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The washcloth is cold and when I touch it to my skin, I feel immediately better. Physically, that is. I’m still emotionally miserable.
He sits beside me on the bed with a tired sigh. “I could have just as easily sent you away with your parents as your sisters were banished with their mates. You wanted out of your mating pact. I needed an assurance that your father won’t make further moves against me.”
“That makes me an insurance policy,” I point out. “Or a hostage.”
“Or a queen,” he argues. “Didn’t they teach you history in school? Kings and queens and noblemen?”
“Of course, they did.”
“And those royal marriages? What were they based on?” He waits for a response I don’t make before going on. “Political advantage. If a king marries his daughter to the ruler of a neighboring country, will he then attack that country? Put his daughter in danger?”
“Maybe.” I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of being even partially right, but now that my unsustainable level of rage is dropping, he’s beginning to make sense. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you told me it was a choice. You made me promise to become your mate, when you were planning to force me into this, anyway.”
“No.” His gentle denial sucks the air from the room. “That’s why I asked you to make the choice, Bailey.”
I meet his eyes and see a pain there that he couldn’t possibly be faking. He wants me to believe him. It wounds him that I don’t.
“I never lied to you when I said I thought you would be a good queen. You make difficult choices and follow them through. You survived on your own after you invoked the Right of Accord—something I thought only I had done. And I never lied when I said I thought you’d make a good mate for me.” He tentatively touches my cheek. “I’ve known you are mine since the moment I laid eyes on you at the ball. Since the moment I touched you. I can’t explain it—”
“You feel it, too,” I whisper. His eyes widen in startled surprise and even though that’s enough affirmation for me, I add, “The…pull.”
He nods slowly.
“What is it?” I ask, my voice barely squeaking out.
“I don’t know.” The fact that he doesn’t is unsettling. “I’ve never heard of such a thing happening before. I wondered at first if it had something to do with the Right of Accord, if it’s meant to keep us with our own kind. But what I do know is that I dream of you, Bailey. You haunt me. And I hate to admit it but if you had chosen to leave the pack instead of accept my offer… I might not have let you go.”
Whatever the strange attraction is, it swells between us now. I see the hunger in him, the desperation I know too well, that I couldn’t bury under my layers of anger and sorrow. It claws its way up through me, energizing me with raw need, and I feel it building in him, too, echoing what I feel and projecting it back a thousand fold.
I hate him. But I don’t. I never want to see him again. But I don’t want him to leave. And when he grabs me and kisses me so hard, I have to hold onto him to stay afloat, I realize that this has never been a choice for either of us.
He pulls me roughly into his lap and grips the hair at the nape of my neck, baring my throat to him. “You’re mine,” he groans against my hot skin.
“Yours,” I whisper back, and I know to the depths of my soul that it’s the truth.
CHAPTER 20
Maybe it’s not a good idea to sleep with the man who just turned my entire world upside down. But ignoring the almost painful need that binds us is a growing agony, and the closeness of his body is a welcome distraction. It’s not like things could get better by not doing it, and for some reason, Nathan’s hands on me feel righter than my anger does.
His heated kisses reach the collar of my t-shirt, so I lean away to take it off. He pulls the lace cups of my bra down and buries his face against my breasts, and I arch my back, trusting that he can hold me up with the single hand splayed across my lower back. Gripping my thighs around his waist helps steady me, but it maddens me at the same time. I physically ache to feel his skin on mine, to touch as much of him as I can with as much of myself as I can, and my jeans are not helping.
“I couldn’t get you out of my mind,” Nathan murmurs. “All of the things I wanted to do to you…”
