And yet here she was, and her body and mind were opening to Garret, abandoning all caution, renewing the intense emotional connection she had wanted so badly to extinguish. She had forgotten what it could be like, how quickly one could lose control with the right partner. And she had never taken blood during what humans called “making love.”
But now, when Garret touched her bare skin, she felt his excitement as well as her own. She was being carried away by a current she couldn’t stop, delirious with feelings and sensations that superseded mere arousal or the sensual stimulation that so often accompanied feeding.
She wanted him. She wanted to possess him, to be possessed by him, to join in complete physical union. What happened afterward...
No. The unraveling thread of her sanity begged her to remember what she could lose, what she could do to Garret. Once she stepped onto this path, she might never find her way back again. A single reckless act might finally shatter any hope she had of closing the gate against Garret Fox.
But sanity had no hope when Garret’s fingertips discovered her nipples and teased them into firm, sensitive peaks. His blood soothed her tongue. Erotic images shaped in Garret’s mind slipped into hers as his fingers slid down her belly and to the waistband of her pants. He unfastened the fly and dipped inside. Callous skin touched tender flesh. She shifted her body, urging him to explore as she continued to drink.
Garret stroked her with one hand while his other worked at the buttons of her shirt. Cool air washed over her breasts, and she straightened as his emotions told her what he wanted to do. Acting entirely on instinct, she sealed the bite and leaned back, giving him complete access to her breasts.
When he took her nipple into his mouth, she moaned at the incredible sensation of his reaction as well as her own, desire doubled and redoubled as he suckled her hungrily. His other hand found its way between her thighs and grazed the tight little bud where pleasure was almost like pain. She gasped, and he gasped with her.
Somehow her pants came off and she was straddling his thighs, rubbing against the taut bulge of his erection. She felt herself floating, guided to the ground by strong arms, lying on her back with her thighs parted.
The touch of his lips and tongue in her most sensitive place drew a muffled cry from her throat, quieted only by some distant sense of self-preservation. She seemed to recall something like this happening long ago, but the past was as unreal as the future. Garret knew exactly where and how to use his tongue to tickle and tease, drawing out each caress with rapid flicks and long strokes.
She arched her back, begging him with her entire body. He turned his attention to her breasts and continued his ministrations while she felt for the waistband of his pants.
“Garret,” she whispered, filling her mind with the emotional images of taking and being taken. His aura erupted around him, emitting tongues of flame that strained toward her. Her own aura flared for the first time, a blue-tinged amethyst radiance that opened to accept the thrust of his fire as her body was ready to accept his.
Garret was more than ready. Her hand found him, large and very hard. The intensity of his need—hers—multiplied a thousandfold.
For a moment there was nothing between them. Nothing at all—no boundaries, no barriers, no walls. He eased himself over her, gazing down at her with his weight braced on his hands and his hips between her thighs.
Again she saw herself through his eyes, less a distinctive shape than an aura enclosing the interwoven strands of her emotions. But the image began to take form, and she glimpsed her face: eyes closed, lips parted, hair wild and tangled about her shoulders.
And beautiful. Beautiful in a way she could never have imagined. It was the face she’d seen in mirrors before her exile and sometimes in the imperfect reflection of water, but bathed in a gentle light that softened the blue of her aura to a silky violet. Violet water, smooth and untroubled.
Garret caught her lips with his, exploring the terrain of her mouth, coaxing her to open for him. With a low moan of surrender, she parted her lips, and his tongue found its way inside. He curled it around hers, sucked, kissed her more deeply than she would have believed possible.
Violet transformed to deep, hot purple. She pushed her fingers into his hair and bit lightly into his lower lip, drawing blood. He adjusted his position so that a single thrust would make them one at last.
Something remarkable happened then. Feelings she barely recognized bloomed in her mind, so astonishing that, at first, she didn’t know how to name them.
But not all the memories were dead. There were no times, no places...only the joy and happiness and exhilaration of the single thing she had sought and found and lost before the change. The thing she wanted again, here within her grasp.
Everything else vanished. There was no more need to struggle, to aspire to anything greater than this. Her emotions swelled to obliterate all other desires. She would float in this perfect world forever, in endless bliss and exultation.
She had found what the humans called heaven.
But there was a bubble of disturbance in the flawless pool of eternal rapture, a devil in this paradise. It picked and prodded at her, mocking her with warnings she could not quite shut out.
There is no heaven for Opiri.
“Artemis,” Garret said. His voice was hoarse and urgent, his mind spinning on the edge of euphoria. She knew that all she had to do was speak a single word, and every other voice would be silenced.
So would her dreams and hopes for her people. She would no longer care about them, because she had what she wanted, all she would ever want.
Forget them, she thought. You owe them nothing.
But her past would not be silent. They are your people, it said. How can you abandon them for a human?
“No,” she whispered.
All we fought for destroyed, because of you. Because of him.
Garret’s face came into sharp focus, blazing with elation. He could destroy nothing, but he could give her—
“Roxana?” he murmured.
She saw her own face again...saw it change, felt Garret’s bewilderment and her own turmoil as that other face slipped over hers like a mask. Eyes too dark, hair too long, features too...
“No,” Garret said hoarsely. The stranger vanished, but the sheer weight of his emotions—regret, grief, confusion—bore down on her with such force that she thought they would crush her. Illusion shattered. Shock worked as no careful discipline could have done.
She pushed him out—out of her heart, her mind, her very being—and slammed the wall down between them, severing all emotional ties, all the feelings that had tempted her into relinquishing the new way she had sought to win for her own kind.
The feelings that had nearly made her surrender to a human who saw another face even as he prepared to possess her.
Artemis scrambled to her feet, snatching up her pants as she bolted away from him. Garret’s face was drained of color, and though she could no longer sense his emotions, she saw the stark pain in his eyes.
For her, or for himself?
Roxana.
Somehow Artemis dressed, gathered her weapons and fled without looking at him again. She ran recklessly toward the border of the woods, as if by simply putting physical distance between herself and Garret she might undo the past hour and forget.
But she knew it was not possible to regain that safe sense of living in a fortress that could never be breached. There was no undoing this. The gate had closed, but she knew that she could never take Garret’s blood again. It wasn’t simply a matter of becoming dependent. Death would be preferable