AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His hand cups my cheek. Heat floods through me at the touch, pooling between my thighs, my core pulsing with a sudden, needy ache. My next breath is ragged, but I force myself back under control. Fix him with another pointed look.
He only looks back at me, an adorable sort of confusion coming in to his expression. I sigh. Spell it out for him.
“You believe that about me - readily, without even knowing anything about what actually happened with my mission. But you can’t believe it about yourself?”
His jaw actually drops as the realisation floods over him. He sits back, as if I’ve dealt him a physical blow. But his back goes a bit straighter, a tension leaving his shoulders. Then he dips his head again, shooting me a bashful grin, the green of his cheeks darkening as if he’s blushing.
“Do you believe the same about me as I believe about you?” he says.
It’s a loaded question. So many ways of interpreting it. But do I believe that he did everything he could for Sam?
“Yes.”
“Then perhaps I can believe it about me also.”
He looks up at me, and the bashfulness melts out of his expression, a roguish grin spreading in its place. My core clenches.
The drugs they take to… facilitate. You could take them too.
Brannigan’s voice drifting out of the fog in my memory, along with an image of her pushing some small packet across my desk. The two little green pills inside it. It cuts through the heat building in me in an instant, bile rising up my throat to replace it.
Bred for brawn, not beauty. The muscle definition in my shoulders might be a work of art to some people, but I’m not beautiful. I’m not dainty or curvy or feminine.
But Sam is all those things, and she’s right there, frozen in Maldek’s memory around us. She’s right there, and I assumed he cared about her in a ‘more than just friends’ kind of way. But his eyes never waver. They’re glued on me.
You know the ways of mating?
I swipe away the memory of the village, of pretty little Sam, taking us back to the plain white room.
“This place is real, you know,” I say, my voice crackling slightly. I push past it. “We called it ‘the Canvas’, as in a blank one.”
Maldek frowns, clearly not understanding. If he’s bothered by the sudden shift in mood, location, he doesn’t show it.
“It’s a human saying - a blank canvas. Literally, it means that you have a blank space to paint a picture on, but we also say it to mean like it’s a fresh start, or you could make anything you like out of something.”
“Like a pelt before it has been cut into pieces to make clothes. It has the possibility to become anything still.”
“Yeah, exactly. This room was like that - you could paint anything on it you liked. My trainers used to use it to teach us skills. Me and the other soldiers, warriors, I trained with.”
“A dreamspace in the waking world.”
“Pretty much. But no connection to mates.” I don’t know why I’m so anxious to reassure him of this. “Anyone could use it. We’d use it for pretend missions, and then our trainers would go over our actions with us.”
“As you have just done for me?”
“Exactly.” I conjure up some generic trees around an open space, then get to my feet. Maldek rises beside me, shooting me a questioning look.
He said he has come to know my spirit, looks at me like he wants to devour me. And though the memory of Brannigan, the drugs she pushed across the table at me, what exactly they were for, lurks in the back of my mind, ready to extinguish any heat I might feel towards him, I find I still want to feel that heat. Want to know what he would do about it, given a chance.
So I’m going to give him a chance.
“When you found me, you didn’t jump in front of me to save me from that thing,” I say, looking back at him. “Why?”
He shrugs. “I thought you did not need saving. I thought you needed a better weapon.”
“Never fought with a spear before.” I conjure one into my hand. “Don’t really know how to use one.” I look over at him. “Would you teach me?”
The smile spreads slowly across his face, growing wider and wider long after I think it’s not possible for it to get any bigger.
