I swallow hard. “Until Lena is dead, you mean?”
He steps close to me, so close I have the urge to trace those beautiful grooves that carve over his hips and disappear beneath the waistband of his pants. Damn him for being so hot. It makes it hard to remember that his emotional damage makes him a complete disaster of a person.
I should not have put my hands all over him earlier. They’re itching to touch him again. I stare at the floor so I don’t accidentally reach out and bump a finger down the row of abs that stripe his impossibly muscular torso.
“She doesn’t have to die.” I barely hear him. He cups my jaw, lifts up my face to repeat himself. “She doesn’t have to die, Delphie.”
“Why do you get to call me that, but Aqen can’t? I like him better than you,” I say, feeling obstinate, my hackles up because he’s so attractive and repulsive at the same time.
“Delphie is your nickname,” he says, drawing out the word and breaking it in two parts. “Nick. Name. For me only.”
Ohhh.Nik-name. He thinks Delphie is a pet name just for him to use. That’s why he keeps getting upset when other people use it. He wants it to be special.
He’s still holding my face. Why is he holding my face and looking at me like that? I feel weird. Dizzy.
“I know how to save her,” he says.
“Who?” Duh, he means Lena. Focus, bitch. Get it together. “I mean,how?”
“Give the priests what they want. They don’t care about your friend or Chanísh’s concubines, just like they didn’t really care that my other brothers took terrakins as their queens. The females are just a means to their ends. So I give the priests of the Eye what they want in exchange for the hostages, and Lyro will be free. If he wants to be,” he adds, echoing my earlier words about Aqen. “He can live with the shadowcloaks forever if it makes him happy.”
“What do they want?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Power? Coin? Land? I’ll find out and I’ll give it to them. Nobody has to die.”
I can’t help it. I wrap his waist in a big bear hug and squeeze as tight as I can. “Just when I think I hate you, you come up with this.”
“Delphie,” he says thickly, prying my arms away. “Enough.”
“Nope,” I say, holding on even tighter so my cheek is pressed against his bare skin. “Not done yet. You probably don’t get enough hugs. It might help you, you know. Having physical contact with someone that isn’t fighting or medical treatment. It might be healing.”
He grunts dismissively, but he gives up on trying to pull me off him. His hands settle on my shoulders, and eventually he sweeps them down my back in long, resigned strokes that make me want to whine like my grandpa’s old lap dog. I need hugs, too, damn it.
“Stop making that noise,” he orders.
“Why?”
“Because I told you to.” His grip firms on my upper arms as he attempts to peel me off him again. I squirm out of his hands, but not before I feel the insistent press of a very hard dick against my belly.
Oh.I see. Big grumpy alien is turned on byhugs.
“It’s totally normal,” I assure him, backing up to give him a little more space. But he won’t look at me. Instead, he sits on the bed and puts his boots on with so much focus, it’s like he’s doing brain surgery. I feel myself sliding into therapist mode. “A lot of men can only access their emotions through sexual contact. You perceive platonic touch as intimacy because you so closely equate emotional intimacy and sex. I was touching you a lot earlier, so it makes sense that your body would be a little confused by my display of friendship.”
“You make a lot of assumptions,” he says tersely.
“I’ve met a lot of men.”
“I am not aman.” He practically spits the word. “I’m an Irran warrior. One of the best. I’ve trained for decades to perfect the control of my emotions.”
I wait a beat. He has to be joking. He literally just flipped out multiple times because he thought I had a minor injury. But he doesn’t laugh or give any indication that he’s not dead serious about his “perfect” emotional control. “Um...are you sure about that?”
“I’m sure my cock is notconfused.” He yanks on his long-sleeved sveli and a vest and fur-lined jacket over it, eyes hooded and furious. “It is only eager. Wanting what it’s never had. I will not apologize for that. I warned you several times to move away.”
He did, now that I think about it. I didn’t realize he had a reason for ending the hug prematurely other than his bad personality. “Wait, when you say it wants what it’s never had, do you meanme? Or sex in general?”
He completely ignores the question, and there’s my answer. I suck in a disbelieving breath. How is it that this droolworthy physical specimen has never gotten laid?
“Nik, are you avirgin? Like really truly, get-a-boner-because-you-hugged-a-girl virgin?”
