my voice hitch at the memory of him lying there, bleeding from everywhere.
Anyan left his one hand on the small of my back while the other knotted my hair in a rough queue, tugging my head back so that my face came away from his chest and I was looking into his eyes.
I gotta admit, it took everything I had not to moan. That hair-pulling thing he did really peeled my bananas.
“You saved my life again, little girl,” he said quietly, his eyes searching my face as if he were lost and I was his map. In response, my own throat worked uselessly, gone dry and tight from a combination of nerves and lust.
“Nothing you haven’t done for me quite a few times,” I only just managed to croak out in a voice about four octaves lower than usual. I hoped the barghest found my sudden plunge into man-voice as sexy as I found his hair pulling, but I wasn’t about to bet on it.
As if he knew what I was thinking, Anyan’s reply was to pull my hair again. Only this time he tugged outward, rather than up, moving my chest away from his. I was still astride him, our hips flush, but he’d pulled my shoulders back so that my upper body was bared to him. Cradling my neck and the back of my head in his large hand, his eyes swept over said upper body, which I quickly remembered was very naked except for the two wings of crow-black hair that, having escaped his grip, fell alongside either side of my face and down over my breasts.
Thank the gods I currently resemble Cousin It, I thought, my face reddening under his scrutiny as that long, crooked nose twitched once, hard.
He ignored my embarrassment, stroking the hand that had been at the small of my back across my buttock and the outside of my thigh, raising goose bumps all over my flesh. His nose twitched again and lord and lady did I want to nibble the tip…
“You’ve hurt yourself, already,” he said as he harrumphed, his iron-gray eyes taking in the multitude of cuts and bruises I’d accumulated near the Sow.
I was about to spill the beans about my sort-of possession, and had even opened my mouth to do so. But all that came out was an only partially stifled groan as Anyan raised his free hand to run it down my cheek, to my neck, and down each arm, trailing healing warmth. His power pushed through my body—warm and strong—and I ground down on another groan. I also may have ground down on the barghest a bit, but under the circumstances, who could blame me?
Anyan, for his part, didn’t seem to mind.
Instead, he grunted softly, his gray eyes spearing my black ones as his generous mouth pursed in concentration. At the same time, his hand on my hip clutched convulsively, squeezing nearly hard enough to hurt before his grip relaxed. Then that same hand reached up ever so slowly to insert itself under the hair on the left side of my face. Anyan spread his fingers, trailing his thumb across my jaw as he used his hand to push my concealing hair back away from the left side of my body. Without looking down, he reached across me to do the same thing to the hair covering my right side, leaving me naked before him. But he still kept his eyes on mine.
“Is this all right?” he asked, his voice husky with desire.
“All right?” I asked, wondering how on earth he could think it was anything but. Then I saw the concern on his face, like he was genuinely afraid I was about to say no. I immediately put his worries to bed.
“Of course it’s all right,” I said. “Unexpected, but all right.”
“Unexpected?” he asked, his turn to make me feel nervous.
I paused, unsure how to answer him. “You’re Anyan,” I replied, finally. A response that made perfect sense to me.
The barghest looked at me like I was speaking Flemish, but he started talking anyway. His hands were still where they rested on my forearms, but his eyes swept over me possessively.
“You lay there for weeks,” he said, “and there was nothing I could do. I thought you were going to die, and there was nothing I could do. You were so small and still, and there was nothing I could do.”
With that, he stopped talking, and his eyes glistened suspiciously. The thought of Anyan tearing up,