His tone told her that he still hadn’t forgiven her that betrayal.
“Well, no more distance, Rune. We have to start the Mating ritual soon. For everybody’s sake.”
He shot her a look as she hurried to keep up with him and when his gaze landed on her, nerves fluttered in the pit of her stomach.
An inner voice laughed at her. Trying to convince herself that she was ready for sex with Rune only for the greater good wasn’t working. No, the truth was, when she was around him, her entire body hungered. She remembered the feel of his body sliding into hers. She wanted to touch him again. To feel the heat of him surrounding her.
On this crazed race across the countryside, the one stable point in her universe had been his solid, muscular presence. He held her and she felt safe. He touched her and the cold inside her drained away, replaced by a relentless need that only he could ease.
She quivered for a release that seemed to be hovering just out of reach. She looked at him and felt heat pool at her center. She touched him and her nerve endings sizzled. Her magic, her body—there was no distinction here. She wouldn’t care for him. Wouldn’t love him. But if they were fated to mate, would it really be so bad if she enjoyed herself in the process?
She pushed those thoughts aside for the moment, though, and told him, “There’s no point in waiting for the memories to show up. We don’t have time to waste, right? Well, I can try an unblocking spell and maybe hurry them up a little.”
He nodded. “Good idea. We should be able to find what we need here.”
As they drew nearer to the village, Teresa wondered if he was right. The place was hardly more than a spot in the road, really. A dozen or so buildings clustered together in the middle of nowhere.
“Then what?” she asked. “Where do we go from here?”
“There are caves near here,” he said, swatting at her bird as the small creature made a dive at his head. “I’ve stayed there before.”
“Caves. Great.” Mother Nature’s version of a shack. Teresa whistled for Chico and he flew to her shoulder, where he bobbed up and down in time with her steps. She lifted one hand to gently stroke his sleek feathers and immediately felt comforted. Her home, her life, her friend were all gone. Chico and this stranger who would be her mate were all she had left.
Except for the grandmother who probably, thanks to her gift of visions, already knew they were headed her way. Teresa suddenly needed to see her abuela. She felt a desperate urge to hear the older woman’s steady, nononsense advice. And she needed to feel that connection to the past that she knew before she walked into a future that was looking more and more terrifying.
He stopped suddenly and asked, “Will you trust me, Teresa?”
“What?”
“Trust. Can you trust me?”
“I have so far, haven’t I?” She wanted to trust him, but there was still so much she didn’t know. Prepared or not, she had gaping holes in her knowledge and handing her fate over to an immortal wasn’t something easily done.
He grabbed her arms and pulled her in close to him. The color of his gray eyes shifted from pewter to steel to the soft gray of storm clouds, all while he looked into her eyes, as if searching for something that he couldn’t find.
“Fine,” she admitted. “It’s hard. I don’t know you, Rune. You say you’ve always been with me, but I’ve never seen you, so why should I—”
“You were ten,” he said, his gaze boring into hers. “At your abuela’s. You wandered into the desert and stirred a rattlesnake nest to life.”
She remembered. That frozen sense of terror came back to her and it was as if all the years between then and now had fallen away. “There were dozens of them.” She shook her head and swallowed. “The rattling, the hissing, it was so loud and—”
“And a coyote saved you,” he said. “It jumped into the nest so you could run.”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling now. “I don’t know where it came from—”
“The coyote was me, Teresa,” he said. “I used magic, drawing on yours and my own to create the illusion of a coyote.”
“You were there?” She looked into his eyes and saw the truth staring back at her. “You saved me.”