“I think you’re right,” he said.
They reached the gate to Baralt’s house, but he didn’t reach for it right away. Instead he found himself standing there, looking down at Polly and turning over something that had been building in him all day like snowmelt gathering behind a dam.
Today she’d stood in a market that terrified her, comforted a female falling apart, and faced down a bitter stranger without hiding behind him once. He’d spent the past year protecting her from the world. Perhaps it was time to start helping her find her way back into it.
The thought was both exhilarating and terrifying.
“Njkall?” she asked softly. “Where did you go?”
“Nowhere.” He reached for the gate. “Just thinking.”
“About what?”
He looked at her for a long moment. “About how much you’ve changed. And how I might need to change with you.”
She didn’t ask what he meant. But her small fingers clasped his enormous furred palm and squeezed once before letting go.
Then he opened the gate, and warmth and firelight spilled out to meet them, and Izzie’s voice called a greeting from within, and he put the moment away to be examined later.
The journey home passed in the dark. The sleigh runners hissed over the snow, the stars wheeled overhead through breaks in the cloud cover, and Tess sat wrapped in furs beside Polly, exhausted into silence. Polly dozed against his side for part of the ride, her small body finally surrendering to the day’s toll, and he held himself still so as not to wake her, cataloging the warm weight of her and the soft sound of her breathing.
Cera met them at the healer’s cave and took Tess in hand, promising to make her eat something before she slept. Polly hovered until she was sure Tess was settled, and only then did she let him walk her back to their quarters.
He’d expected her to collapse into sleep the moment they arrived.
He was wrong.
He was banking the fire in the main cave when she came to him. He heard the soft pad of her bare feet on the stone and the whisper of fabric before he saw her. He turned, expecting to send her to bed, but the words died in his throat.
She stood in the entrance to her sleeping cave, in one of the short gowns that skimmed lightly over her body, her dark hair loosearound her shoulders, and her grey eyes bright with something that looked almost like exhilaration.
“You should be sleeping, little one,” he said roughly.
“I can’t.” She crossed the cave towards him, and there was no hesitation in her, no caution. “I’m too—” She laughed, a soft startled sound. “I don’t even know what I am. Tired. But wired. Like I ran a race and won it and I can still feel it humming in me.”
She stopped in front of him, so close he could feel the heat from her body. “I keep thinking about today. About all of it. And I keep thinking—I did that. I did that. And I want?—”
She stopped.
He held very still. The fire popped behind him. He was suddenly, acutely aware of how little she wore, and how much he wanted, and how dangerous both those things were.
“You want what?” he asked.
“You,” she said, and then she reached up, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him. A hungry kiss, fueled by the day’s triumph, and it hit him like an avalanche.
He kissed her back. Gods help him, he couldn’t not kiss her. His hands spanned her waist, and he felt her shiver at the touch—not in fear, he was certain of it now. She pressed closer as the kiss deepened. Her mouth opened under his, and he tasted her, and a low rumble built in his chest that he couldn’t have stopped if he’d tried. She made one of those delicious sounds against his lips, wanting and unguarded, and it went through him like a spear.
He was losing control. He could feel it slipping.
And the moment he felt it slip, the old fears rose up to meet it—the fear of his own size and strength, and the fear that in some unguarded moment he might hurt her or frighten her or take one step too far and shatter the fragile trust they’d built. She was so small. So breakable. And he was?—
He started to pull back.
“No.” Her hands tightened in his fur, and she refused to let go. “No. Don’t.”
He went still. “Polly?—”
“You always do this.” Her breath came fast, but her eyes were steady, and there was that stubbornness in her, that quiet iron core that had kept her going all this time. “You always pull back. I know why. I know you’re scared of hurting me.” Her hands softened against his chest, gentled. “But you’re not going to hurt me. You never have. Not once, in all this time. And I’m tired of us both being scared.”
