Her hair? He’d been expecting her wristlet, as dumaq women were themselves wont to offer. The intimacy of her choice briefly staggered him. He shook that off too, then gathered up a fistful of her mane as she began her formal protests, and cut it off. “You are permitted to fight,” he told her, but she was already slapping at him, so their mating rituals must not be too dissimilar.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Meoraq stabbed the blade deep into the ground, still piercing the hair—to hell with the tent; he could get another tent—and swept back the blanket. His belly was hot and every nerve felt new and alive in a way he had never known. He had never been so aware of his own body or of a woman’s. And she was still struggling, still pretending not to understand, but when he slipped his hand through her tangled hair and behind her head, her shouting, swearing protests stopped and she grew very quiet as he leaned close to scrape his chin along her throat, filling his senses with the fullness of her scent.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

His throat was too tight to answer, but hers was soft. He nuzzled his way up to the underside of her jaw and scraped his chin slowly down again, breathing her in. The heat in his belly had become pain, a second pulse like a hammer from within. His hand dropped, feeling along the front of her shirt and plucking once at the alien fastens he found there. “Take this off,” he murmured. “I don’t want to rip it.”

Obedience was not immediate—it never was with Amber—but at last he felt her shift and heard the rustle of fabric as she opened her clothing. At once he put his bare hand between her breasts and, as he tasted his way from her throat to her naked shoulder, he moved that hand slowly up and down, up and down, a little further on each gentle stroke, until he had slipped beneath the loose waist of her breeches.

She grabbed at his wrist, her skin smacking audibly against his scales. The next sound he heard was the soft thump of her back hitting her bedroll and she was flat beneath him and he was above her and his hand was there, stroking hard up and down through the small patch of coarse hair that grew above her opening. Her shoulder was soft and warm and tasted of smoke and rain and Amber as he gently bit, not piercing, not yet, but wanting to, needing to. Was she fighting again? It was hard to tell. One of her hands was on his chest, pushing; the other, at his back with her blunt claws prying at his scales. When he looked at her, her eyes were shut and her neck irresistibly arched, so he bit it and then scraped his chin hard where he had bitten, until he could taste her in every breath.

He didn’t want to wait anymore and neither did she. The edges of her slit were oddly plump and human-soft, but already open to his lightest touch; she was very aroused. Careful exploration with his fingers (she clutched at his wrist again, but did not move him and did not really appear to be trying) proved she was deep and pliant and that was all he needed to know. He burrowed his free arm beneath her, pulling her up off the mat, and yanked her breeches down until they tangled with her boots. He unfastened his loin-plate eagerly and then, with the last of his reason, he paused and leaned back so that she could see him.

His cock had flexed free the instant it had liberty to do so and now stood primed and ready before him. Amber froze, as he had suspected she might, to stare at it. Her expression was strange, difficult to read.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Meoraq awkwardly. He hated to break the mood, but some surprises were pleasant while mating and some were not. Human males were small and limp and fleshy. This had to be a shock. Far better to break the mood than to stab her with what she might perceive as a weapon.

“This is my masculine member,” he explained, and pointed. “It will go here.” When she did not correct him, he gripped her thigh and said, “Open to me.”

She stiffened, staring intently and in tight-lipped silence into his eyes, but then she obeyed without allowing him even a token show of force, submitting as one already in his possession.

He resisted the urge that swept him then, instead touching the soft skin below her brilliant eyes. “You are mine,” he said. It was early for these words. They were meant to come after, when conquest was done, but conquest, it seemed, already was.

She put her hand on his cock—a hesitant touch at first, one that grew firm as she closed him in her fist. She looked down, watching with a faintly furrowed brow as her fingers moved over him, growing slick with the oils she brought from him so easily.

Few women had ever done this for him and no woman had ever looked as she did now, neither angry nor afraid but still fierce when she met his eyes. No woman had ever said the words she said next, in a voice like the prairie wind, that shook but still blew strong, “I want you.”

She frowned when she said it, as if confused by her own meaning. He understood very well how that could be. Sheul’s voice had not been clear to him in all this time, and he had been trained to hear it.

“I want you,” he told her. These words had no place in the ritual at all, but they felt right in the air. He said it again as she lay down before him and again as he rose over her. He entered with those words and the proof came at once with the first rush of Sheul’s blessing, filling her womb before a single stroke had been made.

He’d never mated this way before—lying down and belly-to-belly—but it felt new and exciting and perhaps just a bit deviant. Covering her in this fashion, he was all that she must feel. His flesh, his weight, were all her sensations. Looking down, he saw her looking up and knew he was all that she could see. This was the conquest all others had been imitating.

Hers was not a dumaq body. There was no resistance, no clenched sleeve of muscle to battle through, but only a soft, tight well that gripped the whole of his length at once. He was free to withdraw and stab again, thrusting with the whole of his body and crushing her possessively beneath him as he made himself drunk on this strange, enthralling sensation. He was vigorous in his passion, perhaps too much so, his weight driving her back and forth across the ground, but she did not protest. Indeed, she fell back, relinquishing all control to him with a hoarse, human cry. Her little claws gripped at his back, their points prying at his scales as she bucked up at him. Not so fragile, then.

“Sheul, O great Father, make this woman worthy,” he groaned. “Let her soul be pierced and made open. Let her womb be warmed to receive my spirit—” And never mind it would be for the second time. The important thing was that he’d remembered to say it at all. “—and Yours. If it be Your will, raise her up with Your blessing and give her the gift of new life.”

She cried out suddenly, and at the same time, he felt her body seize on him in the grip of her own blessing. In the next moment, he shared it.

The second explosion was greater, which was so seldom the case. He felt it pour out of him, unbearably bright and alive. He could not pray aloud in its grip, but the name of Sheul and all his ancestral fathers burned in his mind until it was done and he slumped heavily atop her. He felt he could keep going—he wanted to try, anyway—but three was the sacred number of creation and belonged to Sheul alone. He would not sour this gift with blasphemous lust.

“Now you have become completely mine,” he said. “Let Sheul who has made you for me witness as I take you from your father’s House and give you the headship of my own. I take you in, Soft-Skin, to be Uyane under me for all the days that remain to you. Hear me and know that you are mine.”

She spoke no word of submission, shyly or joyfully or any way at all, still lost in her own fires. He nuzzled at her, scraping the end of his snout hard across her skin to fill his senses with her scent and taste, and, every nerve alive with Amber, bit deeply into her shoulder. She yelped and struck him fetchingly as he drowsed, licking at the wound to stop it bleeding and thinking of what a fine scar it would make.