She gave him a small twisted smile. “I’m just still trying to figure out how I can learn to milk a cow, I guess.”

He lifted her hand and, head bowed, pressed his lips to it. His eyes closed, he held her fingers against his mouth. She sat still, watching him, and felt pierced to the core.

When his grip loosened, she pulled away and stacked their supper dishes together at random. Pushing her chair back, she carried the dishes to the sink. The air in the cabin felt thick and intimate on her overly sensitized skin, and her body seemed too heavy to hold upright. Hardly aware of what she did, she leaned against the sink, squirted soap over the dishes and turned the faucet on.

Even though he moved so lightly that he made no noise, she felt him come up behind her, so close that she felt his body heat at her back.

Her hair was still bound back in the simple braid. He stroked the edge of her hairline, from her temple, around the delicate shell of her ear, to the nape of her neck. His light touch reverberated through her body and she shivered.

“I would love to see your hair loose, if I may.”

He sounded strange, unlike his usual self. He sounded wistful, and somehow that hurt, twisting the spike deeper. She raised her shaking hands to the back of her head to pull out the elastic band, as she whispered, “It’s a crazy mess at the best of times, you know. It’s even crazier without conditioner.”

He pulled his fingers through the loosened braid, and her hair sprang free. His quiet intake of breath sounded loud in the silent cabin. He sank both hands into the wild abundance and gently spread out the curls until they lay loose around her shoulders.

The sensation of his fingers moving through her hair was exotic, sensual, not just physically arousing but emotionally moving. Closing her eyes, she turned her head slightly toward him. He took such extraordinary care with her. She realized that he had not bruised her once, not even during the most violent part of their initial meeting.

“Thank you,” he said. His voice was a rough, bare thread of sound. “It’s beautiful.”

The physician in her realized something else, and she felt stricken. “We don’t have any condoms, do we? At least I don’t.” Carrying a condom in her purse. Taking birth control pills. What a ridiculously foreign concept to someone who once had no interest in sex.

He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around. His expression was flushed with heat yet filled with a kind of settled, mature patience that both astonished and moved her even more. “I took a chance and bought a pack of condoms at the store,” he said. “We can do anything we want, or nothing at all.”

She took a step forward. As his arms folded around her, she tucked her head into the crook of his neck. He stroked her hair and the sensitive skin along the side of her face, all with that light, gentle touch. He was bigger than she was everywhere, from the length and breadth of his chest and flat abdomen, to the muscled biceps that were so thick she couldn’t span them with both hands if she tried.

Sensual awareness had been a perpetual backdrop to all of their interactions with each other. It welled now inside of her, a dark, rich energy that was as life-giving as the earth. She rested against the strength of his body, inhaled his scent and savored the texture of his warm skin as she nuzzled into him. He murmured something and pressed his lips against her temple then simply held her, his mouth resting against her skin.

To experience desire now, after going a lifetime without it, seemed like a gorgeous and unearthly gift. How strange that it came at such a time. What did someone say in a situation like this? Honey, I’m going to war and I would like to spend the night with you?

She licked her lips and whispered, “I haven’t been with anybody in a long time. Justin was my last attempt at any real intimacy.”

His hand came under her chin. He tilted her face up and looked into her eyes. His gaze was somber, the lean, tough lines of his face filled with tenderness. “I don’t remember what making love is like. I would love to be with you, but only when you’re ready.”

Shock tightened her face. He was so masculine. He was at least thirty-five years old, and he had been that controlled, that cut off, his entire life? “You’ve never been with anyone? Ever?”

He shook his head, his gaze lowered as he watched his thumb stroke her lower lip. “My memory of you was so much stronger and brighter than anyone I met. Other women were pale shadows by comparison.”

Her eyes filled. Her mouth trembled, and so did her hands as she stroked his back, his cheek. “I didn’t know to wait,” she whispered. “I didn’t remember.”

“Of course you didn’t,” he murmured.

