“There are tricks you can do with your grounds to make it better, but no. Lakewalker ladies and farmer girls are equally magical in this. Anyway, farmers have grounds too, they just can’t sense them.” Absent gods be thanked.

Her expression now was intensely cogitative, and a stuttering swirl of arousal had started in her as well. It wasn’t, he realized suddenly, just her hurts that blocked its flow. Something that half-blood woman at Tripoint had once told him, that he’d scarcely believed, came back to him now: that some farmer women never learned how to pleasure themselves, or to find release. She’d laughed at his expression. Come, come, Dag. Boys practically trip over their own parts. Women’s are all tucked neatly up inside. They can be just as tricky for us as for the farmer boys to find. Many’s the farmwife has me to thank for providing her man with the treasure map, scandalized as she’d be to learn it. Since he’d had much to thank her for as well, he’d set about it, dismissing the ineptness of farm boys from his mind and, in a short time, from hers.

That had been a long time ago…

“What other things?” Fawn said.

“Beg pardon?”

“Besides hands and tongues and mouths.”

“Just…don’t…not…never mind.” And now his arousal had grown to serious physical discomfort. Atop a horse, of all things. There were many things not to try on a horse, even one as good-natured as this mare. He couldn’t avoid remembering several of them, which didn’t help.

Spark couldn’t sense his ground. He could stand in front of her rigid with mind-numbing lust, and as long as he kept his trousers on, she wouldn’t know. And considering all her recent disastrous experiences, she oughtn’t to know. Bad if she laughed…no, upon reflection, good if she laughed. Bad if she was disgusted or horrified or frightened, taking him for another lout like Stupid Sunny or that poor fool he’d shot in the backside. If it grew too excruciating, he could slip off the horse and disappear into the woods for a spell, pretending to be answering a call of nature. Which he would be; no lie there. Stop it. You did this to yourself. Suffer in silence. Think of something else. You can control your body. She can’t tell.

She sighed, rustled about, and gazed up into his face. “Your eyes change color with the light,” she observed in a tone of new interest. “In the sun they’re all bright gold like coins. In the shade they go brown like clear spice tea. In the night, they’re black like deep pools.” She added after a moment, “They’re really dark right now.”

“Mm,” said Dag. Every breath brought her heady scent to his mouth, to his mind. He could not very well stop breathing.