Aydin surged past them. “Run!” he bellowed.
Colwin charged forward, swinging the blade they’d captured to make a path. Aydin had managed to grab a sword, as well, and paced himself to run beside them.
Emma was so horrified at the screams and spurting blood from every direction, she burrowed her face against Colwin’s back and squeezed her eyes closed. She finally opened them again, cautiously, when she realized the sounds of battle were falling behind them. After looking around on either side of them, she finally craned around to look behind them.
It looked like hundreds of centaurs, not dozens, battling outside the entrance to the passage. She realized after a moment that the army that had been behind them must have emerged and joined the battle.
It actually didn’t look like much a battle by that time. The hoonans, finding themselves outnumbered, had broke and run. The centaurs charged after them, cutting them down.
Fear curled in her belly, but in a few moments the trail they were following turned and cut off her view of the battle.
Neither Aydin nor Colwin slowed appreciably even when the trail began to descend and became a hazard by itself and it got worse the further they went until they were sliding more than running. Colwin finally slid down completely on his side. When he did, Emma let go of him, launching herself toward the side of the hill. Colwin skidded to a halt and glance back at her.
“Are you hurt?”
Dazed, Emma managed to push herself upright and studied her hands and knees. “I think so,” she said in a quavering voice.
Colwin made a couple of attempts to climb up to her and ended up sliding further. “Come to me, Emma,” he said finally. “I will catch you.”
After studying him a moment, Emma decided it might be better not to try to stand up. She picked her way carefully down the slope in a crab walk, freezing every time she felt herself slipping.
She was so relieved when she finally reached Colwin she grabbed at him a little frantically. He pulled her closer, holding her while he surveyed the hill. Aydin, who’d fared better than they had, had reached a level area below them. “Is she alright?”
Colwin nodded. “I think so. Scared.”
“Do you want me to climb up and get you, dearling?” Aydin called to her.
She did. She wanted him to pick her up and carry her down. “No,” she said a little weakly. “I can do it.”
She did. She was shaking like a leaf in a strong wind when she managed to scramble down the slope to the trail below, but she managed it without breaking anything or going into a dive and rolling down.
Aydin and Colwin paused to catch their breath and listen to the sounds of battle in the distance.
“Do you think they’ll come after us?” Emma asked after a few moments.
Colwin and Adyin shared a look.
“I think they are more interested in fighting one another,” Aydin said finally, “but we will keep moving. I would like to find a better place to camp before nightfall.”
* * * *
Colwin discovered he couldn’t stop smiling. “She is a wild woman!” he murmured. “Did I tell you that she took this sword? She bit his hand! You have never seen a more surprised centaur!”
Aydin chuckled. “You told me.”
“She told me she loved me.”
Aydin felt his amusement take a nosedive. “Colwin … She thought we would not live to see another day,” he said gruffly.
Colwin glanced at him, frowning. “You are saying she did not mean it?”
Aydin shrugged. “I think she believed it in that moment. You know as well as I do that people say and do things in the heat of battle ….”
Colwin studied him for a long moment. “You did not mean it when you told her you loved her?”
Aydin swallowed a little convulsively. “I meant it. I did not say it, though. A woman wants to hear the words.” He uttered a sigh of disgust. “I did not want to say it because I did not want her to think about it if we died today.”
“She helped us to escape. You think she would have risked so much if she did not care about us?” Colwin asked after a few moments.
“I would like to believe that, but there is no understanding the way a woman’s mind works. She has felt guilty that we were being pursued. It might have been nothing more than that—determination to make sure we did not pay for taking her.”
“You think that she still wants to return to her own world and she will leave us as soon as we return to the village,” Colwin said flatly.
“I do not know. I only know that I would rather not think about it at all,” Aydin said tiredly.
“Lay with her,” Colwin urged him after a few moments. “I am in better shape than you are. I will take first watch.”
Aydin studied him but finally nodded instead of arguing. He thought Colwin was right and, in any case, he was so exhausted himself he thought it just as likely he would fall asleep as Colwin.
* * * *
Emma didn’t realize she’s dozed off until Aydin roused her when he settled beside her. She didn’t have to search for the objective that had been her reason for struggling to stay awake. It surfaced in her mind the moment she roused and she turned over onto her side, burrowing closer to Aydin.
Actually, she’d expected Colwin to be first to sleep. Aydin usually took first watch, but she didn’t particularly care about the order as long as she got what she wanted—needed.
She’d come too close to losing them today for her comfort. A deep need had been churning through her almost from the time they’d been captured by King Dresden’s men, to hold them close and be held by them to assure herself that nothing would happen to them, that she couldn’t lose them. Nothing that incomprehensibly awful could happen.
She nuzzled her face against the center of his chest, dragging in a deep breath and savoring his scent, the warmth of his skin, the reassuring beat of his heart. “Make love to my, Aydin,” she murmured against his skin, nibbling lightly at his flesh with her lips.
The hand he’d settled lightly along her waist tightened. His cock rose between them. Emma felt her lips curl in pleasure.
He settled his cheek on top of her head. “You are too tired and sore, love. Rest.”
Emma tipped her head up and nibbled a trail up his neck. “I need to feel you inside of me, Aydin. Please?”
Aydin had thought he was exhausted, but his cock clearly wasn’t, he thought wryly, and her plea woke the rest of him. It set his heart to pounding. He didn’t think he could’ve ignored it if he’d been half dead. He wasn’t certain if he could please her. He wasn’t sure he would be able to do much more than push his cock inside of her and then sprawl atop her like a dead thing, but he was more than willing to try.
Settling a hand lightly along her jaw, he guided her face upward to match his mouth to hers and kissed her, gently, trying to keep from hurting her poor face worse. Even so, it took no more than the taste of her eagerness on his tongue and the heat of mouth to stir everything inside of him.