“I wish I had. None of them meant anything. Afterward, I always felt empty and more disconnected than ever, and I could never understand why.”

“Hush. Whoever you were with before—Justin or anyone else, it doesn’t matter.” He bent his head to lick the path along her lip that his thumb had taken. “This is what is real, not what happened in the past. This, right here and now.”

She stood on tiptoe, cupped his face and kissed him with everything she had. His arms clenched, his lips warm and responsive on hers. Urgency flared hot and bright between them, and he turned the kiss aggressive as his powerful body tightened.

They were flush against each other, torso to torso. She felt a heavy, thick length growing against her hip bone. Instead of feeling the usual revulsion that she’d always had to mask before, her body moistened in a sharp pulse of arousal.

As he grew harder, she softened, inviting him with her mouth and her body while she wrapped him in her energy. He slanted his lips over hers, driving his tongue deep into her mouth while he sank both fists into her hair. His breathing came hard, as if he had been running for miles. For uncounted years.

She slipped her hands under his shirt. They both groaned as her palms connected with his warm skin, and he arched with a gasp as she stroked the long, muscled length of his broad back.

She caught a glimpse of his expression. The bones and contours were the same, but he looked radically different, unleashed. The tiger that lived behind his face had finally escaped its confinement and leaped to freedom, and there was nothing at all human in those glittering, moonstone eyes.

The sight should have frightened her. If she had been sensible, sane or fully human herself, it might have.

Instead, she, who had shrank from every caress or gesture of affection from her gentle human partners, raked her fingernails down that tiger’s back and egged him on.

Something extreme flashed in his expression.

He tore her clothes off her body. Just ripped them to pieces, even the tough material of her new denim jeans, shredding it as if it were as thin and fragile as paper.

That he had that kind of inhuman strength shocked a sound out of her, the noise filled with incoherent amazement and need.

After she was naked, he tore his T-shirt off too. The heavy muscles of his chest and arms clenched and flexed as he flung the shreds of material aside. A scatter of dark hair sprinkled his chest from his flat, male ni**les to the length of his taut, washboard abdomen.

She couldn’t take her eyes off him, even as she reached for the fastening of his own pair of jeans. She jerked open the top button and yanked down the zipper, and his large, erect penis spilled out of the opening, into her hands.

At last her gaze fell from his face. She looked down, from the broad head to the thick, veined shaft. Discovering such a private part of him made her feel delirious, intoxicated. The stretched skin over the hard, swollen flesh of his erection was soft as silk and hot to the touch. She stroked the length of him and rubbed the ball of her thumb over the thin slit at the tip.

He hissed and shuddered all over. He gripped her wrists, shackling her. Then he pulled her hands away from his erection. Before she had time to grow disappointed, he swung her into his arms. Moving swiftly, he carried her to the bed. The bicep muscles in his arms bunched as he threw her onto the bed.

Even as she hit the mattress, she was already twisting up to reach for him again. Urgency gripped her, and a kind of crazed greed. She could not remember having ever felt this way before . . .

. . . and then her mind opened again, and she could.

Snatches of images filled with the same need, echoing back and back throughout millennia, time out of mind.

The tangle of naked limbs. His fist in her hair. Screaming as she climaxed, as he took her again and again. He took her so far out of her body, she knew ecstasy like a pure, soaring note.

She knew him.

All the pieces, fitting together with such perfection. Journeying through life together. Not quite dancing the same dance every time. Infinitesimally shifting their path through the seasons, yet still completing a circle. Making a pattern.

Two interlocking pieces that sustained and balanced each other.

While she knelt frozen on the bed, he turned off the overhead light and yanked off his pants. The flames from the fire threw long, flickering strands of golden light across the room. The gold danced along his tall, nude body as he opened a foil packet and rolled a condom over his erect penis. When he turned to her, she opened her arms. He came over her as she lay back on the bed, and they settled their bodies together.

