“You didn’t have to do all that,” she tells me softly.
My mouth pulls into a thin line. “One thing you should know about me is that I’m not entirely rational when it comes to what’s mine.”
“Am I yours?” Her hazel eyes find mine.
“Yes.”
She looks away, standing with the bowl in her hand.
I catch her wrist and let my touch linger. “Where are you going?”
She lifts a brow. “I have to stitch you up, right?”
Reluctantly, I let her go.
A minute later, she comes back with everything she needs and I watch her every move. She’s graceful. Sure. Like she’s done this a thousand times before. Which, maybe she has.
“First, I’m going to dab some clove oil on it to numb the pain.”
“I don’t need that.”
“Stop being stupid,” she mutters, then starts gently dabbing my wound.
It does ease some of the stinging sensation, but I honestly don’t require anything for the pain. I’ve had far worse injuries and had nothing but a leather strap to bite down on while they tended my wounds. Still, if it makes her feel better, I’m happy to stay silent.
“This next part is still going to hurt.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You don’t have to be brave.”
“I’m not. A few stitches is nothing.”
Her expression says she doesn’t believe me, or maybe she doesn’t want to believe me, but she gets to work. The stitches feel like nothing. A gentle poking. A movement of the flesh. My focus is more drawn to the rise of her breasts as she breaths evenly. My fingers itch to reach out to touch the swell of her, to see if she’s as soft as I remember.
Everything about her awakens something inside of me I’m not familiar with. A longing. An intense need. It’s not just a desire to get off. It’s a desire to be inside of her, which is something so foreign to me that it frightened me at first.
I don’t know if it’s because of my connection to her through our dragons. I know that my dragon, Verdraxa, is obsessed with Ebron. Lives, breathes, and eats to please him. The tension and longing between them to consummate their relationship has been living a living thing between them, between all of our connections. And yet, this doesn’t feel like it’s because of our dragons. This feels like something that would have inevitably become something, whether I met Harper as a dragon rider or as a healer.
“I’m sorry we weren’t there to protect you from Tesson.”
She glances at me again, uncertain. “It’s not your responsibility–”
“It is.”
Her laugh is uneasy. “We haven’t all accepted this marriage, so why are you acting like you have?”
“My brothers and I have accepted it.”
Her brows wrinkle as she continues to work. “That’s hard to believe.”
“You’re hard to resist.”
She bites her lip and glances at me beneath her lashes, making my blood rush even harder south. “You don’t mean that. This is another game. Another plan.”
“Man, we really fucked things up with you, haven’t we?”
It takes her a minute before she says, “Maybe.”
