AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Being funny was not enough. It wasn’t as if I could make her laugh so hard that she lost all strength and fell helplessly upon my cock.
She didn’t answer me for a long moment, instead taking her time to stride over to the heated pool. She dunked the clean hide into the water, then walked back with the sopping thing in her hands.
She knelt beside me and began to dab gently at the dried fluids on my chest and abdomen.
I almost wondered if she’d forgotten my question. I opened my mouth to ask it again because, cursed peaks of the Deep Sky, I would go out of my already half-crazed mind if she didn’t just tell me what to doto make her love me.
“Generosity,” she said suddenly. “Kindness. I guess, someone who makes me feel safe.”
“You willalwaysbe safe with me,” I said fiercely.
Her hand halted, but she recovered quickly and began her movements once again. The hot wet cloth was a tantalizing drag across my hide.
“But will you be generous?” she asked. “Will you be kind?”
“To you? Of course.”
“But what about to others? People from the other tribes? The other Gahns?”
“I hope you are not telling me that the only way to win your love is to be kind to Gahn Thaleo,” I said flatly. “You can’t have already forgotten the arrow he sunk into my chest. You pulled it out yourself.”
Her brows drew inward and she let out an irritated sigh. “That’s because you barged in here and caused chaos! Things were going perfectly fine around here before you came in hereguns, er, arrows blazing!”
Grunting, I forced myself up into a seated position. I needed to clear this up for my mate, and make it clearnow.
“What are you doing? Lie back down!” Zuh-Tephanie smacked the wet cloth against my chest, trying to push me back down. But I remained firm. My head swam for a moment. I swallowed hard, and things settled enough for me to say my piece.
“You speak as if I have done some great wrong,” I snapped. “As if I have done great harm to the alliance for no reason. But this is because you do not understand our kind. You do not understand me, nor the ways of the Deep Sky. If you did, if you had bothered to ask me anything about what had happened with a willingness to listen to what I had to say, you would know that Gahn Thaleo committed the first wrong. Gahn Thaleo shamed me greatly by bringing you here. In accordance with our culture’s oldest and most sacred laws, I was well within my right to call the taklok. In fact, our waysdemandedthat I do it. Gahn Thaleo knewexactlywhat he was doing when he brought you here without me. He knewexactlywhat the outcome would be because there could have been no other outcome but a taklok.”
Zuh-Tephanie stared at me, her eyes wide and her lips parted with shock.
Fine. Let me continue to shock her, then.
I placed my own hand atop her small one, pressing it harder to my wounded chest.
“The moment Gahn Thaleo invited you into his mountain, he knew that I would come for you. He knew that our ways would demand a taklok for the insult he’d heaped upon me. In fact, I now think it likely he brought you here not only to lure your party closer to his tribe for his own benefit, but also to force me into the taklok in the hopes that he would win. So that he could finally end me.”
Zuh-Tephanie’s lower lip trembled slightly. I gnashed my fangs, longing to slide my tongues along its softness.
She clamped down on that quivering lip with her teeth. Her gaze fell to where I held my hand against her chest.
“Well, I suppose that gives a little more context to the situation.”
Her gaze met mine again. Concerned and questioning.
“Are you telling me the truth?” she asked. “Do you really think Gahn Thaleo invited us,me, here to manipulate you into the taklok?”
“I believe that was a large part of his motivation, yes. And look how well it worked out for him,” I said bitterly. “In your eyes, he is the gracious host, innocently defending himself against my jealous violence. The Deep Sky people know that what I did was justified by all laws and measures. But you new women do not. And thus, I become the monster. Well, if I am the monster in this situation, it is because he has made me so. And at the same time, he made himself out to be thekindone. Thegenerousone.”
Those last words were poison on my tongues. Gahn Thaleo had painted himself with the exact things Zuh-Tephanie looked for in a male. And in doing so, had made me the unreliable one.The unsafe one.
She said she wanted someone who always made her feel safe...
I will be that man. Whether she recognizes it or not.
I swear that I will be that man.
“I’m sorry.”
