THE RICH SMELL of morning brew woke Rachel, who opened her eyes to see Evander pulling on a pair of trousers. For a moment she admired the long, handsome stretch of his back, and then noticed his hair was damp. She glanced over at the sodden pile of clothes on the floor, which were creating a little puddle of their own.

“Is it raining again?”

His shoulders stiffened for a moment before he turned around and came to sit on the bed. “I had a swim.”

“Oh. Then you’re a crazy man, because the water is like ice now.” She pulled him down for a kiss, and felt the heat radiating from his tattoo. “What’s wrong?”

“Naught I can fix.” He hauled her onto his lap and wrapped an arm around her, pressing her cheek against his shoulder. “There’s a fair down in the village. They have dancing and games and all manner of food. I thought we’d spend the day there.”

Rachel didn’t care about a fair. She wanted to know what had him so upset that his ink was practically sizzling. Yet when she reached into his mind, all she saw was her own face, like a reflection. He wasn’t thinking about anything but her.

“Maybe we should stay in today.” She straddled his thighs, and pushed on his chest until he lay back. “We can dance and have food and play my favorite game, right here.”

Evander tucked his arm under his head. “You’ve a favorite game?”

“Yes. It’s called Loving Evander Talorc.” She bent down, curtaining his face with her hair as she brushed her lips over the hard line of his mouth. She kissed his chin and the angular line of his jaw, and then worked her way over to his ear. “Do you want to know the rules?”

He ran his hand down the length of her spine. “Aye.”

“There aren’t any,” she whispered, and nipped his earlobe.

Rachel rubbed her hands over his chest and shoulders as she left a line of soft, damp kisses stretching from his ear to his collar bone. She had to shift a little lower to lave her tongue over his flat nipples, which puckered and hardened in response. She could feel his erection hardening against the top of her belly, and sucked on one nipple until his penis had swollen so hard and thick she could feel it throbbing through his trousers.

His tattoo burned against her lips, but as she swept her tongue over his crossbar spear the heat changed. What had been feverishly hot now pulsed with delicious warmth, which she caressed with her lips and fingers.

“Oh,” she groaned as she felt an answering heat spread over her left breast, and brought his hand to her mark. “Do you feel that? I think someone’s waking up.”

He rubbed his thumb over her ink. “It hardly sleeps since we mated.”

“So that’s why I always want you to touch my breasts. My ink is flirting with yours.” She smiled as she moved his hand over her, nudging his palm with her hard nipple before she shifted lower. “Your spirit is driving me crazy, you know.”

His brows arched. “How so?”

“It puts ideas in my head.”

She pushed her hands under his hips to unfasten the laces at the back of his trousers, and then tugged them down to free his erect penis. She crawled backward off the bed to finish stripping him before she pulled off her night shirt.

When she went around to the opposite side of the bed, Evander looked up at her with a frown.

“I think you want the other end of me, lass.”

“Be patient,” she said and climbed up over him, straddling his shoulders and tucking her legs under his arms as she positioned herself. When she lay down on top of him she heard him make a rough sound as she presented her slick sex to his face. “I think you’ll like this.”

Rachel curled her fingers around his shaft, squeezing him gently as she whispered a kiss over his engorged cockhead. As she parted her lips to draw him in she felt his fingers stroke her folds apart, and then the heat of his breath just before he began licking her. Her breasts throbbed in response to the intimate kiss, and she rubbed them against his belly as she slid her mouth down and sucked on his cock.

The thrilling, sexy feel of Evander lapping at her fueled Rachel’s desire to give him the same pleasure, and she began working her lips down on his shaft with gentle, tugging strokes of her mouth. His shaft jerked as she increased the pull and lashed him with her tongue, and then she worked the base of him with her fist, squeezing and releasing with the rhythm of her sucking. When she felt his thoughts pour into her she focused on what aroused him the most, and then caught a fleeting desire for her touch on the tightly constricted bulge of his balls.

Rachel cradled his sack in her hand, and caressed the softly furred flesh with her fingertips. At the same time she went down on him as far as she could manage, sealing her lips around him as she held his cock in her mouth and sucked hard. Evander made a deep sound that vibrated through her pussy, and then worked two fingers into her tight, wet opening as he tugged on her clit, sucking it.

Under her fingers she felt the surge of his semen, and felt the rigid swelling of his shaft that preceded him coming. She pressed her pussy back against his mouth as she stroked his penis with her fist, sucking at him until the first jet surged over her tongue. The taste of him pushed her from aching, tight need into a storm of sweet, sultry ecstasy.

More primitive thoughts filled Rachel’s mind as she came, and spread through her as she drank Evander’s silky come. It seemed half-memory, half fantasy. She saw herself kneeling naked before him in a meadow filled with warriors holding torches, and strangely-carved stones in a circle. Someone had bound her wrists behind her, but she wasn’t afraid. There she sucked his cock in front of the tribe, his tribe, while they watched. Some of the men caressed the bulges at their crotches, while others openly took out and stroked their own erections. But oddly it didn’t seem obscene to her. She could feel their emotions, and they were honest and sensual.

This was his tribe, his ritual, his mating bond. He had chosen her as if she were a woman of the Pritani. His spirit had marked her. They were not simply connected now, they were joined.

