The Centaur Queen (The Dark Queens #7)(12)

I met Tymanon, and I suddenly saw women as something other than a body to slake my thirst on. I still remembered the first time I truly heard her laugh, not in a sexual, teasing way, but with pure, unfettered joy. I was mesmerized by the rich sound of it, oddly enthralled by her, and desirous to hear that sound often. It had become my goal in the games to hear it at least once a day, and I’d gotten pretty good at teasing it out of her.

I loved the way she spoke about the world, the rich depths of her intelligent mind. I became obsessed with plumbing its depth. It seemed, no matter what I asked of her, Tymanon almost always had the answer. And if she didn’t, she’d find it.

When I first met Ty, I brushed her off as being just a centaur and hadn’t expected us to get along very well. But over time, I noticed she was far from the typical female of her kind. There was a kindness to her that seemed lacking in others of her race, and she was thoughtful too. She often went out of her way to find me fruits and vegetables to go along with the meats she preferred to eat. She was also brave. I’d seen her in action inside the games. The accuracy of her arrows was astonishing.

Tymanon was nothing like the females I associated with. Then one day, I blinked and realized just how pretty she was. Where I hadn’t noticed it before, suddenly it was the only thing I saw. Her features were comely and pleasing to look upon. She had strong teeth, just shy of being fully equine. They were large, but fit her face. There was nothing all that delicate about her. Her nose was sharp, her chin slightly pointy. But her lips were soft, and her eyes were large, the color mesmerizingly amber, so clear a brown that I often found myself staring deeply at them as she spoke.

The entire package together was surprisingly alluring in its own way. I imagined any centaur male would feel pride calling her his mate. A frown tugged at my lips at that thought.

Centaurs and satyrs, the mix of the two was laughable at best. There was nothing about her lower half I found attractive, and I knew she’d say the same for mine if she ever saw it. I swallowed hard, rubbing the muscles of my stomach as I thought about the legs I’d seen her wearing tonight.

Human legs.

She’d been partially submerged, but I’d seen her thighs. The muscle was lean, supple, and smooth. Her skin was a burnished shade of bronze. When we’d been kicked out of the games, I’d thought my mounting attraction to Ty would wane, that I’d get around other females and lose interest, that what I had been feeling was nothing more than a result of being locked away together, and that she’d been the only female afforded me.

But all this week, I’d seen comely females aplenty and hadn’t had even a passing fancy for any of them. My thoughts had still been only for Ty.

Grunting, I shifted on my seat. My cock was still hard, too hard. I needed to think of something else, anything else.

Light blue eyes came immediately to mind, and the shrill, piercing cry I’d heard echoed on the breeze when Myra had been locked away, our bond splintered, nearly obliterated, and feeling like I might die of it. I thought of the way my heart beat, skipping and pausing, making me hurt so badly I rolled off the bed on which I’d been pleasuring yet another nameless nymph.

Myra’s cries still echoed through my head. I could have thought of nothing else that would have so quickly shunted the blood from my cock. I was flagging in seconds.

A twig snapped to my right. My jaw clenched. The scent of Ty’s familiar honeysuckle perfume hovered like a cloud before me. I twirled on my seat, looking over at her. She was back in centaur form, head held high but not looking at me.

I hadn’t tumbled with a nymph in a little over a year now. In fact, I hadn’t felt the slightest twinge of desire in all that time, not until tonight. Shame and anger were competing emotions within me.

“Ty—” I said with a voice still sounding like gravel.

But she shook her head and held up her hand. “I was nude. You saw me.”

My nostrils flared. I wanted badly to lie, to tell her I hadn’t seen much, that it’d been too dark for me to make her out. I wet my lips. “I did. I am sorry.”

“Why?” She walked around me, planting her hands on her hips.

The leather bindings were around her breasts again, but I recalled their dusky-rose hue with perfect clarity. I looked down at her horse’s legs, strong yet slender and delicate, the hair smoothed down as though she’d brushed herself.

Her fur wasn’t long and shaggy like mine. I must look a beast to her. My lips pursed because until just now, that thought had never once crossed my mind.

“Why, what?” I asked, maybe a bit too sharply than I intended.

But she didn’t flinch. Tymanon met my hard gaze with a centaur’s curiosity. She was always learning, always wanting to know more.

I’d often thought her kind aloof, pedantic, boorish. It was like her people had lost the art of laughter. They rarely did it, or at least not in public. They were scholars and warriors, and that’d been the extent of what I’d really known of her breed.

But I’d been a month in Ty’s company, and I’d begun to see that I’d known next to nothing.

“Why do you apologize, male? Was I not beautiful to you?”

I rocked back in my seat, blinking with shock. She did that to me sometimes, asked me questions that I wasn’t prepared to answer.

If she were anyone else, I might believe she was fishing for a compliment. But that wasn’t Tymanon at all. She was a confident woman who didn’t seem to care one way or another about her looks.