Something massive and metal was falling out of the dark straight at her.
Her feet wouldn't move.
three
. . .
The rigging line moved.
A flicker. Metal shivering at the wrong angle. The cable above center stage with the three-point rigging rated for the lighting array's weight and then some, was separating.Splitting.The audience was still applauding. She was still standing there with her hands raised and her face open and honest in a way he'd never seen from anyone, and something was falling toward her from the dark.
His body moved.
The rail was chest-height, and he cleared it one-handed, boots hitting the stage floor in a dead sprint. Three strides. Four. The crowd noise warped into something distant and irrelevant, the applause bending around the edges of his focus until the only thing left was her position, the trajectory of the array, and the closing distance between his body and hers. Five strides. Six. She wasn't moving. Her feet were locked, her face turned up toward the sound she'd finally heard.
He hit her at full speed.
His arms wrapped around her. One across her shoulder blades, the other catching her low around the waist. He twisted midair, rotating them so his shoulder took the stage floor. Theimpact drove the air from his lungs. They slid three feet across polished composite, his uniform absorbing the friction burn while he curled his body around hers, one hand cupping the back of her head, pulling her face into his chest.
The lighting array hit the stage where she'd been standing.
Metal screamed against metal. Glass shattered. The crash was enormous. Two hundred pounds of steel and crystal smashed into the exact spot her heels had occupied a second ago, and the sound rolled through the amphitheater like thunder. Someone in the audience screamed. The applause died. Silence rushed in behind the impact, broken only by the tinkling scatter of broken light casings rolling across the stage.
They stopped moving.
She was full-length on top of him. Chest to chest. Her thigh caught between his, her hips flush against his hips, and her warm, shaking breath hit the bare skin of his throat in fast pulses. Her face pressed against his collar, and her mouth was a millimeter from his pulse point. Her hands were fisted in the front of his uniform so hard the fabric pulled taut across his chest.
He was aware of his hands. One splayed across her shoulder blades. The other one that had caught her waist when they were still airborne had ended up on the curve of her ass. His palm spread across the full, warm shape of her through the wine-dark fabric, his fingers gripping where they'd landed. He could not move his hand without deciding where to move it. Up meant her back. Down meant?—
No. He kept it still.
The heat of her body registered everywhere at once. Ten months of remembering a walk in the snow, and his memory hadn't stored this data, the actual physical reality of Phoebe Calloway. Pressed against him from sternum to knee, her warmth soaked through his uniform into his cold skin. He wasMentharian. He ran cold. Contact with warm bodies always registered as contrast. This wasn’t contrast. This was a full-system override. Her body heat bloomed through him in a wave that reached his spine and kept going. His body, which he had controlled with Mentharian discipline for thirty-seven years, responded.
Three seconds of her hands in his uniform and her heartbeat slamming against his chest fast enough he could count it. Three seconds and his truth-sense opened wide with nothing in range to read but her.
He felt her full-body terror first. Then gratitude rising through it. She was alive, and she knew it, and the knowledge was pouring off her in waves of authenticity so pure his truth-sense didn't register it as data; it registered it as warmth. Actual physical warmth spreading through his chest, his throat, in every space where her body pressed against him.
The contact was sustained. Sincere.
The bond clicked.
Not loud. Not the Cinnamite thunderclap Kaelor had described. Quiet. The way Mentharian lore said it happened, when it happened at all. A key turning in a lock, settling into place with a soft, final sound only he could hear.
She is the one.
The certainty sat in his chest beside her warmth and did not move. Unwavering and unambiguous.
She was the one. Phoebe Calloway. The woman he'd been watching for ten months. The voice he'd been calling professional distraction because anything else would have required him to act. She was his mate. Mentharians almost never recognized their bond mate. The lore was clear on that. Once in a generation, if that. The lore was right. And it had happened to him.
Later. He was going to have to process this later.
The medics arrived.
"Sir. Sir, can you?—"
He shifted her off him. The discipline it took was physical, mechanical, a Mentharian override he'd learned in training and had never needed as badly as he needed it now. His hands released her. His arms unlocked. He rolled sideways, depositing her gently onto the stage floor, and was on his feet before she could focus on his face.
He turned away.
