Page 54 of His Human Believer

I unlock the door and stand back and let her walk in ahead of me, and then I stand in my own entry and watch my bound look at my domicile.

She has stopped in the middle of the front room. She turns around slowly. “There’s one chair in this front room. Why isn’t there anymore furniture?”

“I have not required a second,” I say. “No being has ever come here because I don’t invite anyone.”

She lifts an eyebrow. “That is going to change.”

I grin. “Of course. And I welcome the change.”

Then I show her the east room and I do not tell her what it is for. “This room faces east,” I say. “The light comes in across the floor at an angle from approximately the second hour until the fifth. The wall opposite the window is interior stone, four hundred millimeters, which would take acoustic treatment extremely well. The window seals. There is a supply of shelving in the cellar.”

“Vidar. Is this a studio?”

“It could be.”

And she crosses the room and puts her forehead against my chest and stands there with her fists closed in the front of my sash and does not say anything for a while.

And then I take her upstairs and show her the primary bedroom.

She walks in ahead of me. The bed takes up the far wall because it is Hyrrokin-sized.

“Why are there two closets?”

“Because Senior Fellows are housed on the assumption of a bound.”

She turns around. “Yes, I want to live here. I want the second closet, the bench in the garden and the room with the light. I want all of it and I’m going to bring my chair, I’m warning you now, it’s an ugly chair.”

I cross that room and get my claws in the follicles at the back of her head and I kiss her. I get both claws under her and lift her and her legs come around my waist and I put her against the wall beside the second closet and she makes a sound directly into my mouth that I intend to think about for the rest of my life.

“You are mine,” I growl.

“I’m yours,” she says, and bites my lower lip.

I set her on her feet.

“Take those clothes off. I want you naked.”

She goes still.

And I understand at once what is happening, because I have been watching this female for eleven diurnals and I know precisely which of her hesitations are practical and which are not.

“Margaret.”

“I’ve never…” She stops. Starts again. “Okay. So. I’ve never actually been fully naked in front of anybody. In the light. Ever.”

“Not once?”

“Not once in thirty-four years.” She laughs and it comes out wrong. “There’s always been a shirt on, or a blanket or the lights were off or…”

“Take it off,” I say. “In the light. Slowly. I have waited too long. You will not deny me this, which I consider the most erotic moment of my life.”

She reaches back and the white top comes off over her head. And then the skort, and then she is standing in the middle of my bedroom in the late light with nothing on at all and her hands start to come up.

“No.”

She stops.

“Put your hands at your sides.”