The thoughts faded as they shuddered with the force of their climaxes, and when it was over Evander righted her and held her against his side.

“I do like that,” he told her, making her laugh. “’Tis how such pleasures are shared in your time?”

“Yes, but I’ve never tried it before now,” Rachel admitted. “I did read up on it, and I…practiced a couple times with a banana.” She sighed. “I was going to have my first time on my wedding night.”

“Hmmm. I am glad you didnae waste that on your spineless bawbag of a husband.” Evander stroked his thumb over her tingling lips. “What is a banana?”

“A long, yellow fruit that’s the right size and shape for practicing.” She glanced down at his hand, which was shifting her legs apart. “And what are you doing down there, Master Talorc?”

“Playing your game,” Evander said and ran his hand from her knee to the inside of her thigh, where he stroked her slick folds with his fingertips. “Open your legs to me. Aye, and wider.” When she had parted her thighs he penetrated her with one long finger, pumping it gently in and out of her pussy. “You want me inside your quim still.”

“I want that every second I’m awake.”

She had never felt him more focused on her, as if no one and nothing else in the world existed for him.

He studied her face. “’Tis the same for you, then, the need to be joined.”

“Aren’t we already?” she asked, shifting closer until her mark touched his. “Isn’t that what this is?”

Evander dragged in a ragged breath. “I’ve taken you, and I’ve marked you. ’Tis enough now.”

He didn’t seem to be talking to her. “I want it all, my love.”

Burning shadows welled into his eyes, and he groaned and shook as his ink began to dart down his abdomen and then the crossbar fell onto her belly and began inching up her body. Rachel’s eyes went wide as she felt the ink, hard and hot, but knew not to resist it. It crawled between her breasts, spreading over them and then tightening as if the tattoo were fondling her.

“Evander, oh, god,” she breathed, thrusting her mounds up into the strange, intensely arousing sensation.

The ink scrolled from her breasts to her throat, where she felt it split and race along her arms, dragging them up over her head. She could feel the pieces of tattoo rejoining at her wrists, effectively binding them together.

“Our willing captive,” Evander said, his voice taking on a harder edge. “Bound to us and marked as our mate. What shall you offer for our pleasure?”

Rachel discovered she could still move her arms, and lifted her wrists over his head, settling them against his neck.

“Everything,” she breathed. “All of me. Take what you want.”

He pressed her knees up as he moved between them, his chest heaving as he rooted against her. His eyes remained locked with hers while he worked his cockhead into the ellipse of her opening. The tattoo tightened around her wrists as he gripped her bottom, and with a single, powerful thrust buried his cock inside her.

Rachel clutched at him as she absorbed the shock of the penetration, grateful that her earlier climax and his mouth had made her so wet. He had filled her so completely she could feel every inch of him, hot and hard inside her pussy, and that alone was going to make her come again.

Some of the blazing darkness left his eyes. “You called me your love.”

“That’s because I’m in love with you,” she said. She hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that, but he was so deep inside her that she couldn’t think of something cleverer to say. “I know it’s too soon, but let me love you anyway. You’ll like–”

Evander cut her off by kissing her, his mouth almost desperate as he pushed in his tongue to stroke hers. His body shuddered over hers, and then he drew out of her, and plowed back inside, over and over, but he never stopped kissing her. He swallowed her gasps and cries and the shaking moan she uttered as she came on his pistoning cock. He fucked her through the wild delight and kept shafting her, their skins growing slippery with sweat. Rachel felt now what he had been thinking, as if nothing else existed but the two of them. Her world became his body over her, the bed rocking under them, the devouring hunger of his mouth, and the endless pumping of his swollen, satiny penis into the clenching, quivering suppleness of her pussy.

After an eternity Evander wrenched his mouth from hers, and brought his hand up to cradle her cheek.

“We are joined now. I am yours, Rachel.”

He meant it, she realized as his feelings flooded into her. He belonged to her, now and forever. His heart, his body, his soul. He was giving her everything he was, everything he would ever be. He would never touch another woman again.

Rachel finally understood the meaning of the ritual she had seen in her head. The men of his tribe demanded complete surrender from their mates, because once they had it, they gave the same to them. Then all of his memories poured into her, and she saw all at once the twelve hundred years that Evander had lived since his days with the Talorc tribe.

He hadn’t been fantasizing about being an immortal warrior.

Her vision grayed as her whole body flushed, and she fell into a roiling sea of primal sensation. She had no name for what came next, only that it filled her head with soundless light, and wordless joy. She felt on fire from within and without, and at the same time submerged in the coolest, softest water. She could hear the high, helpless sounds she made, and the deep, harsh grunts from Evander as he poured into her, and they blended together into a symphony of pleasure.

For a long time Rachel lay holding him, heaving in the air she’d forgotten to breathe and feeling him do the same. After what they’d shared she couldn’t go on keeping the truth about her ability from him.

“I have to tell you something.”

“Aye, and so must I you.” His weight lifted, and he moved to her side, turning her to face him. In his mind he was remembering a beautiful lake surrounded by dark mountains. “Tonight, after the fair.”

She didn’t understand why he was so determined to take her to it, but if it would make him happy, she planned on doing that every day for the rest of her life.

“Whatever you want.”