place drew a muffled cry from her throat, quieted only by some distant sense of self-preservation. She seemed to recall something like this happening long ago, but the past was as unreal as the future. Garret knew exactly where and how to use his tongue to tickle and tease, drawing out each caress with rapid flicks and long strokes.
She arched her back, begging him with her entire body. He turned his attention to her breasts and continued his ministrations while she felt for the waistband of his pants.
“Garret,” she whispered, filling her mind with the emotional images of taking and being taken. His aura erupted around him, emitting tongues of flame that strained toward her. Her own aura flared for the first time, a blue-tinged amethyst radiance that opened to accept the thrust of his fire as her body was ready to accept his.
Garret was more than ready. Her hand found him, large and very hard. The intensity of his need—hers—multiplied a thousandfold.
For a moment there was nothing between them. Nothing at all—no boundaries, no barriers, no walls. He eased himself over her, gazing down at her with his weight braced on his hands and his hips between her thighs.
Again she saw herself through his eyes, less a distinctive shape than an aura enclosing the interwoven strands of her emotions. But the image began to take form, and she glimpsed her face: eyes closed, lips parted, hair wild and tangled about her shoulders.
And beautiful. Beautiful in a way she could never have imagined. It was the face she’d seen in mirrors before her exile and sometimes in the imperfect reflection of water, but bathed in a gentle light that softened the blue of her aura to a silky violet. Violet water, smooth and untroubled.
Garret caught her lips with his, exploring the terrain of her mouth, coaxing her to open for him. With a low moan of surrender, she parted her lips, and his tongue found its way inside. He curled it around hers, sucked, kissed her more deeply than she would have believed possible.
Violet transformed to deep, hot purple. She pushed her fingers into his hair and bit lightly into his lower lip, drawing blood. He adjusted his position so that a single thrust would make them one at last.
Something remarkable happened then. Feelings she barely recognized bloomed in her mind, so astonishing that, at first, she didn’t know how to name them.
But not all the memories were dead. There were no times, no places...only the joy and happiness and exhilaration of the single thing she had sought and found and lost before the change. The thing she wanted again, here within her grasp.
Everything else vanished. There was no more need to struggle, to aspire to anything greater than this. Her emotions swelled to obliterate all other desires. She would float in this perfect world forever, in endless bliss and exultation.
She had found what the humans called heaven.
But there was a bubble of disturbance in the flawless pool of eternal rapture, a devil in this paradise. It picked and prodded at her, mocking her with warnings she could not quite shut out.
There is no heaven for Opiri.
“Artemis,” Garret said. His voice was hoarse and urgent, his mind spinning on the edge of euphoria. She knew that all she had to do was speak a single word, and every other voice would be silenced.
So would her dreams and hopes for her people. She would no longer care about them, because she had what she wanted, all she would ever want.
Forget them, she thought. You owe them nothing.
But her past would not be silent. They are your people, it said. How can you abandon them for a human?
“No,” she whispered.
All we fought for destroyed, because of you. Because of him.
Garret’s face came into sharp focus, blazing with elation. He could destroy nothing, but he could give her—
“Roxana?” he murmured.
She saw her own face again...saw it change, felt Garret’s bewilderment and her own turmoil as that other face slipped over hers like a mask. Eyes too dark, hair too long, features too...
“No,” Garret said hoarsely. The stranger vanished, but the sheer weight of his emotions—regret, grief, confusion—bore down on her with such force that she thought they would crush her. Illusion shattered. Shock worked as no careful discipline could have done.
She pushed him out—out of her heart, her mind, her very being—and slammed the wall down between them, severing all emotional ties, all the feelings that had tempted her into relinquishing the new way she had sought to win for her own kind.
The feelings that had nearly made her surrender to a human who saw another face even as he prepared to possess her.
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