"You are staring," she said.
"I am always staring. You are worth staring at."
"That is unbearably sentimental."
"I am an unbearably sentimental person. You knew this when you bought me."
"I bought you because you were pretty and cheap."
"And yet here we are."
"Here we are," she agreed, and pulled him down.
He entered her slowly. He always did, the first time — slowly, carefully, watching her face with those green eyes that saw everything, that missed nothing, that tracked every flicker of expression the way a hunter tracks movement in tall grass. She felt him — felt the stretch and the heat and the impossible, aching fullness of having another person inside her body, inside her life, inside the walls she had spent centuries building — and she made a sound that was not a word and was not a moan but something between the two, something that lived in the place where control ends and surrender begins.
