Free True Colors by Thea Harrison Page A

veins. She arched into his touch and groaned as she gripped the back of his head. Her hands slipped against the short corn silk of his pale hair.
    “Tell me to stop, sweetheart,” he muttered against her cheek. “Just say the word if we’re going too fast.”
    His body said something else though, as he ground harder against her.
    It said, please, please .
    She stroked the wide arc of his back as she whispered in his ear, “You are my mate. I could never say no to you.”
    His head reared back. He stared at her in astonishment.
    For one terrible moment, dread darkened her vision and her heart gave a sickened lurch. She thought, I cannot be so wrong. I cannot live with it if I am so deluded.
    The joy that came over his face was so incandescent, it blinded her. “That’s what it means,” he said. “True north.”
    She broke into a bout of reactive shivering. “What?”
    He leaned on one elbow to caress her face. “When I looked at you for the first time, the world changed. It all but knocked me off my feet. I’ve been thinking it was like true north had shifted, the magnetic pull from the one direction you use in navigation, but it’s more like the primary force from your card spread. I’ve been trying to figure out what it meant. All I knew was that it was you—you had become my true north, my primary force. Just like that, from one moment to the next.”
    She closed her eyes and swallowed hard as the world came back into focus. “Yes, that’s what happened to me too.”
    He bent down to nuzzle her neck. “It reminds me of a quote from a French philosopher. ‘The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.’ Do you know it?”
    She wound her arms around his neck, and she let her frightened heart find ease and grow full of him. “I do now.”
    I dreamed a dream of incomparable rarity and loveliness.
    Then I woke to find it true.

Chapter Six
    Sacrifice
     
    Gideon stared at the woman in his arms. She was so gorgeous it took his breath. He had thought her beauty was understated and intelligent, but right at that moment she was so flagrant with color and voluptuousness he could only gaze at her in passionate awe.
    Her cocoa-and-cream skin turned a deep rich gold in the light of the fire, and her vivid eyes shone blue and green. Those fabulous gold-tipped corkscrew curls spilled extravagantly over his hands, and her pale yellow nightgown moved like silk against his overheated skin. Her breasts were full and generous, and the dark areola of her erect nipples pushed against the thin material.
    He imagined watching her grow older, a pale sprinkling of frost touching those curls, the laugh lines growing at the corners of her eyes and that delicate, sensitive mouth. The images in his imagination drew him at a fundamental level. She could only become lovelier to him as he grew to know her with the intimacy of the passing years.
    He bent his head and caressed the slender arc of her golden neck with his lips. He felt the sigh of pleasure that shuddered through her, the sexy shift of her body molding to fit his, and oh holy gods, he was the one who did that to her, great hulking brute that he was. The wonder of it closed his throat.
    He knew too much about how to kill and hardly anything about how to live in peace. Hell, he hardly knew how to stay indoors for any length of time. She was too good for him, too refined. She put cloth napkins on her table, read books of poetry, and taught small children. The quilts she created were works of art that nurtured the soul.
    He put bullets in clips to load his guns, and read files on unsolved crimes and treatises on war. He taught recruits how to wait, how to obey orders, and how to kill, and he played chess because it was a battle of wits that kept his mind sharp.
    He put his forehead to her breast. His hands fisted in her nightgown.
    He needed to come home but he didn’t know how. He hadn’t even known where home was until he looked in her face for the first time. He needed to