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contained. It was always like this between them, a struggle of wills, a battle with restraint.
    “We have very little time.” In a swift motion, he pulled the shift over her head, pushed her back on the blankets, and parted her legs with his knee. All the while, his lips were intent on hers, drinking her breath and filling her mouth with the taste of him, as if he knew she needed the strokes of his tongue to survive.
    She slid her hands under his shirt and ran them over the contours of his familiar body. He was tall and powerful, but not bulky with the pretentious extravagance of muscle built for show. Instead, his neck, back and arms were strong from pulling his deck through the Barren Flats. His legs were lithe from jumping and running in the dead water. Her fingers tripped over the scars on his chest. No one knew those scars as well as she did, because some of those were her fault too, and always a stark reminder she had almost lost him once.
    “It's been too long,” he mumbled apologetically while he fumbled with his breeches’ ties. “A fortnight. Wicked goddess, I thought I was ailing.”
    She knew the thirst and suffered it willingly because the emptiness of their separation, terrible as it was, was better than giving him up. Theirs was an unusual bond, tried and tested, as demanding as a twin stone trance and as fundamental to her existence as breathing air. She didn't try to understand it, not anymore. Her wiser's mind was at a loss to comprehend her heart's mysteries. The lust she couldn't explain either, so she acknowledged it in the only way she could, granting him berth.
    He didn't bother with the rest of his clothes. He came into her firmly, claiming occupancy of every space he bore in her body's depths. But his hands were tender when they traced the bruise on her forehead, when they spanned her waist and cupped her breasts with a connoisseur's delicacy. The black and green eyes beheld her as if she was a hard-earned prize. She should have been afraid, knowing full well from her years at the Guild that done roughly the sport could cause her injury, but she was not scared.
    Her body was the gift she gave him freely. Raised to serve without a mind for the self, it was no small privilege to her. In the ways of the Guild, she hadn't known parents or kin. She had only known the obligations of her leases, the services required by her masters and mistresses, and the use of her body for others’ pleasure, a bothersome, most often harmless chore which was a part of her duties. Then she had met Kael and everything changed. She thought she knew why.
    “May I?” she whispered in his ear.
    “Aye, Sariah. Always when we're together like this.”
    She pressed her hands against his back. His emotions burned through her palms, reaching out to stroke her mind like the clearest of stone tales. Need. Lust. Affection . It had been the flood of his affection that had percolated through the drought of duty and allowed her scorched soul to discover her own reservoir. It was that affection that touched her now, transforming something common and lurid into a gratifying sharing for the generous purpose of each others’ free and willful pleasure.
    The clips on his pulling harness jiggled at his pace. His weave chafed against her skin. She could feel the struggle in him, the lust advancing on the affection, not suppressing it, not exactly, but teaming up with his need to burst his restraint.
    “When I saw you there—” He couldn't finish.
    “I'm here now.” She smiled at her own uncharitable wickedness, relishing the power that a thrust and a twist granted her body over his, appreciating her own boldness, the shivers that shot through him, the pleasures she unleashed.
    His eyes narrowed to slits. The furious grin turned up at the corners of his mouth. He pinned her wrists in his hand, cutting her connection to his emotions. It prevented her from outright witnessing the barbaric surge of the beast she cherished. The inevitable