marveled at how intense he looked. To anyone else, he would’ve looked angry. But I knew that expression. I knew he was processing what had happened, I knew he wanted more, I knew he was trying to work out how he could get more.
As for me, I felt surprisingly relaxed, given that the Dakkari male I’d loved and loathed most of my life had just brought me to an amazing orgasm. I was—surprisingly—calm about it.
“Kiran,” I said softly, my voice hoarse from my cries.
His name seemed to shake him from his thoughts. I still felt him hard and throbbing at my back, though his hips had stopped rolling and grinding. My torso was twisted towards him. His tail was still wrapped around my thigh. His hand was still curled around my throat.
When his head dipped, a jolt of panic went through me, erasing whatever calm I’d felt. Right when I felt his breath drift across my lips, I shifted my head, turning it away. His lips landed on my cheek instead.
Kiran made a rough sound in the back of his throat but kept his lips at my cheek, brushing a kiss over it. I didn’t want him to kiss me. Not the way he’d been about to. Because I’d kissed him like that once. And the beginning of it had been wonderful. But the end of it had left me in pieces with a shattered heart.
If he kissed me again, it would blur the lines of what this was. I couldn’t risk that.
When Kiran pulled away from my cheek, his eyes darted back and forth between mine, a slight frown on his features. But he didn’t comment on what I’d just done. Or ask me why.
Though it couldn’t yet be dawn, I heard footsteps approach the voliki from the outside, crunching over the earth as if a thin layer of ice was upon it. The mornings were getting colder.
“Vorakkar,” came the voice.
“Lysi?” Kiran grunted.
A darukkar ducked his head inside the tent but I didn’t flinch. Kiran kept my eyes, as if testing to see if I would turn away, prevent myself from being seen in his bed. My body was covered but the darukkar saw me, nonetheless. Saw Kiran hovering over me.
The darukkar inclined his head in respect.
“The Vorakkar of Rath Rowin is preparing to leave,” the warrior announced. “Will you be seeing him off?”
“Lysi,” Kiran rasped. “I will be there.”
My breath hitched when, all at once, his touch was gone from me. His hand uncurled from my throat, his other hand pulled away from where it’d been resting above my sex, his tail uncurled from my thigh.
My body felt cold when he left the bed. As he stood, I saw his cock and my eyes went wide. It was flushed a dark color and pulsing against his abdomen. So hard and rigid that it looked painful.
The darukkar was already gone when I looked back to the entrance. Hesitantly, I sat up in the bed, the lingerings of my own orgasm still pulsing gently through my sex. I watched as Kiran went to a basin of clean water perched on one of his taller chests. He leaned over it, splashing his face, leaning his arms across the basin as water dripped from his face.
I heard his deep breaths. Was he trying to…get control of himself?
He stayed there for a brief moment before he straightened and dried his face. Snagging a pair of trews from one of the chests, he dragged them on though he had trouble tying the laces with his massive erection.
Kiran was watching me as he finished dressing. The tension in the voliki was strange. It was quiet but charged, though there was no strain to it.
It held the edges of a promise. Like Kiran intended to return and finish what we’d started. Whether that was the kiss I hadn’t accepted or if he wanted me to finish him, I didn’t know.
“I have a gift for you,” came his words.
I blinked in confusion. A gift? That wasn’t what I’d expected.
Though my curiosity was piqued.
I’d never been one who needed material things. I owned a small chestful of clothes that were practical and durable. I had one brush for my hair, which I honestly felt sorry for more times than not. I had my mother’s pendant, which was my most prized possession, and my healer’s kit, which my father had given me when the mokkira had taken me on as his apprentice.
But I didn’t need anything else. I didn’t