Tallis shrugged. “It’s been a little while since I’ve been back. Who knows what twenty years will do to a people. Probably not as much as I fear. Besides, none of us are as bat-shit as your people.”

Rather than take offense, Kavya chuckled quietly. “Can’t really argue there. Where to?”

They poked around the underground storage until they found a hose and utility sink. “This will have to do.”

“Oh no. Not again.”

“We can’t be too picky. If we go upstairs looking like vagabonds, they’ll throw us out on the street. Trust me.”

“You’ve looked like a vagabond before, Tallis? Don’t disillusion me.”

“You don’t know—”

Another huffing laugh revealed her sarcasm, which made him feel a fool for getting his back up so easily, and equally impressed that she’d accumulated a quick knack for his quiet humor.

She pointed to a plain door on the far side of the tight, moldy basement. Some writing adorned it. “The laundry,” she said with a note of triumph.

They were inside with the door shut and locked within seconds. Again, Tallis felt an off sense of having reluctantly met his match and satisfaction at having done so. He’d been on his own so long.

The laundry was barely functional, but at least its utility sink offered warm water. He began to strip.

“What, no tease this time?” Kavya was watching him, her pale brown eyes avaricious.

“You think I have the energy to try seducing you again, goddess?”

“No energy?” She made a noise as if contemplating the situation. “You seemed rather . . . vigorous in the cornfield.”

Leaving him stunned and likely marked for life, Tallis watched as Kavya unwound the maroon cloth of her sari and unfastened the bodice, all without ceremony.

She stood naked before him.

After what he’d dreamed and what he’d already discovered of her flesh, he was revealed as a fool for thinking he knew what to expect. Not even close. Unnerving visions and real life had never diverged so sharply.

She was thin with fine, long bones. Breasts that would fill his hands with bountiful flesh to spare were perfectly formed. Her nipples beaded beneath his riveted gaze. The muscles of her stomach were lightly defined, as were the curves of her legs. Walking had made her into a woman of refined grace and strength, but with softly rounded shoulders and flaring hips that made him eager to learn more about the texture of her coppery skin. His mouth watered when his attention alit on the small thatch of dark hair at the apex of her thighs.

On top of his desire was layered his greater impulse, his true imperative: he would make her first time one she never regretted. Kavya of Indranan would know what it was to be revered not as a goddess, but as the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

Kavya had never stood naked before a man until that moment, when Tallis of Pendray consumed her with eyes darkened by hunger. He might consume her with his mouth and claim her with his body, but his eyes promised it would never be enough.

Promised?

Threatened?

She didn’t care.

On the inside she was trembling with anticipation and a touch of fear, but she stood before him calm and still and proud. She had borrowed too many images from other minds to doubt that she aroused men. That she aroused and had even satisfied this man gave her confidence. She felt hot to the touch, although her skin was pebbled with goose bumps in that small, enclosed laundry room.

“I want to kiss you,” he said, his voice rough and primal.

Her body was on instant alert—not in preparation for a fight, or to muster the strength of calm to inspire her followers—but because she knew the next few moments would change her forever. “Not until I wash.”

She flipped on the tap and, because there was no plug for the drain, she shoved her maroon sari to the bottom. Hot water soon filled the sink. He leaned heavily against the wall beside the sink, soaking in her every movement. She retrieved the bar of soap from their possessions and lathered it beneath the streaming faucet. The scent of sandalwood filled her nostrils and set off her imagination. She wondered how the notes of that fragrance would change when layered with the musk of Tallis’s clean skin.

The process of washing was simple yet luxurious. She lathered and rinsed, then bent over the filled sink to wash her hair. Tallis kept his hands tucked behind his lower back. His expression was turning. Changing. He was turning. There was little left of the thinking man she had come to know. The beast inside him was taking over—with sex in mind, not violence, although, the two seemed inexorably linked among the Pendray.

She should have been afraid, but her nerves and her fears disappeared with the last of the soap from her long, clean hair. In the field, beneath his mouth, she’d felt like a goddess, but not the one he used as a tease. She’d been both powerful and helpless. Tallis looked that way now.

She squeezed out the excess water, then snatched a towel from a stack of clean laundry on a wire shelf. The luxury continued, not because the towels were soft, but because she emerged from that enveloping cloth as a new woman.

Tallis took a deep breath. He yanked his gaze away from her naked body. The speed with which he washed made her smile, even as his nudity sparked gorgeous flames in her blood. He leaned over the sink. Kavya had the most exquisite view of his arched back, the strong ladder of his ribs, the taut clench of his buttocks, and the muscles that trailed from his thighs to his calves. His legs were sleeked with hair that darkened when he scrubbed with the wet washcloth. He remained turned away from her. Rather than the teasing way he’d washed his groin in the room above the high valley pub, he rubbed the cloth quickly between his legs as if it were just another few inches of skin.

Kavya was glad for it. She wanted the heart-deep, lung-deep shock of seeing him turn around, presenting her with an offering.

He would be hard. Yearning. For her.

Sandalwood and steam made her dizzy, as did anticipation. She wanted and craved and needed in ways she’d never thought possible.

He stopped washing. Water dripped from the ends of his hair, along the column of his neck and down the dip and ridges of his back. His spine was a single row of mountains, perfectly straight. Kavya liked that.

Moving slowly, she retrieved another towel from the shelf, then stepped to within inches of his tight, hunched body. His knuckles were white where he gripped the edge of the sink. Kavya started with his hair, gently tousling the dark mass until it was dry enough for the silvery tips to shine again. She caught the drips that trailed down his neck, back, ass—which is when he flinched. Not his whole body. Just those tight twin globes, powerfully shaped.

No, she thought. Not a flinch.

More like a thrust.

She couldn’t resist touching. As if to check the progress of her work, she smoothed a flat palm from his hairline to the span between the divots at the base of his spine. His ass, however, deserved more attention. She laid the towel over her shoulder and pressed her hands against his flanks. With her thumbs she caressed curving slopes of erotic muscle. Tallis hissed, then groaned. She glanced at his knuckles. Either he’d bust bone through skin, or he’d crush the edge of the porcelain sink into powder.

She kissed the back of his left hand before changing sides and kissing his right. So near, he pried his fingers loose and pushed damp strands of hair back from her face. She risked a glance up. His eyes were squeezed shut. He was touching her without looking at her, as if touch would be enough—or as if he were a man on the verge of losing himself to dangerous impulses.