“Yes.”
I considered him. He considered me back. It wasn’t a conversation so much as two territorial disasters attempting grammar.
“All right,” I said. “I won’t approach her in a way that forces your hand.”
His jaw moved.
“You won’t approach her in a way that forces mine,” I added. “We’ll discover what to do with this when we have more information than we currently have.”
“You expect me to take your word?”
“No.”
His eyes narrowed slightly.
Good. Honesty was refreshing. Also occasionally suicidal.
“I expect you to understand that I have no interest in frightening her, exposing her, or starting a clan conflict in a guest corridor before dinner.” I paused. “Especially not before dinner. These things should have standards.”
Nothing in his face moved. But the air loosened, barely.
“She is under my escort,” he said.
“Good.” The word meant more than it said.
“She is also my mate.” The corridor went still enough to hear the building breathe.
The truth. Impolite of it.
Graves took one step toward me. Only one. It was enough to make every old instinct in me bare its teeth. I didn’t move. We had both come too far to be stupid in a hallway.
The door behind him remained closed. Catalina was on the other side of it, likely unaware that two dragons were negotiating the shape of her future a dozen feet from where she might be removing her shoes.
I hoped she was removing her shoes. Then I immediately hoped something else.
Unhelpful of them both.
Graves looked at me. I looked back. At last, he gave a single grunt of acknowledgment. An admission that these were facts neither of us could kill.
I took it. “Goodnight, Graves.”
“Solberg.”
I backed away the way I had come. Slowly. Turning my back on him too quickly would’ve been insulting.
Also, some part of me didn’t want to stop looking at her door.
* * *
I lay on the bed in my assigned quarters at one in the morning and stared at the ceiling and ran through the situation one more time.
In two days, a state dinner. A room full of shifters from three clans. The U.S. government’s senior trade representative. My father’s agenda moving through every conversation. And a small dark-haired woman in a translator’s wardrobe who would be standing at Yuki Mendel-Ashenmere’s left shoulder, likely unaware that she had twoshifters who claimed her as their mate.
Two shifters from rival clans were going to be trying to behave themselves around the same woman in front of an audience of some hundred and twenty people.
We weren’t going to be able to behave ourselves. I was very confident on this point.
I closed my eyes against the day. I thought about the look she’d given me across the dispersing room. She’d taken my measure and I had felt it.
