“Sagan,” she panted in a soft panic, her eyes wild with her confusion. Torn between her mind and her body, it was obvious what she was feeling as he touched her. He dipped his head and nuzzled at her breast and the outthrust nipple at its tip. “You said…you said you couldn’t…oh God, that feels…”

She couldn’t seem to finish a thought and it made him smile against her. Baring his teeth, he nipped at her through far too much material. Sagan was very aware of how small his window of opportunity was with her. She was a woman of spectacular conscience. Very much like himself. She also seemed to remember the tenets that restricted him from her arms better than he did. But he couldn’t ignore how easy and natural it felt to disregard all that had guided him in these matters for a hundred and sixty years of priesthood. When he had entered Sanctuary it had been a resonant calling he couldn’t resist, and now he was being called again and it was just as potent a need.

He reached for the hem of her sweater, shucking it from her body as quick as lightning. She was limp and distracted, making it so very easy for him to do. Now he had her in a much thinner shirt, a white creation he could see her bra through. White; an astounding color his kind never wore. Everything they wore was black or dark, making the ability to blend and dwell in the shadows seamless.

“There is a realm,” he murmured, “where it is always night, and there is never any light. We call this place Shadowscape. When I look at you, I think of what you would look like in that ’scape, with your brilliant eyes and your ever-so-fair skin.” He slowly pushed her shirt upward, baring the pale plane of her belly and the tempting oval of her navel. He lowered his head to that place, tracing his lips in light, damp streaks across her until he felt her shiver with her growing need for him.

She was silent and did not outright protest his explorations of her body, but he could easily hear the internal dialogue she was having about her tummy being “flabby” and that her ass was “the size of a small planet.”

Sagan disagreed with all of it and he made very certain she would know that. Shifting himself to a position between her legs, his chest resting on her pubic bone, he framed her waist between his hands and nuzzled her belly with his face and released a long, male sound of appreciation. After all, she smelled so good. So purely good. He flicked his tongue against her warm skin and he delighted in the way she jumped beneath him in response. She lay perfectly passive, submitting to him but not touching him as he continued to explore her and stimulate her.

He ignored below her navel for the time being, knowing that if he crossed that line, the dynamic between them would change quite dramatically. Instead he headed north, plowing away at her shirt until he found the snug and serviceable white bra she wore. Skimming away the blouse completely, he rose over her to view her nearly topless state.

Valera choked on her own breath as the incomprehensible reality of having so much potent nude male on top of her, where she could just feel so much, completely stunned her. Sagan moved against her intimately and without any reserve or shame, showing not a single sign that he was anything but confident and proud of the aggressive arousal of his body. In fact, it almost seemed incidental to him as he focused on the slow caresses of his fingers down her breastbone and across the tops of her br**sts.

“Look at you,” he rasped in low heat, peeling away the cover of her bra until he could see both of her ni**les. “I can see in these pretty pink buds, so tight and so upthrust, how much excitement you are feeling. You may try to hide in your passivity, Valera, but your body tattles on you like a town gossip.” Sagan followed the keen observation by catching her suddenly between his teeth, drawing on her roughly until her nipple pulled free just as suddenly.

Val nearly exploded off the bed in reaction, her back arching high and hard, the strength of it lifting him as well in the wave of response. She cried out in lust and pleasured pain, her nails suddenly attached to his shoulders and her strength dragging him back for more.

“Sagan,” she groaned, the lusty sound of his name rushing into him like an ocean tide drowning a parched desert beach. He flooded with a wicked combination of need and unexpected desperation. Sagan latched on to her again, this time drawing her deep against his tongue, sucking on her with tight hunger. “Sagan…”

Not M’jan Sagan or even Ajai Sagan, but just Sagan. For the first time, he felt stripped of his personas of priest and Shadowdweller and was only a man. It gave him a glorious freedom all in a rush and that liberty powered his craving for her, jacking it up into astounding exponents. He teased and tortured her br**sts, devouring her until he knew she was nearly raw with sensation. Sagan then launched himself upward to seize her mouth and reached to draw up her thighs to frame his waist.

