“You wanted me,” he murmured, and felt that same soul-deep thrill as when he had heard her say it.

“I didn’t mean it,” she whispered.

“Lies.”

“It was just sex. You didn’t even like it!” she said suddenly, renewing her shrugging shoves. “You acted like you were doing your damn taxes the whole time!”

He didn’t know every word she used, but he thought he caught her meaning. He grinned and nipped at her. “A Sheulek is the master of his clay, Soft-Skin, but mine wanted very much to finish too soon. Be reassured, I liked it.” He reached for his belt, nuzzling at her throat with long, slow strokes of his snout. Her scent filled his senses, became a taste, became a throb in his very heart. “Shall I prove it?”

“No,” she said, but she didn’t duck demurely away. She held onto her cup of tea as the color rose in her flat face and tried to pretend there was no hand kneading at her hip, no snout rubbing up and down the length of her throat. She even tried to drink.

“Your hand is shaking,” he observed, and moved his own under her shirt to lie upon her bare belly.

She thumped down her cup and tried to scoot away, but she didn’t have the leverage and fell back instead. He dropped comfortably atop her at once, nipping at her jaw and purring while he eased her stubborn legs slowly open around his. And they did open, but not without a lot of kneading and nibbling.

“Damn it!” she shouted, smacking her fist against his shoulder even as her thighs parted. “I asked you what you wanted, I asked you, and you said it wasn’t sex!”

“It wasn’t,” he grunted, bracing himself on one arm so that he could sweep his belt off and let his cock extrude in an immediate and insistent rush. “It was marriage. The sex would just be sex without it. Not that there’s anything wrong with the sex,” he added, now struggling with the loin-plate, which had caught in his straining breeches. “If you’re worried that you don’t please me, you can be easy, Soft-Skin. Your body was made to pleasure mine.”

“What a huge relief,” said Amber in a curiously flat voice, each word carved and set separate from the others.

She really had been worried. He paused to stroke his snout along her throat again, then resumed the battle with his loin-plate and won. “I will burn with you, my wife. And you will burn with me.”

“You’re driving me crazy,” she said, arching her hips to help him tug her breeches down. “You know we’re not really married.”

He stopped. It wasn’t easy. His man’s shaft pulsed in his fist where he gripped it for the guidance it needed to find its way inside her in this bizarre position, but he was the master of his clay and he ignored its urgings. “I didn’t mark that,” he said, a bit breathlessly, but with admirable self-control. “What did you say?”

She looked up at him, her brows furrowed, and bit at her lower lip with her small, blunt teeth. She was also breathless and flushed as well, and she looked down the hills and valleys of her body at the cock in his fist with an expression that was at once profoundly annoyed and entirely defeated.

“We’ll fight about it later,” she promised, reaching between them to take what he offered and guide him home.

A true master of his clay would have firmly removed himself and thrashed this out. Human speech did not change from one tone to another; he knew what she’d said and he knew he should not allow it to lie spoken.

But her body took him in, hot and wet and gently squeezing at the whole of his length in ways miraculous to feel, and he was no Sheulek then, only a man willing to trade every future argument in all the world just to stay right here right now. So he let it go, and whatever twinge of conscience he may have felt in that release was swiftly forgotten in the pursuit of the one that eventually followed. It was not his proudest moment, but he would just have to pray about that. Later.

7

Maybe it was true. Maybe they really were married. Amber had never actually befriended a married couple and didn’t have much personal experience with the married lifestyle, but Meoraq certainly seemed to fit the stereotype, even though he’d never been to the movies. He grunted when she talked to him, insisted he knew where they were going even after admitting he’d never been here before, coddled her unnecessarily when he decided her poor little girl-body couldn’t keep up, and then ignored her on the one occasion she asked to stop.

She asked for two reasons. First, the rain that had been drumming down on their heads for the better part of three days had undergone a series of disturbing changes in a short stretch of time. This morning, although drizzly, the wind had been relatively warm; next, it had stopped raining for maybe an hour, but gone very dark and very cold; about an hour ago, the sky had taken on a vaguely grainy appearance, almost like she was seeing an old movie, and it had started raining again, the drops like nails falling, not on her head, but straight into her face. Since then, it had been getting darker almost by the minute, even though she knew they had hours to go before nightfall. The lightning, which to be fair had never really stopped, picked up in frequency and intensity, until it began to feel like they were filming that grainy old movie in front of a huge crowd of paparazzi. And now there was thunder—not the low rolls and grumbles that had been following them for days from the distance, but the kind that she could feel shivering in her bones.

The second reason, the selling point as it were, was that quite unexpectedly, they were presented with a place to go. The hill they’d been climbing hadn’t been the latest in a series of suspiciously regular, short, steep hills. It was just a hill, like any of a number of hills that had been growing the closer they came to the mountains. It wasn’t particularly steep, but it was very slick and muddy, thanks to days of rain and the wind blowing directly in her eyes. The rocks that jutted out of its thorny, mud-slick sides weren’t the squarish chunks of eroded walls that had fallen in and been covered over; they were obviously just rocks. There had been, in short, no clues whatsoever that this was waiting on the other side.

They didn’t look like ruins. There were no skyscrapers, no buildings at all more than a few stories tall, just a few metal towers like antennae around the perimeter, and they were still standing. The roads were all flat—no overpasses pancaked to the ground—and they were all extremely well-lit. It didn’t appear to be the protruding tip of an overgrown metropolis, but something small and complete, built to fill exactly the place it occupied. From here, so far away, any damage that time and neglect had invariably caused was hidden. The rain gave the illusion of movement to the lights that burned in every building and along every street. The wind could have easily been the sound of all the traffic Amber couldn’t see. And looking at it, Amber suddenly understood how people could believe in Scott’s starship. Looking at it, even Amber had a moment, however dim and fleeting, when she wondered if one of their old ships might really be able to fly after all.

Of course, she didn’t say that. All she said was, “Let’s go down there and look around until this blows over, what do you say?” and he said, “No.”

And wasn’t that what marriage was all about? Communication and compromise. Jerk.

“Hey,” she said, and then had to shout it because of the wind and the fact that he was still walking. “Hey!”

She knew he heard her because his spines flattened, but he kept going.

“Hey!” That wasn’t working. Amber gave in and ran after him. “Can we please stop?”

“No,” said Meoraq.

The sky grew noticeably darker.

“Nicci and the others might be down there!”

“They aren’t.”

“You don’t know that!” She grabbed at his pack, since she knew he’d just shake her off his sleeve, with far more success than she’d expected. He skidded, arms flailing, but quickly recovered his balance and before Amber could think to let go of his pack, he’d shrugged out of it and swung around. Lightning snapped across the sky, throwing her shadow in stark relief over his chest.