Heat poured through her core at the feel of his mouth on hers, the intimate stroke of his tongue. Pleasure spread with the heat, filling her mind not only with enjoyment of the sensations his taste and scent produced but a craving for more.

Alien, foreign, savage, unnatural didn’t enter her mind, though she knew, later, that any or all of those thoughts/reactions should have happened.

The one thing that should not have happened did.

Desire swept her away on a heated tsunami, addling her wits so thoroughly that she wasn’t entirely certain of when he began to strum her body in concert to the kiss, lifting and massaging her breasts, tweaking the sensitive nipples, coasting his large, calloused hand over her belly to cup her mound.

So enthralled was she by the heated desire that flowed from the magic of his touch into her that it was slow to sink into her mind she could feel the heat and roughness of his hand. Not the pressure—the unrestricted touch of no barrier between her skin and his.

And she wouldn’t have been able to if his hand had been stroking over the gown she was wearing.

The question that instantly leapt into her mind was just how exposed was she—completely? Not at all? Or somewhere between the two?

That realization brought her surfing upward toward awareness swiftly, but she wasn’t altogether certain that she would’ve emerged so quickly if not for the fact that he ceased to explore her with his hand and broke the kiss, releasing her, mostly, from the spell he’d woven.

She felt sluggish and confused when he did. It was a struggle to regain some composure, to manage a pretense of being unaffected.

Glancing toward the great hall to reassure herself that the incident had gone completely unnoticed by the other occupants of the hall, she discovered instead that they had the attention of pretty much everybody in the frigging place!

She felt her face turn scarlet with embarrassment as she frantically searched her mind in an effort to determine if she’d been completely exposed when the bastard had molested her or if he’d at least done it under the covers where some doubt might remain in their minds.

She had a bad feeling, though, that she’d been the main attraction and not much, if anything, had been left to their imagination.

Drak rose abruptly, shifting her in his hold as he did as if she weighed next to nothing and depositing her across one very broad shoulder. The pressure against her mid-section instantly divided her focus between that physical discomfort and the anxiety that the back of her gown had ridden up to expose her butt.

It certainly felt breezy back there!

Before she could check with her hand, though, he took a step that drove his shoulder bone deeper into her belly and the air from her lungs.

“Kulle—send Kadin to fetch a pair of his boots and breeches, tunic and cape for my woman before she freezes—enough to keep body and soul together until I can have some things made for her. She’s too small for anything we have stored for the women’s use.”

Noelle heard the command Drak flung over his shoulder at the man who’d escorted her to the great hall, but she was in no condition to even try to make sense of it. She supposed it was something of a blessing that she was also in too much physical distress to worry about her modesty/exposure or feel any of the discomfort and embarrassment she would have if she hadn’t been struggling to control the jarring impact of the Prince’s shoulder against her belly with every step he took as he carried her back across the great hall and upstairs again. But she was in no condition to appreciate it.

When they reached his room once more, he strode inside and dropped her unceremoniously on the bed. She flung her arms and legs out reflexively, landing hard enough to jounce upward and meet the impact of his descending form on the rebound. The collision was a long way from gentle, but so much less painful than being carried across his hard shoulder that it made little impression.

Particularly since he sought and captured her mouth beneath his in a kiss that was filled with so much hunger that it shot her upwards from zero to two hundred fast enough to make her head swim.

‘What the hell???’ did flicker through her mind, but remained an unfinished thought.

Her heart was hammering hard enough to deafen her, flooding her system with so much excess oxygen that she felt like she was going to pass out. He moved restlessly against her as he kissed her thoroughly, acquainting himself intimately with every soft, sensitive surface within the cavern of her mouth. The pinch of one nipple between his thumb and forefinger grounded her even as it sent an electrifying jolt through her. Her throat closed with an instantaneous hunger to feel his mouth there—her nether throat closing in a kneading spasm that forced moisture along her channel.

And then a knock upon the hard panel of the door fractured the moment completely.

Drak pulled away from her, studied her for a pregnant moment from beneath hooded lids and then tossed the coverlet over her and rose from the bed, abandoning her.

Shock rolled over Noelle as the fur landed on her face, blocking her vision until she fought the damned thing off. She sat up just as a young boy opened the door and peered around the room—one of the boys from the previous night.

“Kulle said I was to bring these things …?”

Drak, whom she saw had moved from the bed to the fireplace, jerked his head in the direction of the bed. “You can leave them there.”

Nodding, the body approached the bed and settled the pile of clothing at the very foot of it—a good mile from where Noelle sat, studying him blankly while she tried to gather her scattered wits.

He flicked a curious glance her way and then turned. Drak, who’d crouched beside the hearth to build the fire up, finished his task, straightened, and escorted the youth from the room.

Noelle had no idea he intended to leave with the boy until he shut the door firmly behind him.

She blinked at the closed door when she’d been left alone, struggling with the emotions roiling inside her and trying to sort them.

Outrage was one of them.

She wasn’t entirely certain of why she felt that particular thing, but she had a sneaking suspicion it had a lot to do with the blood still throbbing in places she didn’t want to think about.

After staring at the door blankly for a while, turning the flickering impressions over and over in her mind in an attempt to understand what the hell was going on—what had happened and why it had happened—Noelle debated briefly and finally decided to access her PMAI—personal memory assist implant.

She wasn’t in the habit of it. She’d been very reluctant to allow it to be installed, in point of fact, for although it seemed, on the surface, that it would be handy to be able to perfectly recall anything that happened around her that she’d ‘witnessed’ with any of her senses, the anxiety that her privacy would be infringed upon was never far from her mind when she thought of the PMAI.

That was one of the things that had made colonization appealing—the vanishing privacy of life on Earth because of the many new devices and laws that ‘protected’ everyone by intrusions on their privacy and increasing limitations on freedom.

Unfortunately, it was required of colonists and it was either or—allow the implant or forget about going. And she could concede that there was actually a good reason for having it so long as the ‘powers’ didn’t abuse their right to scan the PMAIs of its citizens.

It was a well known fact, though, that memory was notoriously inaccurate under the best of circumstances because it was influenced by emotions, personality traits, distractions of the moment—numerous internal and external influences that altered the perception of the memory. The PMAIs used the eyes and ears to record, just like natural memory did, but the devices recorded even things you weren’t aware of seeing or hearing—background noises or conversations. Things you saw but weren’t conscious of.