KINSMAN’S OATH By Susan Krinard

But what she pictured did not grow solely out of her own overstimulated imagination. It was Ronan’s thoughts she was sharing, a veritable catalog of fascinating and challenging ways to join two bodies. In each image the female was herself.

Ronan couldn’t know how strongly he was projecting. He wasn’t that advanced, or that skilled. She must be reaching out more than halfway, strengthening his thoughts without any conscious purpose but desire.

‘Today I went into your Middle Town,” Ronan said, licking her neck. “I observed humans in a place where mating occurs frequently.”

Scylla’s teeth. He’d gone to the Prostitutes’ Quarter. She was afraid to speculate how he’d managed to eavesdrop on the doings there.

“I am not… like those women,” she said.

He began to draw back, and his absence turned the room cold as an ice floe.

“No,” she said, reaching for his hand. “I didn’t mean—”

“I will penetrate you in the way you find most comfortable.”

She groaned. How could such clinical words have such an unbearably erotic effect? “I thought you said… that shaauri don’t use words in… mating.”

“I am sorry.” He lifted her hair and kissed the nape of her neck while his other hand was busy elsewhere. She leaned her head against his scarred shoulder. By the black tides of space, he had no need for speech.

“I can’t believe,” she murmured, “that the men who patronize the Quarter are… quite so expert.”

He didn’t answer. Every part of her was kissed and caressed and stroked by lips and tongue and fingers, and all the while she shared the pictures in his mind.

Unbidden, her mind latched on to one of the images and would not let go. Ronan rumbled deep in his chest. He took her hand and pulled her down to the floor.

“Ronan… I think the bed is better.”

Without hesitation he lifted her into his arms and carried her to the bed. For a moment he crouched above her, staring with such intensity that she felt flayed bare all the way to the bone.

“The shaauri are wrong,” he said, wonder in his voice. Carefully he eased her into position, supporting her waist with one strong arm, and knelt behind her. He steadied her hips with his hands.

Poseidon. There was nothing rational in Cynara’s mind, only the excruciating awareness of Ronan pressed to her buttocks, the indescribable feeling as he slid between her thighs.

He entered with a single, unerring thrust, rocking her forward among the pillows.

Pleasure exploded in her mind. Not only hers, but his, joined in a way she had never dreamed to experience. The images he had projected, the sharing of emotions, were as nothing to this. She knew, to the very center of her being, how much Ronan had wanted her. She knew how he had tried to stay away, how every moment in her presence was a kind of agony, desire beyond mere human lust.

It was hunger, to know and be known, to fuse with another of his kind in a way that he had only imagined, that she had only imagined. Each thrust drove him deeper into the core of her very self, body and bodiless. There was no separation. Only rocking, rocking, and a joy so profound that it surpassed every definition of pleasure.

“No,” he whispered.

She heard the protest like waves in an undersea cavern, muted and remote. It drew her from ecstasy, to the mundane sensations of the quilt under her palms and Ronan’s heat between her thighs.

“Don’t,” she begged. “Don’t stop.”

“I must see your face.”

He withdrew and turned her about, pulling her into his lap. Suddenly, irrationally, Cynara was afraid. There was no escaping those eyes, no forgetting.

“Cynara,” he said, cupping her face in his hands. “Don’t fear me.”

All she could think, in that moment, was that Ronan had used a contraction like an ordinary human. “I’m not afraid.”

He brushed her hair back from her face. “Look at me, Cynara.” With infinite tenderness he laid her back, cradling her head among the pillows. He entered her slowly, watching her face.

Humans called this “making love.” They used the word “love” so freely, but he knew it for what it was: one more trap to sabotage his resolve.

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