The wind caught her question and spun it away, but not before Azarion heard. His answering laughter was part chortle, part snort. “That depends on whom you ask, Agacin. The best way to know is to find out for yourself.” He punctuated his remark by nuzzling the underside of her jaw, planting a soft kiss there that made gooseflesh rise along her shoulders and arms.
She tilted her head, exposing more of her neck and the hollow of her throat to his caresses. Her hands busied themselves with shoving aside bits of his clothing, pushing his tunic up to expose his sides and back. His skin was hot beneath her palms, his muscular back flexing at her touch, skin twitching when her fingers glided over a ticklish spot along his ribs.
They exchanged numerous kisses, each one longer, deeper, more intense than the last until Gilene thought her heart would beat out of her chest. She stroked Azarion’s arms, mapping a path over his back and shoulders, past the stitched wound inflicted by Karsas’s horse, down the dip of his spine to his buttocks. His hips thrust forward in reaction to her grip, and he gasped in her ear.
She echoed the sound when his hand burrowed under her skirts to stroke every expanse of skin he could reach. “Too many clothes,” he muttered.
Gilene heartily agreed and set to untying the laces that held his tunic closed at the neck. Azarion helped her, rising to shrug out of the garment before tossing it to the side. Bared to the waist, he knelt before her, bathed in moonlight. “Your turn,” he said softly.
She sat up and pulled off her own tunic, along with her trousers. Her shoes joined the growing heap of clothing. He had seen her nude before, once as she bathed, another while she changed clothes. The burn scars she wore as souvenirs from her fire summoning weren’t secrets to him. Even if they were, Gilene refused to hide behind her hands or her braids. Those scars were earned through tribulation and testaments to her will to survive, to offer mercy, and, in some small way, to throw the Empire’s cruelty back in its face. She wasn’t proud of the scars so much as she wasn’t ashamed of them. They were simply part of who she was.
Azarion’s eyes gleamed in the shadows, a dichotomy of bright and dark that obscured any emotion revealed there, but she heard it in his voice. “Agna blessed you with more than fire. I’ve never beheld a more beautiful woman.”
The way he looked at her now only validated that assertion, for Gilene of Beroe was neither beautiful nor ugly, only an ordinary woman with an extraordinary power that had been her bane since the day it manifested. Azarion gazed at her as if she were the sun.
If anyone was Agna-blessed with physical beauty, it was him. Even when she thought of him as her enemy and wished down a gruesome fate on his head, a small part of her still recognized his allure even if her hatred of him made her immune to it.
She opened her arms. “I’m cold.”
He moved with startling speed, wrapping her in his arms and tumbling them both to the pallet. Gilene laughed and kissed him. In no time he was as naked as she, huddled under the blankets, skin to skin. She touched him everywhere she could reach, stroking every plane and angle, bulge of muscle, and the stiff length of his cock where it pressed the inside of her thigh. He thrust into her hand, her name a drawn-out groan on his lips.
He, in turn, coaxed out gentle gasps and pleas for more of his touch as he caressed her breasts, suckled their tips into his mouth, and tracked a path with his lips that followed his hands from her throat and across her belly, pausing at every sensitive spot that made her shiver in his arms. He lingered at her thighs, and Gilene held her breath, both curious and apprehensive at this unfamiliar manner of lovemaking.
Azarion raised his head to meet her eyes. “Are you afraid? I’ll stop.”
She was anxious, but only because no lover had done this to her before. She wasn’t afraid, not of this man’s attentions or the exquisite way he played her body until every nerve thrummed and sizzled under her skin.
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Just unversed in this.”
He smiled, his irises as dark as his pupils. “What I’m about to do doesn’t require your skill, Gilene, only mine. This is for you to enjoy and for me to enjoy with you.”
With that, he set to proving his words, his mouth and tongue a sweet torture that had Gilene lifting her hips and gripping Azarion’s head as she panted his name on shallow breaths while she begged him to stop and then begged him to continue. The knot of pleasure fanning hot and bright in her belly spooled out with each caress like a thread from a ball of string, growing ever more taut until it snapped. Gilene’s back arched under the force of her climax, and the guttural noises she made didn’t sound human in her ears. Her knees clapped hard against Azarion’s shoulders as she rode him through a tide of sensation that turned the stars blurry.
Azarion rose above her, a long, broad shadow that blocked out the sky. “Gilene.”
Her name, only that, uttered in the tones of a temple worshipper. Gilene curved her legs over his back and twined her arms around his neck. “You are mine,” she said in a ragged voice. “I am yours.”
He sank into her with a sigh, his thrust deep. She gasped at the feel of him slowly filling her, his body heavy as hers stretched to accommodate his girth. Every muscle, inside and out, clenched against his partial withdrawal, and he shuddered in her arms.
Gilene didn’t count the number of thrusts this time or turn her mind away from the moment. Instead, she reveled in it and willingly gave up her body and her heart to the man who made love to her under the open sky of the Stara Dragana.
He came inside her with a harsh moan and a shiver that racked him from head to foot. Gilene held him close, savoring the heat of his orgasm, the way his muscles flexed and his back went rigid before he settled on her, skin slippery with sweat, breath hard and uneven in her ear.
They lay entwined, with the blankets twisted around them, binding them close. Azarion hooked an arm under Gilene’s hip and rolled them both to their sides. His mouth looked lush in the moonlight, swollen from her enthusiastic kisses and his pleasuring of her body. Satisfaction warred with anticipation in his gaze. “Unless you say otherwise, there’ll be no sleep for either of us tonight,” he said.
She grinned and traced a meandering line across his collarbones, stopping for a moment to paint an invisible swirl in the hollow of his throat. “Is that a promise or a threat?” she teased.
“What do you want it to be?”
Gilene pretended to consider the options for a moment. “You always keep your promises, so a promise then.”
A shadow passed through the depths of his eyes. “There are promises I wish I’d never made.” His voice was as grim as his expression had suddenly grown.
She knew to what he alluded. He had promised he’d return her to Beroe, and her belief in him, slow to grow, didn’t waver now. Her own sense of loyalty, however, did, and that scared her. He had offered his heart to her, and Gilene knew Azarion well enough by now to understand he didn’t make such a momentous declaration as a platitude. It was a gift beyond price, one she would hold close when she returned to the capital in the spring. One that tested her resolve to return at all.