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“Come on, Dalk,” I said with a smile and a slight shake of my head. “We might as well go. The moment is ruined.”
I didn’t think his expression could get any angrier. But it did.
“I am going to kill him.”
“Please don’t,” I said mildly, getting up onto my shaky legs. “Oh, man. You’re a mess.”
I had healed his wounds, but I hadn’t even cleaned any of the blood off of him before we’d devolved into our sudden bout of breathless hanky panky. And now, to add to the overall effect, his tight abdominal muscles and heaving chest glistened with semen. Like, a lot of it.
“We’ll be right there, Ox!” I called, grabbing a spare bit of clean hide and hustling over to the water, dipping it in. “Also, I hope you weren’t being a peeping Tom!”
“I... I was not!” came a shakily indignant and hotly embarrassed reply from the valley. “I do not know what that is, but I know I was not being one. And if I saw anything at all, which I did not, then I certainly would not have stopped and watched. And if I had watched, which I did not, it would have simply been due to shock freezing my feet to the ground rather than any sort of perverse desire to invade your privacy. And if there had been a perverse desire, which there was not, then-”
“Ox,” I groaned, my face on fire, partially for my own humiliation of somebody seeing me getting my rocks off on Dalk’s lap, but even more for Oxriel’s pathetic attempt at lying. The Sea Sand guys really sucked at that.
“I will kill him,” Dalk said again, furiously trying to refasten his loincloth, forgetting it was all torn to shreds, “if only to make him stop talking.”
“He doesn’t mean any harm,” I said, returning to Dalk with the wet hide. “He’s like a puppy. He needs, I don’t know, training or something.”
Or a girl who knows what she’s doing to show him the way...
“I don’t know what a puppy is but it sounds absolutely intolerable,” Dalk barked. His voice melted into a hiss of distaste as I started swiping the wet hide along his front.
“Big bad Dalk,” I murmured as I stroked him, “finding puppies intolerable and hating water. Is there anything you do tolerate?”
I was focused on cleaning him off and was still floating on a rainbow-coloured cloud of hormones, so I hadn’t been paying very close attention to my own words. But they must have hit Dalk somewhere important, somewhere it hurt, because his pectoral muscles tightened like closed fists beneath my hands and he grabbed my chin, forcing my face up.
“How can you even ask such a thing after what we have just done together?”
His sight stars were vicious. Demanding. I nearly dropped the hide I held at the intensity of them.
I tried to laugh but it felt forced and hollow. “I guess you tolerate me, then.”
“Tolerate is not the word I’d use,” he growled.
“Then what is?” The question came out tremulous. Maybe even frightened. Because I was suddenly terrified of Dalk’s rejection. I still couldn’t even believe we’d just hooked up, and a small, vulnerable part of me wanted to know exactly what it had meant to him.
Dalk’s sight stars pulsed once before misting across his gaze, infinite copper points of light spinning through an absorbing black universe. He parted his lips to reply, and I felt the breath of that movement across my own mouth. I dizzily wondered when he’d bent down so close to me when he began to speak.
“I-”
“I have a new loincloth for Dalk!”
“-am going to kill Oxriel.”
He straightened up and glared at the direction Oxriel’s voice had just floated over from.
I swallowed back disappointment at not hearing whatever Dalk had been about to say. But I’d told him it myself. The moment was gone. Oxriel and the vaklok were waiting.
I grabbed my jacket and the jar and hides, and together Dalk and I left that beautiful, secluded place and went back out into the world.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dalk
Oxriel was stiff and overly cheery when Fiona and I entered into his line of sight. His sight stars shuddered and swam with embarrassment that I knew Fiona shared.
I felt no embarrassment. Only foul rage. If Oxriel had not interrupted, then I could have done more with Fiona.
