He moved against the headboard and allowed her to choose the distance between them. Veya shifted toward him until her shoulder rested against his side, and her fingers remained twisted in the fabric of his shirt.
Dax placed one arm around her only after she settled there.
The contact was not intended to cure the pain or satisfy any supernatural demand. It offered no magical solution and promised nothing beyond the next few minutes.
It was simply what she had asked for.
When another tremor passed through her, Dax remained beside her and allowed her to hold on. He did not kiss her again, although every part of him remembered the shape of her mouth.
Veya gradually relaxed against him.
“You really want me,” she murmured after a while.
Dax looked down at her.
“That should not sound so surprising.”
“I have had a difficult week.”
“You have had an exceptionally poor introduction to immortality.”
Her faint laugh moved against his chest.
Dax remained with her as the fire settled lower and the worst of the tremors began to ease. He had entered the room furious with Rhen and left the training center knowing exactly how little his brother valued the woman now resting against him.
That knowledge changed nothing about what Dax felt.
Rhen saw currency.
Dax saw Veya.
When the next wave came, she reached for him by choice, and he stayed.
Chapter 26
Hours had passed since Dax carried Veya back to the eastern guest suite.
She lay curled beneath a thin blanket, her lashes resting against flushed cheeks while her lips parted around shallow, habitual breaths. Every so often, a small tremor moved beneath her skin, suggesting that the heat had not disappeared so much as retreated deeper into her body to wait.
Dax sat in the chair beside the bed with his elbows resting on his knees and his hands locked together.
His jaw ached from clenching it.
He could still taste her.
The memory of her mouth against his returned with brutal clarity, along with the sound she had made when he answered the kiss and the frantic strength of her hands gripping his shirt. He remembered the heat of her skin beneath his palm and the violence of his own reaction when she told him she had wanted him before the library.
He should have pulled away sooner.
He had not.
More troublingly, he had not wanted to.
The bedroom remained heavy with the scents of smoke, sweat, Rhen’s blood, and the arousal neither of them had managed to conceal. Dax’s desire lingered alongside hers, answering in spite of every argument he had used to keep himself under control.
He wanted Veya.
It was not because she was tethered, fevered, or vulnerable. He wanted the furious woman who demanded choices inside a house constructed from orders. He wanted the reluctant laugh she tried to hide, the intelligence behind her questions, and the stubbornness with which she continued fighting for herselfafter the world had torn her apart and remade her without permission.