Valera transformed beneath him as she fed off his escalating aggression. Passivity disappeared and she met his mouth with wild appetite and such erotic response that it made Sagan’s head reel. Her nails scraped down his back and this time he was the one to arch in response and groan with incomprehensible lust. He snapped her bra free, ripping it in his haste to bare her against him. A moment later they were both reveling in the contact of heated flesh matching to heated flesh.

Valera touched him everywhere she could reach, and not only with her hands. Her mouth, legs, and even her feet stroked against him. Sagan reached for the snap of her jeans and she was lifting her h*ps for him even before he had pulled the zipper.

“I need you on my tongue,” he whispered in a heated rush into her mouth as he pulled her pants down her thighs.

“Oh yes,” she gasped, tears stinging across her eyes as she helped kick away the last of her confining clothing. “It’s been so long since anyone touched me.”

Sagan felt that keenly because the same was true for him. He surged down her beautiful body, licking himself a path along her sweetly dampened skin. She was misted with a fine layer of perspiration, the slick and sexy moisture speaking to him of how excited she truly was. As for himself, he didn’t think he could be any harder or any more eager than he was. His fingertips paved the way for him, drawing down through soft copper curls and seeking the wet declaration of her need for him. He could already smell it on her, the exotic aroma of a woman aroused. Sagan dropped down and caught the backs of her thighs against his shoulders, his drenched fingers spreading her open to his approach.

Valera was gasping for every breath in anticipation, and when he kissed her intimately she sobbed with aching emotion at the unexpected act of tenderness. Then his tongue touched her in a fluttering tease and her body was awash in fire. It wouldn’t take long for him to make her come, she knew. She was so ready to feel that extreme of passion that it would take almost no effort at all. Val reached up above her head and grabbed for the spindles of her headboard, holding tightly as her body writhed beneath the wickedly quickening play of his lips and tongue. He sucked at her sensitive cl*t again and again, then drew himself a tongued path to her entrance where he teased raging nerve endings mercilessly.

Sagan was not prepared for the divinity of her taste. He thought he would be, but he had overestimated himself and underestimated the delicacy she would be to him. Just her rich flavor alone drove him out of his senses, but she intensified it with the wanton reaction of her body and her strangled cries of pleasure. Valera abandoned herself completely to the magic he worked on her body and he felt her legs clutch tightly around him just before she wrenched into an explosive orgasm. Sagan heard her screams with only half an ear. He was much too focused on lapping up every creamy drop of the release he had coaxed from her body.

“Stop! God, Sagan, please!”

She was on overload and he could very much appreciate the sensation. He was feeling something quite similar. It was that and the overwhelming need that rode him to plunge deeply into her.

But this was the moment of his sharpest reckoning, he realized as he drew up her bare body to kiss her. Not that he hadn’t already crossed several lines to have come this far with her, but this would become a very purposeful flouting of the vows he had taken and adhered to for sixteen decades. He realized nothing could ever come of whatever this was that raged between them. He was a priest. He was immortal and she was a human woman with over a third of her lifetime already past her. She would age and become a host to an array of human illnesses as her body systems broke down and failed her.

It was because the very idea of it so suddenly paralyzed him with such unexpected emotion that he froze into stillness and stared down into her passion-clouded eyes. It had been mere hours since he’d met her, he realized with shock. And yet, now he felt as if he had wasted precious time. He hadn’t taken enough of her by far, and hadn’t given enough to her. Rules, he realized, didn’t matter. Couldn’t matter. They interfered with each precious moment he had with her. She was…

His.

Maybe not for eternity, but for this moment she was his. Sagan took that desperate feeling to heart, letting it seize him and take control of him. He disregarded her limp, sated state and set his c*ck in the hot, wet bath of her sweet pu**y. A chill of raw need raced along his spine and met up with the heat the contact sent erupting through him. He shuddered as he soaked himself in her, reveled as she came alive beneath him once more.

