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He started to smile at her but kindly made an effort not to laugh, although it was dancing in his haloed eyes. He reached out to put both hands under her arms, the movement sudden and embracing, his large hands gripping her around her rib cage and suddenly lifting her off the floor until she was well above eye level, forced to look down into his eyes.

“Listen to me, my little Templar. The gods have delivered you unto me. You are the greatest gift that man and the universe could create. You are mine, my pre
cious,
precious
heart. There is a stroke of destiny here, and I am not fool enough to laugh in its face. Nor would I want to. Why would I want to? Why would I
ever
want to?”

“Umm … well …” She thought about it as if it weren’t a rhetorical question. “I kinda think I snore at night. And … well … I wear pink doggy slippers when my feet are cold, so … what I’m trying to say is I’m not exactly what you’d call sexy. You look like the kind of guy who’d like sexy.”

“Do I? Because I could swear I extolled the virtues of cute already. I like your cuteness. Yes, you do snore a little, and I find it adorable. But as to not being sexy, I must disagree with your assessment of yourself.” He let her down just a little, so she was close enough to touch foreheads with him. “Mainly because to me you reek of sex,” he said. “Every time I touch you, it’s an effort to not grow instantly hard for you.”

She gasped in a little breath, her face warming. And here she’d thought it was just her. She’d thought she was suffering from some kind of weirdo lusty thing that’d have her staring at him longingly from afar … and looking in his windows … or maybe stealing items from his trash so she could, like, hug his boxes of Cheerios with affection, knowing he’d just touched them.

But this was a much better idea.

“So … you …” She trailed off. She didn’t know what to say next.

“Love you? No. It is beyond love, if such a thing is possible, Docia. It has to be. Two souls inside me. Two souls inside you. All connected. All knowing at their very core that we belong together.”

“But it’s only been …”

“A day? Two? Do you think it can get any better than this? If it does, then I will be paralyzed with delight.
I will be useless to Menes and the body Politic because I will not be able to tear myself free of you.”

Docia melted, his words were so beautiful. So exactly what she needed to hear. What she had never come close to hearing in her lifetime. And it didn’t take any effort at all to believe him. She felt no fear when she chose to accept his claims. She didn’t doubt him for a single second longer.

“Why do I believe you so utterly?” she wondered as she felt herself pouring into the liquid gold of his eyes. “My God, you sure know how to charm a girl.”

“Not any girl. This girl. This beautiful, perfect girl.” He dropped her onto his lips, searing her with a kiss that made her head spin. “You are mine now. Forever. This life and the next. And the next. And the next. Tell me you feel that, Docia. Tell me when you look into our futures, you see we will endure just as Menes and Hatshepsut have done.” He kissed her again, making a believer out of her with the fire of his lips and tongue and the way he seemed to push his souls into hers. And funnily enough, she felt there was plenty more room inside of her for that.

“You might get tired of me, you know. I’m … uh … messy. And overall I’m kinda boring.”

“Oh?” he said, walking across the room with her until her feet touched the mattress. “It is fortunate I have a housekeeper, then. And Vincent likes a great many sports.”

“I like my Xbox,” she offered helpfully.

“SEAL Team Six?” he countered.

“Well, duh!”

“Then I don’t see a problem,” he said with a chuckle.

“You’re not going to make me exercise, are you? Cuz outside of a nice walk, I’m very clumsy. And even then … bam! Fell off a bridge!” She smacked her hands together to emulate the sound.

“I think I have a sport in mind that you have already proven an excellent aptitude for,” he said as he laid her down across the bed, covering her body as he went.

“Oh. Really? A-aptitude?” She stuttered the last word because he had touched his open mouth to the pulse on the right side of her neck, causing a powerful wiggly sensation to travel throughout her body, weakening her knees and destroying all cognitive function. “B-because I’m really usually very awkward.”

He stopped making love to her neck to look hard into her eyes.

“Is this what you do? Point out all of your flaws, real or imagined?”

“W-well … I am not the one who pointed them out first,” she said meekly. “I’m just repeating what … what I’ve been told.”

“You have not been told these things by me,” he said with dark vehemence. “And that is all that matters, Docia. I am all that matters from this day forward.”

“You are?”

“I am.” And then there was the slightest flicker, the slightest touch of what she always felt when something seemed too good to be true. “Don’t you want me, Docia?”

It made her smile for some reason, to see this touch of vulnerability in him.

“Do you snore?” she asked.

“Not that I’m aware—”

“Well, do you leave the top off the toothpaste? Or track mud in the house?”

“I don’t—”

“Ram, I need a flaw. Just one tiny little flaw. Because if you’re too perfect, it’s going to be way too much for me to live up to.” She said it straight, trying to keep from smiling as he took a minute to honestly think of something and looking a little desperate when he came
up empty. Not that she was trying to make him squirm, but it was endearing to see how hard he wanted to please her.

“Vincent can be quite obnoxious,” he said suddenly, as if he’d come across a huge diamond, a grin exploding over his features.

“This is very true,” she agreed with a grave nod of her head. “I suppose that’s good enough.”

He grew quickly irate, his handsome face going dark with it. He shook her by shaking the mattress around her. A combination of a shake and a bounce.

“It is going to have to be good enough,” he told her sharply. “I will not allow you to be unsatisfied. I won’t let you leave under any circumstances. It’s unacceptable.” He gave her another shake, and she couldn’t help giggling by that point. “This isn’t funny, Docia. Tell me you understand what I’m saying.”

