Rhain followed my hand. My fingers had drifted to the edge of the claim I still didn’t know how to carry.
I looked at Rhain. His mouth. The fraction of breath he was holding because he had said he wouldn’t move tonight unless I asked.
“Rhain,” I said, standing.
“Yes.”
“Come around the table.”
A breath left him that I hadn’t heard him take.
Then he was moving. Chair back. One step. Two. The table between us gone like it had offended him personally.
The heat of him reached me before his hands did.
For one suspended second, his face was unguarded. Joy. Want. Pain. All of it there, bright and reckless.
His hand came up to the side of my throat where Dominic’s mark sat.
His thumb settled at the hinge of my jaw. The pad of his index finger came to rest half an inch beneath the bite scar.
He didn’t look away from me.
The mark was in his palm now. Dominic’s claim. My answer. The proof of what Rhain had missed and what he was choosing not to punish me for.
His fingers flexed once. Possessive.
“Kjære,” he said, and my name sounded like relief.
Then he bent. And I rose.
His mouth found mine with the heat from earlier still alive beneath it, but now there was more under the want. The kiss was glad and furious and grateful to be allowed, all at once.
His hand stayed at my throat, not gripping, not claiming, justholding the place where every choice in the room had left a mark. He kissed me like he wanted to know all of it. Like he had no interest in pretending Dominic hadn’t been there first, and no intention of letting that be the only truth that mattered.
My fingers caught in his coat.
A rough sound left him against my mouth, and I felt it at the base of my spine.
There was nothing cold in him. Nothing distant. Rhain with the careful hands. The bright joy gone hungry.
A man who had spent the last hour offering patience and then taking it back with his mouth.
So I deepened it, kissing slower. He opened my mouth under his.
Rhain made another sound against my mouth.
Then a word, in Norwegian, so quiet I almost missed it.
“Min.” Mine.
He said it for himself. A confession smuggled into a language he assumed I wouldn’t parse in this state. The joke of it. The hopeless tenderness of him offering me a claim he didn’t dare make in English. It nearly took my knees out from under me.
I bit his lower lip. Lightly. Once. Just to let him know I’d heard him.
His breath broke. He brought his forehead to mine. He stayed there with his eyes closed and his thumb still moving at my jaw.
His mouth was a quarter inch from mine.
