Free Crystal Healer by S. L. Viehl

caressed the tips of the yiborra with his palm. "When Cherijo and I became lovers, I still had no human emotions. I did not know what it was to love."
    "Now you will tell me that you know how I feel and that this is why we love and are meant to be together," I predicted, scowling up at the stars. "You don't have to say it, Duncan. You're wrong. You do have emotions. I have felt them. I know you love me."
    "I did not have these emotions for her," he said slowly, as if speaking the words were painful. "I knew I had to be with her--I sensed that she might in some fashion be the most important person that I would ever meet--but she was not my first love here." He tapped his chest. "You are."
    "What did you feel for her, if not love?" I demanded, unwilling to believe him.
    The corner of his mouth curled. "Curiosity. Desire, certainly. All I wanted was her, but I didn't understand why. I used my promise to Kao Torin as an excuse to keep her with me so I could fathom it. Near the end, I thought it was to prepare me to be a father to Marel. That I was never meant to love Cherijo, but simply learn from her how to be a parent to our daughter. I was wrong about that, as well."
    I swallowed against the tightness in my throat. "Do you know now?" He nodded. "Then why? Why stay with her if you knew you didn't love her? Why did you spend all that time searching for her?"
    "Jarn." He put his hand to my cheek. "It was you. All this time with her, I was waiting for you."
    I saw the truth in his eyes, and relief and shame took turns choking me until I began to weep. I buried my face against his tunic, but the garment didn't muffle the sound of my sobs very well. Reever put his arms around me as my knees buckled, and knelt with me in the soft, cool grass.
    For me, the safest place in the universe was in my husband's arms, and this night I reveled in it. I flung away my fear and held on to what was mine. My husband, my beloved. He belonged to me and only me now.
    Flickers of light danced against my closed eyes, and I looked through the blur of my tears to see long ribbons of luminous color weaving all around us.
    "Wind dancers," Duncan murmured against my hair. "They're attracted to our body heat."
    I lifted my hand, and a length of iridescent blue landed on my palm, curling around it briefly before its glow intensified and it fluttered away, leaving a cool sensation on my skin. Nothing on my homeworld compared to it, but something as delicate and beautiful as this would have been ripped to pieces by Akkabarr's lethal winds. "It steals warmth from other creatures."
    "Only a little." His hands brushed the hair back from my face, and his mouth touched the curve of my cheek. "Are you cold?"
    That startled a laugh out of me. I had survived for years on a world that never knew a single moment as warm as this night. "I think not." I put my mouth to his, tasting him slowly before I pulled him down into the grass.
    A rainbow of light settled around us, reflecting off the shining blades of the yiborra as we tugged off the garments separating our skins. I had never coupled with Duncan in such an open place, and feeling the air and the cool flutter of the dancers touching my body aroused me almost as much as his hands.
    It was my habit to let Duncan do as he pleased with my body, as everything he did gave me great pleasure. Tonight I felt something shift deep inside me, something that wanted to be more than a woman of the Iisleg.
    I pushed my husband onto his back and straddled him, pressing his shoulders into the grass as I bent and used my mouth on his neck, shoulders, and chest. When I seized a handful of his hair and brought his face to mine, he lifted my hips and guided me over him. I sank down, taking him as he had so often taken me, with all the passion I felt. I could not feel empty or alone, not with our bodies like this. Not in this.
    Wind dancers twined their sinuous bodies in my hair as I moved, caressing the thickness of him with my softness. He