Page 149
I stared at him. There was no defense in his expression anymore. No captain trying to manage the situation, no dragon trying to protect his mate. Just Max, standing in front of me and finally letting me see the thing he’d been too afraid to hand over.
And I hated that I understood, because he’d been right. “And now I’m doing it too.”
“I know.”
“Don’t.”
His eyebrows drew together.
“Don’t say I know like that.” I swallowed against the ache in my throat. “You don’t get to understand how this feels when you’re the reason I’m feeling it.”
Max flinched, and I wanted him to.
The thought came with a vicious little stab of satisfaction that disappeared almost as soon as I felt it, because I didn’t actually want to hurt him. I wanted him to understand that he’d hurt me, and somehow those had become two different things.
I sat down on the nearest bale because my legs suddenly felt less reliable than I wanted them to, and for once Max didn’t comment on my ribs. He stayed exactly where he was, several feet away, as though an invisible line had appeared across the barn floor and he understood that crossing it had to be my decision.
That should have helped, but instead, it made my throat tighten again. “You know what the really fucked-up part is?”
Max waited. “I still want you.”
His eyes closed for a second.
“And I don’t know what to do with that now.” I stared at my hands. “An hour ago, I could’ve told you exactly why I wanted you. Because you’re bossy and overprotective and completely incapable of minding your own business. Because you make coffee like it’s a personality trait. Because you pretend you don’t find me funny when I know you do.” My throat tightened again, but I kept going. “Because you looked after me when I was hurt without ever making me feel weak for needing it.”
I finally looked at him.
“Now there’s this other possibility sitting in my head, and I can’t make it go away just because I don’t like it.”
For a long moment, neither of us spoke while I tried to separate the Max standing in front of me from everything he’d just told me, but I couldn’t do it.
Maybe I wasn’t supposed to.
The man who’d kept this from me was also the man who’d refused to touch me when I was drugged. The man who’d been terrified of what his lifebound nature might do was the same man who’d stood naked in a clearing and shown me his dragon even though he’d been convinced I might run.
None of those things canceled the others out, even though I fucking wished they did.
“The telepathy means you’re absolutely certain I’m your mate.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s all you know for certain.”
“Yes.”
“Everything else, we ask Ignatius.” I rubbed both hands over my face, trying to find space in my head for everything that had been shoved into it in the last hour.
Dragon. Mate. Lifebound. Max’s mother and his father. My own father. And somewhere underneath all of it was the memory of Max on his knees in front of me, trusting me in a way I understood considerably better now than I had ten minutes ago.
“What happens if I decide I can’t do this?”
The question hurt him.
I saw it happen, saw the tiny loss of color and the way his breathing changed before he got himself under control, but when he answered, there was no hesitation.
“Then I’ll live with it.”
No argument. No reminder that I was his mate. No dragon bullshit about fate or destiny or whatever else might have given him an excuse to claim I belonged to him whether I wanted to or not.