“Give me your mouth, jei li,” he demanded of her even as he set himself ready to enter her. He took her willing offer with heat and frantic desire. But he disregarded the primal urge he had to plunge into her deep and hard and instead burrowed into her in slow, inching movements. He savored every instant of it, from the incredible tightness of her to the way she raked his back in protest of his pace. Even so she undulated under him with every new inch of his invasion. Sagan’s blood rushed loudly in his ears, his chest aching with the raging beat of his heart. He was almost sheathed completely when the urge to cl**ax rushed over him, reminding him of how unpracticed he had become.

But he refused to make a disappointing show of himself with her. Grinding his teeth for control, he settled into her completely and they both exhaled in pleasured relief. Sagan remained still, recovering himself slowly as he minimized the awesome stimulation she was to him. He took those moments to pay tribute to her kiss-swollen lips and drifted soft kisses across the lashes of her shimmering oceanic eyes.

She caught her breath just long enough to ask him, “Why me? Tell me, Sagan. Why are you defying your vows because of me?”

“Because no other has ever made me want to, Valera,” he breathed in gentle reprimand against her cheek. “If you are a sin, jei li, then I am a sinner with all my soul. Nothing so sweet should ever be dangled before a man only to be denied. It would be cruelty, and I know my gods are strict, but they are never cruel. I will not believe that of them. I knew you were a gift the moment I first saw you. This…” He lifted himself from her and reached to stroke the curls where they were joined. “This is a gift. For however long I am blessed with this gift, I will embrace it with all that I can. I am so vibrantly alive in this moment, Valera. Can you feel how magnificent and vital it feels?”

She could, if for no other reason than the power of his words sent her soaring. Valera was so incredibly full with him inside her, years of loneliness and emptiness melting away as passion bloomed in their place. She had never felt so special. So treasured. And all of it given to her by a man she’d known for what seemed like instants. Yet, somehow she knew that he knew her well. Maybe it was his telepathy, or maybe it was pure fate. Who was she to question it when he refused to do so?

Valera curved sensual hands up over the back of his shoulders, drawing him back down along her body. She kissed his mouth in a slow, seductive connection, plunging them both back into the physicality of their union and all of its ramifications. She felt his weight shift, resting on her heavily for a moment. She basked in the feeling, the sheer size and power of him, as well as the obvious craving she saw in his eyes for her, making her feel light and wondrously sexy. All of her doubts and flaws, real or imagined, flew away. He saw her as a most perfect beauty, and so she became one.

The change that came over her was stunning to Sagan. She had already had the power to make him a little crazy, but when she came alive with an all-consuming confidence of sexuality and feminism, she pushed him to a whole new level of insanity.

“Move,” she breathed in temptation against his lips. “I want to feel you move.”

Sagan couldn’t obey her fast enough. He withdrew from the clutch she had on him in a slow glide of astounding sensation. He watched himself draw free of her grasping, hungry little body, his c*ck slick with her juices. He couldn’t get back inside her quick enough to suit his need. He groaned loudly as he hilted deep inside her and she exhaled a sigh of pleasure that resonated through him.

“More,” she coaxed without need, but the instruction had the desired effect on him. Sagan gave her more, each thrust a little more emphatic than the one before, the pace quickening in large leaps. She stroked his chest and back as he became slick with sweat. She stared up into his eyes so she could see the ecstasy that was building within him. He reached out in a sudden, harsh movement and grabbed the headboard of the bed, rising up slightly to change his pitch into her body.

Suddenly Valera saw any hint of control spinning away. The feel of him changed to something amazing. There was victory in his eyes as he snatched her up into the storm he was feeling.

Sagan knew he was hitting her g-spot just right by the look in her eyes. She became wild beneath him as she reached harder and harder for his every in stroke. She was so unbelievably wet around him, her heat hugging his pumping c*ck so intimately it was mind-blowing. Val threw back her head and began to cry out in a rising crest of lusty sounds that went right through him. It sought out all of the nerves in the seat of his testicles and he knew he was going to lose control completely. He swore harshly as he forced himself to keep his cadence within her. She was so close, her body clutching tighter…tighter…