I decide to lose.
The want hits the bond before I’ve finished deciding, because the bond doesn’t wait for decisions. Across the table, Maximus stops mid-sentence.
Mid-sentence. The man has briefed war councils through artillery.
His eyes come up and find mine, and I watch it land on his face, and what it does to him is something no enemy has ever managed. Adrienne is still talking about the eastern knot. He hasn’t heard a word of it since his eyes found mine. Neither have I.
“We’ll pick this up in an hour,” I announce, in a tone nobody argues with.
I stand. I cross to my husband. I take him by the collar of his shirt, two-fisted, and I look up at the most controlled creature on the eastern seaboard, the man who has commanded armies and outwaited empires and never once in his existence moved before he chose to.
“Celeste,” he says.
There’s a war in it. The war loses.
The crack starts at the eyes, and it runs down through his jaw and his shoulders and the stiff military posture in his spine, and what’s left underneath is a man looking at his wife, holding approximately zero negotiating power and unwilling to trade thehelplessness for anything. Six hundred years of discipline, and it comes apart for me. Not for armies. Not for empires. For me, in a conference room, with ink on my fingers.
“Walk,” I tell him.
He walks.
Behind me I hear Adrienne set down her pen with enormous dignity and slide the diagrams to the far side of the table. I hear Julian, who has wandered in at the worst possible moment with a tablet, say to the room at large, “Right. I’ll just route the eastern knot myself, shall I.” His accent thickens when he’s exasperated, and right now the Scottish is thick enough to spread on bread. I hear Simone laugh, once, bright and unashamed. Alexei, back from the field an hour and already at her end of the table, doesn’t laugh, but I’d bet the compound he’s filing the sound away.
We make it as far as the corridor before his composure gives out. Then his hand closes over mine and I’m the one being walked, fast, his mouth dropping to my ear.
“An hour,” he says, low, “is not going to be enough.”
I don’t hear anyone try to stop us. Nobody in this building is stupid enough or fast enough, and the war, as it turns out, can wait.
It waits longer than an hour.
The door of our quarters closes and what was left of the composed man ends with the sound of the latch.
He turns me and my back meets the door and his mouth is on mine before I finish gasping, and this kiss has nothing in common with the one on the training floor. That one didn’t ask for anything. This one asks for everything, and I give it, both hands in his hair, pulling him down, and he makes a sound against my mouth that nobody alive has heard.
His hands are cold. My skin is burning. Everywhere he touches, his cold meets my heat, and I feel him register the heat ofme the way he registers everything, thoroughly, and then stop registering anything at all.
His hands find the hem of my shirt and the shirt is gone, and his mouth is on my shoulder before the fabric lands. I get his buttons half undone before my patience runs out and the rest of them scatter across the floor, and he laughs, low, against my throat. My leggings require cooperation. We don’t have any. Something tears, and neither of us looks to see what.
The crescent over my heart is glowing. I can see it reflected in his eyes, crimson, pulsing with my heartbeat, and his answers it through the last of his shirt before that’s gone too, two marks throwing red light into the dark room, brightening every time we touch. The bond is open and flooding, and this part never stops undoing me, no matter how many nights I’ve lived it. Wanting him while I feel him wanting me. The want reflecting between us, his rushing into mine and mine into his, building on every pass, until I can’t tell whose hunger I’m burning with and it stops mattering.
He lifts me and carries me to the bed. And then he goes still above me, and his hands frame the curve below my navel, and everything in him changes registers at once.
Four heartbeats in the dark. His head bows. His palms rest there, careful, reverent, a man holding the only altar he’s ever believed in.
“Still even,” he says against my skin. Counting them, even now.
I give him exactly three seconds of worship.
“You said an hour wouldn’t be enough,” I remind him.
“It won’t.”
“Then stop budgeting it.”
The care leaves him in one breath. What replaces it has no patience in it at all, and I arch up to meet it.
His mouth moves over me. Throat. Collarbone. The crescent mark, and when his lips find it the mark flares under them and theheat goes through me to the bone, and my hands fist in the sheets, and he does it again because he felt exactly what it did to me. His tongue traces the edge of the mark and the flare doubles and triples and I feel my spine lift off the bed. There’s no hiding anything tonight. Every touch lands twice, once on my skin and once in my chest where the bond carries it, his pleasure arriving tangled with mine until we’re both drowning in it twice over.
