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He was serious.
Things began to click into place in her mind. The way she had felt drawn to him from the beginning. The jealousy she had been feeling today. Her willingness to climb into bed with him, when she had sworn she would never let lust sway her again.
“How long have you known?” she asked him.
“Since the moment we met,” he admitted. “Though I was in denial about it at first.”
“You took me to bed without telling me,” she realized out loud.
Instantly, her mind delivered back to her the thing she hadn’t shared with him - the thing that might have made him unwilling to so much as touch her hand.
“You are not bound to me,” he told her quickly. “That’s why I wouldn’t let you touch me. If I climax with you, in any way, I’m not sure what will happen. I want you to decide it’s what you want before that happens.”
“I can say no?” she asked.
“You can,” he told her, his expression pained. “For me, there will never be another female. But if there is no claiming, I may be able to tear myself from your side and leave you alone if you decide you don’t want me around.”
“You have to be around,” she remembered. “For twenty standard years.”
“If you decide not to be mine, I will ask the Invicta to send a new guard,” he told her. “And I will do everything in my power to stay away from you. But I hope you decide to accept me. If you do, I will spend a lifetime protecting you and bringing you pleasure.”
“And it will always feel like this?” she asked him. “The desperate need for each other?”
She held her breath.
Let him say that the desire will let go of us once the claiming happens, that we can be like any normal couple…
“At first it will be much more intense than this,” he told her. “The mating frenzy will take hold of us, and for days we won’t be able to leave our bed. Then it will slowly calm until the pull between us is more like it is right now, growing stronger as time passes and our bond grows stronger.”
The pull right now was insurmountable.
Already she ached for him again.
And besides, he wasn’t the only one with something to confess. Once she told him the truth she had been hiding about her time aboard the pleasure ships, she was certain he would resent her forever.
“I-I can’t,” she told him, knowing she would hate herself no matter what she decided. “We can’t be mates.”
His eyes flashed with something like desperation.
“Why?” he asked her softly.
“I just can’t,” she whispered.
She half-expected him to try to convince her.
But he clenched his jaw and nodded, launching himself out of her bed and stalking out of the room.
She listened until his footsteps disappeared and then fell back on the bed, feeling like her heart was breaking.
She couldn’t bear for him to go, yet she couldn’t live as a servant to her own desire again. She had escaped it once. How could she bind herself again knowingly?
The idea was terrifying.
And yet with every step Rafe took away from her, she felt a wrenching in her soul, as if it were being torn to pieces.
Tears came for the second time that night, and this time she let go, crying into her pillow until sleep claimed her.
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