Sitting up with her arms wrapped around raised knees, Andromeda met his eyes. “It’s me,” she said, her tone husky and one hand tight around the wrist of the other. “I have the same carnal drives as my mother.”
“You want to rut with many people?” He tried not to growl those words, though they made him want to growl—he was going to keep his mate for himself. He’d satisfy her as many times as she wanted, but no one else would be touching her.
Andromeda swallowed. “I’m afraid that’s exactly what I’ll become if I give in to the need inside me.”
Naasir struggled to understand. “Have you never lain with anyone?”
“No,” Andromeda admitted, conscious he wouldn’t understand her choice. He was a vibrant, rawly sexual creature. Being with him had made her own consciously dormant sexual instincts fight to awaken; she wanted to rub up against him, wanted to taste him and be tasted by him.
Frown turning into a scowl, Naasir came over to crouch down in front of her. She’d shifted position to sit with her legs over the edge of the bed, suddenly realized he’d be able to see straight between her thighs if she wasn’t careful. Her panties were still near the fireplace, the thin fabric probably dry by now.
“Does it not hurt to be alone?” he asked her, his hair sliding to the side as he cocked his head in that way he had of doing. “I like being petted. Don’t you need petting?”
His honesty demanded her own. “I’ve made myself not need it.” It had been brutal when her natural inclination was to wallow in sensation. “It’s why I first picked up the sword. To put my sexual energy into controlled violence.” Rather than the sadistic kind practiced by her parents.
“Fighting is like rutting.” Naasir’s eyes gleamed. “Not the same, but it gets the blood pumping and it makes me ready.”
When her eyes dropped instinctively, she had to force them back up. She had no business checking whether or not he was aroused. “Sexual pleasure is like a drug,” she said to Naasir. “You become addicted to it until it takes over your life, until pleasure alone isn’t enough and the search for novelty turns brutal. At least that’s how it is with my family.”
“Your parents rule a sector,” Naasir pointed out. “They do other things.”
“It’s a far-off and not very important sector.” Charisemnon might have deviant appetites, but he was still an archangel and no fool. He knew his daughter and her husband weren’t capable of running a large sector, so had stuck them in a small, unimportant corner politically speaking.
“They also have two stewards who can run the territory without instruction, they’ve been doing it for so long.” The twins had been there since long before either Andromeda’s mother or father had even been born. “My parents are powerful enough to be dangerous when called upon to defend the territory, but otherwise . . .”
She gripped one of her hands with the other, squeezing tight to restrain the urge to reach out and play with the silken temptation of Naasir’s hair. “They’ve been dissolute and jaded and sexually violent since they were young.” She’d read stories of her parents’ debauchery, their every move chronicled because of her mother’s bloodline.
“The fact they can’t control their urges makes them weak.” Naasir’s gaze was a lightning strike, as if he’d shatter light right through her, exposing all her secrets. “A woman who has fought her natural sensual instincts for hundreds of years is not weak.”
Andromeda sucked in a breath, wanting to grab at his words and hoard them close. “It requires constant control.”
A shrug. “I have to exercise the same not to act too inhuman.”
“Don’t,” she found herself saying. “Don’t act with me.”
Snapping his teeth at her, he grinned at her little jump. “I thought you wanted me to act civilized.”
“Argh! I said that once while I was mad.” She pushed at the warm, bare skin of his shoulders when he laughed, wicked amusement in his eyes. “You make me want to act totally uncivilized.”