“Ram,” she said, reaching to wrap her hands around his head, framing his sun-kissed beauty. She found that so amusing, that he maintained the appearance of living a life constantly under the touch of the sun when he could do anything but. “I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. I’m all in. Pour cement in my shoes and stick me to the floor. I’m not going anywhere,” she said more plainly. “I’ve got everything I need right here and no desire to look any farther. I know exactly how special this is. How lucky I am. I’m not going to throw it away anytime soon. I … I trust you.”

What she meant was that she trusted him to be a man of his word. She trusted him enough to put her souls and her heart in his hands.

She had only a second to draw breath before he was covering her mouth and kissing her hard enough to rock both of her souls. It was, for all intents and purposes, a branding. Just in case words meant little or nothing, this would mean everything. It was their souls that had
spoken together long before their minds had grasped just how deep their connection went, and he was going to appeal to that the best way he knew how. By the time he let her catch her breath, her whole body was weak and scorched, thoroughly laid siege to, all of her remaining walls crumbling.

Because when it came down to it, there was so very little their minds or their insecure psyches had to do with any of it. All damages and problems born of the past melted away as they wrapped their arms and legs around each other, pressed themselves together as if they craved nothing more than to become the perfect whole they were meant to be. The feeling was incomparable, indescribable. Docia felt tears drawing up into her eyes, but there was no sadness attached to them, only the human limitations of a mind unable to contain the vastness of what she was feeling.

And among all of it was that fiery burn, that sensation of being scorched earth desperately in need of the rain he could drop onto her. Oh, but he had already shown her that he was a master of thunder and of lightning. And he would show her again, she knew, as he began to strip her down to her bare skin, all the while unable to stop worshipping her skin, mouth, skin, and mouth over and over again, trading between the two so quickly and fiercely, as if he couldn’t decide how best to spend his time … as if the two souls inside him were at war as to which made them feel the most. Or perhaps which they thought made
her
feel the most.

There was something almost a little obscene about being fully nude beneath him while he was clothed, trapped by the will of his mouth and hands, able only to accept what he forced on her more than willing body. It seemed as though he had no interest in the touch of her hands. That is to say, as much as her attentions were something he craved, clearly it was her pleasure that
meant everything to him. Almost to an obsessive degree. Docia could barely catch her breath, never mind cling to a solid thought as he held her down, forced her to feel his need the way a child delighted with the surf of the ocean was forced off his feet by the power of it again and again. All she could do was let her hands fall onto the bed, let her body be a limp, pleasured receptacle for anything and everything he wanted to do to her.

There was time later,
she thought,
to learn him just as
well.
There would be time for her to wield this power over him one day.

Her abandon served her well. As he tongued her belly, sucked hard at her breasts, stroked confident fingers through the wet heat between her thighs, she fell into a swirl of pleasure a thousand times more powerful than the first time they had been together. Was that even possible? Was she just misremembering?

Did it matter?

Her first orgasm hit her out of the blue, without him even touching her in any way that ought to realistically produce the effect. It was an orgasm of the mind and soul made real by the body. She cried out, her back curving up off the bed, and he drew back a little, his heavy breaths sounding almost as loud as her pleasure roaring in her ears. He drew back just to watch her, to see the beauty of her riding out the sensation.

“God,” he breathed. “Good God.”

Then he was on his knees, barely keeping himself from ripping free of his clothing. In fact, he got little more than his shirt and pants open before he was back over her and spreading her legs to put himself inside her in desperate, needful thrusts.

Docia’s hands came up, grateful for his shirt because she needed something to grip, some kind of anchor. Last time it had been his skin, her nails making deep
inroads. As she surged up to meet him, just as frantic to pull him inside her as he was to be there, fine weaving and threads popped under the strain of her grasp. But she needed to hold on or she was going to fly apart. The look in his eyes told her he was equally unraveling. That he felt everything she did.

She heard him groan with pleasure after a particularly deep thrust into her. She felt full and wild, and more than anything she felt beautiful and sexy … powerful. He could find her cute and adorable all he wanted any other time, because right here she knew she was sensual and erotic to him. She had absolutely no doubt. A feeling that was only reinforced as he lost control of himself, a wild, desperate rhythm overtaking him, all of it jumping out of him in dark, ferocious shouts of pleasure.

She came violently, almost painfully.
Mortals shouldn’t know such pleasure,
she would think later on. They weren’t capable of processing it all, of savoring it for all its massive details and tiny nuances. It was like having a wild seizure, her body jolting out of her control, sensation riding her as he was, pulsing into her as he was. Her release triggered his, and he lost all of his grace and strength, just as helpless to it as she was. There was so much delight in that for her that she crested again, way before she had even finished coming down from the initial high.

He dropped onto her only after long, hard, emptying thrusts into her that seemed to go on forever. His weight was heavy, restricting her breath when all she wanted to do was suck in oxygen. He tried to coordinate himself enough to move, but he couldn’t do it. She wrapped her arms around him to hold him tight, telling him she was just fine.

Telling him she was perfect.

And when he did finally catch his breath, he turned his head to whisper in her ear.

“I don’t love you.”

Remembering that he had insisted this went beyond love, the greatest emotion in the universe, she smiled.

“I don’t love you, too,” she said softly.

Jackson stood numbly inside the entryway of the Saugerties police department. The first thing he did was look toward Marissa’s closed door. He couldn’t help it. She was the only one in his present life, outside of Docia, who had shared what had just happened to him. He walked over to her, ignoring the questions and greetings of the others who had been waiting to hear from him for the past day as he’d tried to find some kind of reconciliation with his new existence.