It’s too quiet, too intimate.
Varek turns me gently, enough that I’m facing him, and trails his fingers over the longer dreadlocks at the back of my head.
It’s such a small touch. Careful and unhurried. But it burns straight through me anyway.
“You should not have left the bed without me,” he says softly.
The words should annoy me. Maybe they do, a little.
But then his thumb brushes lightly at the edge of my hairline, and his voice drops lower. “You are precious to me.”
The sentence is so unfairly sweet that my brain more or less stalls out.
I blink at him, open my mouth, then shut it again.
How the hell am I meant to respond to that?
Varek’s gaze shifts over my face with something that looks suspiciously like amusement, as if he knows exactly what he’s just done to my ability to form thoughts.
Probably because he does.
“As fascinating as it would be to watch you attempt this conversation half-conscious,” he says, “you need sleep.”
I scowl automatically because it’s expected of me, even though the idea of sleep sounds dangerously close to heaven. “We need to talk.”
“Yes.”
“Now.”
“Later.”
I glare. He waits. Patient as stone and twice as immovable.
The bastard is absolutely right, and I hate it.
“A nap,” he says. “Then we talk.”
I hesitate anyway because some part of me still resists the idea of surrendering to care, even when I want it.
Varek reads it in my face. “I will stay.”
The words slip under my guard with insulting ease. My shoulders relax before I can stop them. “For an hour,” I say, because apparently I’m still pretending I’m negotiating from a position of strength.
His expression softens. “For an hour.”
I look at the bed, then at him. Then, because I am either brave or deeply gone in the head from pain and exhaustion, I say, “Join me.”
There’s a beat of silence. Heat creeps up my neck because now that the words are out there, they sound exactly as vulnerable as they are.
“I mean—” I clear my throat. “Hold me.”
God, I hate everything.
“I know I’m a grown-arse man,” I add, because apparently humiliation wants company. “I know I shouldn’t need?—”
“Pax.”
His tone stops me.