Stricken, she stared up at him, and this time she accepted the duality of her experience. They had never lain naked together, yet it was the most familiar, most necessary thing she had ever done. She stroked his cheek. He kissed her palm. And it was the same dance all over again, a very old dance, the oldest of all, yet now it was made new again.

He stroked and explored her, kissed her br**sts and suckled at her ni**les, while she explored and kissed him too. It all happened too fast, as urgency built into a cascade of need.

She ran her mouth along the heated skin of his chest, feeling the bulge and shift of iron muscle underneath his silken skin, while the sprinkle of hair on his legs rasped against her inner thighs. The urgency would not let her settle or slow down. She raged mutely against the condom, hating the necessity for even that small barrier, and soon at her urging he brought the tip of his erection to her moist, fluted opening, holding her gaze as he settled into place between her legs.

His eyes were a darkened stormy gray, stricken with vulnerability. Riveted by the expression, she cupped his face, nuzzling and murmuring at him as he eased his rigid thick length inside her softened, slick entrance. He was shaking. The long, hard shudders rippled through his tough frame. Her breath caught as he seated himself fully inside. He froze, leaning on his elbows so that he could search her face.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, answering his unspoken question. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

The anxiety eased from his face, and pleasure transformed him. “You’re a miracle,” he said. “I didn’t think I knew how to feel anymore. I thought I was half dead.” He covered her mouth with his and whispered against her lips, “My miracle. My home.”

The words pierced through her as he began to move. He watched her as her eyelids grew heavy and her plump moistened mouth grew soft, and he was clever, so clever. He learned quickly the language of what pleased her through the catch of a sigh, a murmur of need.

He framed her face with his big hands as their bodies flexed and interlocked. She arched her torso up to him and worked her inner muscles, clasping him tightly as he slid in, and in, and in.

When he climaxed she looked deeply into his unshielded gaze. It brought her to climax along with him. She lost herself as her body shook, and once again, ecstasy sang that pure, soaring note. And she knew it didn’t matter where they traveled next, who they had to fight or what world they had left behind. She had come home.

Tears spilled out of the corners of her eyes. He held her tight against him with an arm hooked around the back of her neck. It was his turn to murmur as he kissed the tears away. She offered him her mouth. As he covered it with his, her lips shaped the words.

Home.

He went still, all breathing suspended, and she knew that he focused everything on the movement of her mouth. Then he crushed her to him, kissing her so hard, she knew he had understood, although she had said no word out loud, nor had she made any sound.

Chapter Twenty-two

THE LITTLE DARK spirit outside the cabin was wretchedly disappointed and growing desperately hungry.

At first the pair inside had shown such rich, bountiful promise, but as time progressed they were actually healing and comforting each other. Raw, deep spiritual wounds closed, and they grew stronger and brighter.

In the meantime, the spirit had trapped itself with its own greed by following them to such a secluded place. It couldn’t sense any other prey around for miles. So it lingered in the deepest shadows of the clearing, hoping against hope to catch one or the other of the pair alone, vulnerable and in pain again. Whenever they came outside together, or the man stepped out by himself, it hid in the recesses of the car’s engine.

Then something else snagged its attention.

A call reverberated through the psychic realm. The voice was a familiar one, dark and seductive as a siren. The spirit wavered in indecision but, while the people in the cabin had been luscious and tempting in the midst of their struggle, they had grown into too robust a force for it to feed on unless they became injured to the point of dying.

Whereas the voice that called came from someone that led a life rich in all the dark paths. He birthed a fertile feeding ground of pain and suffering wherever he went, and he rewarded those that pleased him.

Detaching from the cabin window, the spirit drifted upward like a feather on the wind. It began to travel in lazy swirls in the direction of the voice.

Chapter Twenty-three

“WHEN DO WE have to leave?” Mary asked.

The sound of her soft voice vibrated in his ear as he rested his head on her flat stomach. He turned to press his lips against her skin.