened to her in this strange new world, she was one lucky woman. She had two handsome males prepared to die to protect her, and she had discovered a love like none she had ever dared hoped to find.

Somewhere, on a primordial level, she knew she’d been born to mate with and love Hunter. To think that she had spent so much of her life unaware of his existence and the joy that awaited her as his woman…

She had loved and adored Cody and still did, but what she felt for him paled in comparison with the depth of feelings she had developed for Hunter. Whatever new experiences and adventures her future held, she would bravely face them with the big, handsome male she’d fallen so desperately in love with at her side.