He pulled away after a moment, tugging her tunic up. She sat up and pulled it off over her head. He caught her just beneath her breasts and dragged her close enough to capture a pert, pink nipple in his mouth, relishing the feel of her nipple on his tongue, the soft yielding of her breast, and her little sighs of pleasure with equal measure.
Her skin smelled of flowers. He debated for a few moments whether he actually liked that scent when it made it difficult to detect her own sweet scent. He dismissed it as he moved from one breast to the other, building upon his arousal and hers until he began to feel impatient to wedge his flesh inside of her tight, hot passage.
Settling her on the pallet, he stroked her soft skin with his hands and his lips, trying to decide if she was as eager to move on as he was. When she shifted her legs apart, grasped his hand and guided it downward to her nether lips, his doubts fled. She was hot and wet for him. Her restless movements were evidence enough, he thought, but the moisture he felt there begged for possession.
He moved over her, holding himself aloft until she’d opened her legs wide for him and then settled in the cradle of her thighs, guiding his flesh to her sweet spot, the gateway to heaven.
It gave him a glimpse of heaven and hell trying to work his flesh inside of her without risking hurting her, but it was the sweetest torment he’d ever felt. From the moment her flesh began to closer tightly around his, squeezing, he hardly knew from one moment to the next whether he was dying of pleasure or just dying. His heart squeezed as her flesh squeezed his and then began to hammer against his chest wall until felt as if it would explode. Darkness swarmed around him dizzyingly.
He sighed in bliss when he’d sunk as deeply inside of her as he could, when could feel her flesh clamped around his from root to tip. He paused, panting for breath, battling two demons at once—the one to stay just as he was and savor, the other to began to race greedily for the prize offered. He compromised, arching his hips to slowly withdraw as he’d entered her, relishing the almost excruciating pleasure that pounded through him at the movement and then, when he’d almost withdrawn completely, surged inside of her again.
He managed the savoring cadence for a count of ten before he lost his mind, lost his tenuous grip on his patience, lost the determination to savor the pleasure and bring her to the precipice with him. His cock bucked with impatience. Dragging in a shuddering breath, he allowed it to take him because he couldn’t fight it anymore. His body began to move of its own accord, seeking the rhythm he needed to expel his seed.
She groaned, lifting her legs to wrap them around his hips, shifted her hands along his back to grasp his buttocks and draw him to her. It shot him toward his crisis at dizzying speed. A choked grunt left him as his body convulsed. He felt the walls of her sex tighten, massaging his cock, milking him. His balls tightened until he felt like he was strangling on them, expelling his seed in hard convulsions that knocked the breath from his lungs with each contraction. A mixture of relief, triumph, and anxiety wafted through him when his body finally ceased to convulse.
He struggled to lift the darkness long enough to try to tell if she’d found the pleasure he’d promised himself he would give her and sighed with relief when she nuzzled her face against him and relaxed.
He hoped that meant she’d found pleasure. If not, she would have to berate him for his selfishness when he woke. It was all he could do to lever himself off of her and he couldn’t have managed that much if he could’ve convinced himself he wouldn’t flatten her with his weight. She rolled with him when he landed on his side, draping herself over him limply. Dragging in a shuddering breath of relief, he felt himself falling into a dark pit as he expelled it.
* * * *
Emma’s anxiety didn’t really dissipate to any great degree until she noticed that Colwin and Aydin had begun to relax and ceased to push so hard to put the mountain where the lost tribe lived behind them. Convinced then that that could only mean that they were relatively confident that they were no longer being pursued, she managed to focus on personal concerns.
She had finally decided after worrying the question on and on of whether to accept Colwin and Aydin as her mates, or whether to continue trying to find a way home—always assuming they still wanted her to—that she couldn’t decide. She’d considered her options carefully. She weighed the happiness/unhappiness factors with equal care, and she’d concluded that she just didn’t know whether she should stay or go back to where she belonged.
There wasn’t any doubt in her mind that she loved both of them. She also loved her family back on earth, though, and knew they loved her. If she didn’t go back, they would think she was dead and she didn’t like to think about the pain that would cause them. On the other hand, if Colwin and Aydin loved her, it would hurt them if she left them, and she didn’t want to hurt them either.
She’d grown as accustomed to the life here, she thought, as she was going to and it had been, quite frankly, a severe test of her strength, stamina, and her threshold for pain. She didn’t like it. She didn’t think she would ever get to the point where she
liked
squatting in the woods, bathing in natural bodies of water, and sleeping on the hard ground. She could tolerate it, but the few hours she’d spent in the king’s palace had only made her yearn for the comforts she’d left behind.
Could she be happy with Colwin and Aydin if it meant suffering discomfort for the rest of her life?
She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that the moment she began to think with longing about the ‘things’ she’d left behind she began to remember how lonely she’d been. She began to think about the fact that she’d wanted a family of her own and had concluded that she wasn’t destined to have it. She remembered that she hadn’t wanted to look to her future because it had seemed so dismally empty.
There seemed only one solution to her dilemma.
Leave it in the hands of fate.
If she became pregnant, then she belonged here with the father of her child. The baby couldn’t be taken back—not when it was half-centaur—and she certainly wouldn’t leave it. If she didn’t become pregnant—well, she thought it would be better to go. Colwin and Aydin weren’t just looking for a bed partner. They wanted children. If she couldn’t give them one she had no business staying and getting in the way of their happiness. She didn’t deserve them and she knew, eventually, the disappointment they felt would destroy whatever happiness there was to be had.
It wasn’t a perfect solution and she was well aware of it, but there
was
no perfect solution.