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I may not have been somebody to her but I was somebody.
And I was closest.
“Three!”
She didn’t want to kiss me. I should go get Oxriel. That half-daft warrior would have licked a new woman from head to tiny toes if one had only asked him to. But for some reason – selfishness, maybe, or perhaps lack of time left in the countdown, but not jealousy, surely not that – I refused to run and fetch him.
I refused to move at all, really. Just stood and stared down at Fiona with such intensity that it was a slightly woozy relief my sight stars didn’t slice right through her.
“Two!”
Fiona whispered something that sounded a lot like, “Never been without somebody to kiss at New Year’s and I’m not about to bloody start now,” and flung her arms so forcefully around my neck I was obliged to stoop.
“One!”
The word fizzed out into a shimmery echo as an incredibly soft human mouth pressed to mine.
She touched my lips with hers and it was like she touched me everywhere. My hide glowed with the sensation of nerves screaming beneath it. Heat in my throat and my chest and, toss me on a blasted funeral pyre, my groin.
I have to touch her.
I was just about to, claws reaching for her, when suddenly she was gone.
Well, not entirely gone. Just gone from the shuddering, searing, world-smashing position of having her hands at my neck and her mouth against mine, and in that blackened moment I felt her absence so acutely that it became something to mourn.
She did not pour out words of mourning, though, but rather ones of human celebration.
“Happy New Year, Dalk.”
Her cheeks were dark with some unnamed human emotion or condition or, curses, maybe even illness. Could I make a new woman sick just by putting my mouth on her? Her voice was oddly breathy. Which was better than my own, because it sounded like it had crawled, cracking, out of the depths of some long-forgotten cave when I replied.
“Happy New Year,” I croaked.
I stared at her as she looked everywhere, everywhere, but at me.
Finally, she gave me a flash of a smile, a flimsy human nod, then disappeared into the laughing crowd.
And once again, I was standing at the edge of the party.
Alone.
But watching.
This time, I did not even try to deny it.
This time, I watched her.
Only her.
CHAPTER ONE
Dalk
Long had it been since the new women had started sleeping in Gahn Errok’s mountain. Their human shuttle was not large enough, nor did it have enough private spaces, for all of them to sleep there comfortably. There were tents, of course, to make more space available. But once the new women got used to the mountain living that the Gahnala Zuh-Tephanie and Priya enjoyed, they had little interest in remaining in the colder tents or the crowded shuttle.
Thus, they had all moved into their own quarters in the mountain.
And we Sea Sand men, as their devoted chaperones, had followed.
