Tall like a majestic mountain, solid with hefty bones and even heavier muscles. Powerful like a massive oak tree, grand and rough-hewn. His beauty lay in his ruggedness, in his battered heart, with his raw strength and even rawer emotions that he normally hid behind a cold wall of reserve, a wall of control—his normal facade. A life-preserving habit that he had honed under Mona Sera's cruel rule, so that one was fooled into thinking that he didn't feel much… until he looked at me, like he was doing now.

I swallowed against what I glimpsed naked and intense on Amber's face, what he allowed me to see. There was nothing cold or reserved about him now. His dark blue eyes had changed to fiery gold, glittering yellow like a bright, shiny jewel; the same color as his name—Amber. The eyes of his beast. They heated and glowed with this extraordinary color whenever he was gripped with passion or power.

I watched him walk toward me with those glowing, molten eyes filled with desire and devotion intertwined, and was torn between running away and throwing myself into his massive arms. He had saved me, brought me back from the brink of death, protected me from a band of kidnapping rogues, and had loved me so. When we returned from our ordeal, the bond between us had been forged strong and true, and I loved Amber now as dearly as I loved Gryphon. My two Warrior Lords. My two lovers. I still hardly believed that I would not have to give up one or the other. That I could keep them both and allow them to share me, as they called it.

Amber lowered himself into the aisle seat beside me, his trim waist and hips fitting easily. Even the great sword he wore at his waist found a space. But his shoulders were so wide, so broad across that we touched. And with that small contact, a sign of relief rippled through us all. The tension between us eased, the strain ebbed. My left hand naturally, without thought, reached for Amber's broad, callused hand as my right hand twined with Gryphon's long, slender fingers. Gryphon raised my hand, brushed a kiss across the back of it, and pressed it to his heart. A courtly gesture that was as natural and graceful as the man himself, triggering a rare fluttering feeling within me—happiness. And being this happy, having things this perfect made me nervous. Why? Because I knew it couldn't last. Not for me.