his shoulders. Her mouth finds his. He feels his belt being tugged open and his trousers slide down gym-hardened thighs. Her hands glide across the front of his legs and she can feel his muscles twitch and flex like snakes beneath silk. Tom’s heart thumps hard, drumming his urgency into her body. Her thumbs latch on to the side of his shorts. His hands pull her robe apart. The smell, the warmth, the touch of her skin electrifies him. Tina pulls back and kisses him. Short, hard kisses that set his lips ablaze. Now she holds him off, so her nipples tantalisingly brush the mountains of his chest. Tom takes her breasts in his hands, cradles them like he’s been given something sacred. He doesn’t understand how he feels – doesn’t want to. Even her skin confuses him – soft, yet firm. It’s all a contradictory swirl. An unrehearsed dance.
Tina lets her robe fall and she holds him while he climbs out of a tangled knot of trousers, underwear, socks and shoes. They step into the steaming cubicle. Hot water beats hardon his scalp and skin.
Tom’s about to say something. She puts a finger to his lips and shushes him. Kisses him again. More urgently this time.
The dance quickens. A tempo unknown to him. A beat that cannot –
will not
– be halted.
She reaches between his legs and strokes him.
He holds her waist, uncertain for a moment, stuck between two worlds – the one he’s left behind and the one he’s falling into – and then she puts him inside her.
She folds her body around him and takes his mind into a space and time he’s tried for so long not to think about, not even dream about. His body quakes as she moves against him, holds him, grips him.
He feels her heart against his chest, feels himself deep and hard inside her. Her hands span the broad arch of his back, fingers digging into his skin as she trembles and almost buckles.
Tom grips her legs and lifts her. Her knees tighten like a vice around the top of his thighs. She clings to his neck as a wave of orgasms breaks loose.
Tom pushes her against the cubicle wall. Their bodies rock rhythmically. Their lips stay desperately locked together for fear that something special might escape should they dare to breathe.
And then it happens.
For the first time in his life, at the end of an experience full of contradictions and pleasure, Tom Shaman gives himself – in all his uncontrolled entirety – to a woman.
CAPITOLO VII
666 BC
The Sacred Curte, Atmanta
Two days after meeting Pesna, Teucer finally sets about the task the magistrate gave him.
He doubts the gods will be pleased. He is, after all, nothing more than a common murderer. The father-to-be of an evil rapist’s child. Nevertheless, he will once more seektheir forgiveness and try to divine signs that goodwill may visit Atmanta in the coming months.
Tetia walks with him to the curte. The grass is sodden with dew and the only sounds are the shuffle of their feet and birds stirring in the now leafless trees.
Teucer is going to make no ordinary sacrifice. It wouldn’t be enough. The atonement of a netsvis and his wife merits more than an offering of livestock.
The ceremony he has in his mind is one of personal cleansing and purity. He uses the sharpened staff of his lituus to mark out his sacred circle. This time it encompasses not only him but also Tetia. They stand together as he angles his ceremonial knife to open a small cut on the fingertips of his left hand. Next, he does the same to Tetia and looks to the skies. ‘Man and wife, joined as one by actions in what we do, joined by the blood we have shed of others and now the blood we shed of ourselves.’ He holds his cut hand up to his wife’s and their bloody fingers touch. Slowly Teucer moves one way around the circumference of the sacred circle and Tetia goes the other, until they meet again.
Together they kneel and dig a hole in which Teucer starts a fire – a roaring blaze that will be a tribute to the gods and a beacon for
William Kent Krueger
P J Brooke
Janel Gradowski
Virginia Nelson
Nora Roberts
Ivan Brett
Ann Brashares
Heidi Rice
Michael Cadnum
Sue Grafton