I came on the knot with my nails in his back and my forehead pressed to his shoulder, my breath breaking into nothing.
When I could speak again, barely, I turned my mouth against his jaw. “That was a violation of trust.”
His laugh was almost silent, more breath than sound. Then his hand slid up my spine, anchoring me while the last of it moved through both of us.
“Little spy,” he murmured.
I opened one eye. He was watching me with heat and devotion burning through the vertical black of his pupils. His thumb brushed the back of my neck, where he held me close.
“It only works because you let it.”
I had several excellent arguments in theory. In practice, I was naked, locked around him, and still shaking from an orgasm he had pulled through a bite mark like a man using a door I had opened for him.
I did the dignified thing. I closed my eye again and said nothing.
His mouth curved against the mark, soft and pleased.
Masks Off
Rhain
Ihadn’t slept.
It wasn’t unexpected, which at least spared me the indignity of hope.
The lamp on the desk had been burning since two. My Norwegian council overcoat lay across the back of the chair, exactly where I had placed it. My boots stood by the door, polished first at midnight, then again at three-fifteen, because leather could be brought to order when my father’s madness couldn’t.
At four, I heard footsteps in the corridor. Two sets. Catalina’s and Graves’s.
I knew the cadence of both now. Seventeen days in a building where the woman you want is kept under guard will make a man an expert in the small, ruinous details of sound. The length of her stride. The weight of his. The slight pause she made before decisions.
I exhaled. She was coming. Whether to save me or finish me remained, admittedly, unclear.
I didn’t stand. She had walked toward me before. I had spent the days since learning, with limited success, how not to ruin a miracle by reaching for it too soon. So I waited.
She knocked once, lightly. I had the door open before her hand had fully lowered. Catalina stood in the gray hallway light wearing a black sweater. Hers, and not for the chamber. Her hair hadn’t been brushed, but her eyes were alert.
Graves stood at her left shoulder, half a step back, his sweater open at the throat just enough for me to see the mark she had put there. He had come with her; not in possession of her or as her keeper, but with her. My dragon had several immediate opinions on the matter, all ofthem ancient, territorial, and profoundly unhelpful. The man in me was relieved.
“Catalina.”
“Rhain.”
Her gaze held mine, then moved briefly to the open collar of my shirt, then not at all. “I want the formal claim,” she said.
Everything in me paused.
“In front of the council, so it’s on record. Whatever your father signs after that, he signs against a bond he can no longer call illegitimate.”
I had imagined the sentence, though not precisely this one. In my version, I asked her. There would be a balcony in Oslo and a year of context. Possibly a light, romantic snowfall. I hadn’t imagined her at four in the morning, wearing another man’s claim on her skin while that man stood silent at her shoulder.
“Yes,” I said, though it felt inadequate.
Catalina studied me. “You’re sure?”
“I have been sure for twenty-one days.” I let the truth fall. I had hidden enough from her already. “The question was whether you wanted this.”
“I want this,” she said softly.
