She'd never felt beautiful in her life, until him. Even free of the glamour that had hidden her Fey appearance behind a mask of plain, awkward mortality, she still felt more like Ellie Baristani than Ellysetta Feyreisa. Except when Rain looked at her and touched her the way he was doing now.

She skimmed her nails across the silky skin of his back and gave a throaty growl as his muscles twitched and shuddered in response. Desire roared through her in a fiery rush, his and hers combined, the sensations and emotions so intertwined she could not separate them. Her sex throbbed with a hot, heavy ache, and her hips bucked against his in instinctive, rhythmic demand. Rain shuddered as heat blasted through his veins. Tender devotion incinerated like thin silk wrapped around a white-hot coal, softness replaced by consuming heat. His teeth grazed her skin, nipping with sharp little bites that made her gasp and arch against him.

His tairen roared inside him, turning blood to fire and flesh to burning stone. Give us our mate. Take her. Claim her. Make her ours. The fierce snarl whipped through his mind. His tairen growled and hissed, baring fangs and claws. There was no sweet gentleness when tairen mated. There was only fire and heat, the rush of the wind, the stab of talons gripping tight, the scream of desire and fierce possession that rocked the heavens.

Spirit spun from his fingers in wild waves, and the river around them blazed with fiery lights. Hands, teeth, tongues, lips, wings, talons, his Spirit bodies—both Fey and tairen— caressed and tormented her, claimed and plundered. Gone was the gentle lover. He poured out upon her his magic, his essence, the blazing need of his soul, the primal core of him that existed when all else was stripped away: pure, dominant male energy, unyielding and fierce, aggressor and defender, protector and conqueror, the darkness to her light. Ours, his tairen hissed. She is ours. Our mate. Our female. Our pride.

"Kem," he snarled to Ellysetta, sending the claim in Spirit and across the threads of their bond as well. Magic flowed across her naked flesh, drawing her muscles tight, detonating shuddering bursts of pleasure in her br**sts, her loins, her womb. She screamed and his soul flared with triumph as her pleasure fed his own. "Ve sha kern. You are mine. Say it."

She clutched at him with greedy, wordless hunger. Her mouth dragged across his skin, trailing fire in its wake. Her legs wrapped around his waist, trying to draw him to her, her own tairen seeking completion without submitting to his claim,

"Say it," he demanded. His hands clutched her hips, fingers sinking into her flesh as he raised her up. The head of his sex brushed against the soft entrance of her sheath, tempting her, teasing her with the promise of what she desired. Her hips bucked again, and her teeth closed on his neck in a swift, sharp bite, a female tairen's nip of irritation and command. He tossed his head back, shaking his wet hair out to its full length, but he refused to give in.

In the pride, the females were makai, those who led the pride. But in mating, it was the male who staked his claim with unyielding dominance. A tairen male pursued his mate with relentless intensity, chasing her through the skies, using his greater speed and endurance to wear down her willful resistance. He herded her where he wished her to go with darting passes and daring swoops. He demonstrated his mastery of the skies by diving towards her on a collision course, only to pull back at the last moment so that he merely brushed her flying form, wingtip to wingtip, fur to fur. And with each brush of tairen bodies, he released the heady mating scent that teased and tormented her, driving her wild until she could do nothing but scream a final roar of defiance and succumb to him.

"Say it," he rumbled again. "Ve sha kem." A bump of his hip brought another tantalizing brush of his sex against hers. "You are mine. Say it."

She clawed at him, snarled at him, twisted and writhed in his grip, but he would not relent until finally, exhausted and aching for him, she growled, "Aiyah, ke sha ver. I am yours."

"Forever, kem'tani." And, gripping her hips, he plunged into her core. Their eyes closed and their heads flung back on a mutual cry as he filled her, joining them in body as their magic swirled and twined about them.

When he opened his eyes again, the world around them had changed.

They were not in a magical river in Elvia anymore, but lying together, his body covering hers, on a silken couch in a tent whose purple silk drapes swirled and flapped in a warm night breeze, redolent with the heady scent of tairen. Muted roars rumbled in the night, and flashes of fire lit up the distant sky where tairen played near the snowy peaks of the Feyls. He recognized the place as the shellabah on his ancestral family lands near the Feyls.

He stared down into her face, as his body surged into hers, and her gold-kissed hair spilled about her head in a wild tangle. He frowned ... not gold. Her hair should be ... ? Thought disintegrated. His back arched, ecstasy splashing across his senses. "Fellana, what you do to me." His hips surged again and he watched her face, her eyes were closed and her lips parted on a gasp.

"No more than you do to me." Her voice was a husky purr, rich and deep and throaty. It hummed across his skin and vibrated in his soul in a place no other woman had ever touched.

His hands stroked the silky, pale skin, its silvery glow so bright it was as if the Mother Moon herself shone from within. So soft. So sweet. All woman. All his. His own true love. He bent to trail kisses down her arm, her palm, drawing the delicate, slender fingers into his mouth. His tongue slid across the sensitive pads of her fingertips and touched lightly on the delicate edges of her fingernails.