Page 38 of Unlikely Omega

“Finnen!” I yell, hoping to be heard over the thunder and pelting rain and pounding hooves and whistling wind. “Finn, we need to stop!”

For a long time, I don’t think he’s heard me and we ride on. Time has taken a dream-like quality, stretching and snapping, isolated moments and images—a copse of cypresses, a distant hamlet, a lone rock, a river valley.

Am I falling asleep?

I shake myself. Can’t have that. I might fall to my death and it will all have been for nothing. My teeth won’t stop clamoring in my mouth. My body won’t stop trembling.

Then he pulls on the reins, stopping his horse, and over us looms the giant shadow of a standing rock—the one I had noticed earlier in the distance.

“We make camp here,” he says.

“How did you know?” I pull on the reins, stopping beside him. A hollow in the rock forms a cave where we can take shelter. “How did you know without seeing it?”

“Something is cutting off the wind,” he says and without another word, he jumps off his horse and comes around to take the reins of mine. “A rock, right?”

“And a cave.”

His grin flashes. “That’s good news, isn’t it?”

I’d grin back but I’m frozen stiff and too tired to think or react. I let him pull my horse along the others toward the rock, listing on the saddle, and I immediately feel the difference when the wind stops and with it, most of the driving rain.

Then the shivers start.

“Come on,” he says, looping the reins of the horses over a protrusion in the rock and reaching up for me, “we have to warm ourselves up.”

Warm ourselves up.

The words echo inside my head as he helps me down and sets me on my feet, as I become aware of how close we’re standing to each other—closer than ever. In the cage we didn’t even touch unless the jostling of the cart shoved us against each other, but now… My hands have automatically come to rest on his chest, and the muscles underneath the soaked fabric of his robes are hard, shifting as he puts his arms around me, steadying me. I’m suddenly aware of every part where our bodies touch—his hard stomach, his hipbones, his muscular thighs.

And his scent. Good Goddess. It grabs me, twists me up, takes away my breath.

Is he as affected as I am? There’s a hard rod pulsing between our bodies, getting larger by the moment, and it takes me a long moment to realize what it might be.

By then, he’s pulling away. “Get inside the cave, shed your clothes and lie down on them. I’ll join you.”

“Shed my clothes?” I breathe, gasp when he gives me a little shove. The cave is a black opening on the face of the rock, only made visible through streaks of lightning against the night sky.

I’m shivering so hard now that he’s not pressed to me that I can barely walk. I swear my teeth are about to come loose from all the chattering. The ceiling of the cave is low, I realize after I bang my head on it twice, so I go to my knees and crawl deeper. It smells of animal droppings and mold.

Shed my clothes and lie on them—naked? Next to Finnen?

A weird nervous giggle shakes me as I fight with the knot in my cloth belt and the buttons down the side of my robe. And my body cramps at the image, letting me know what it thinks about this.

No, body. We’re not jumping Priest Finnen’s bones.

Even if he was hard when he held me. Well, hardening.

That sends a particularly nasty cramp down my middle and I groan softly. I so don’t need this right now. Awakening or whatever this is, it sucks.

Especially when Finnen enters the cave, lightning casting him in silver and white, followed by thunder.

He kneels beside me where I’m awkwardly trying to shrug off my sodden robe and says, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to break my vows.”

Why not? I want to yell at him, beat his chest and scratch my nails down his flesh. Why am I stuck with a righteous priest who looks like a statue of a god but won’t break his vows with me even stuck in a cave with only the sky looking on?

“I didn’t realize your vows meant so much to you after all this,” I whisper, “after the betrayal of the Synod and the…”

What was I saying? My train of thought isn’t just lost, it’s fallen off a cliff and crashed into the ocean.

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