I lick my lips and fist his shirt, pulling him closer. “Wouldn’t you rather pick up where we left off?”
Leading me deeper into the room, he sits in one of the leather chairs and pulls me into his lap. I squirm against the hard length of him under me, wanting him to kiss me again, but when I lean in, he draws back. “This scar of yours...” He traces it through the fabric of my dress, his touch sending another shiver through me. “...it’s an important part of who you are. I want to know everything about my mate. I want no secrets between us when we become one. No reason for you to believe I haven’t accepted every part of you. It’s why I showed youmy dragon when I did. Now I need you to show me the hidden part of you. I can wait for this.”
The way he’s looking at me makes my stomach flip, but I see in his eyes that he needs to know my secret before we can take the next step. Maybe it’s time I shared my trauma with someone else. My heart beats faster with anxiety, but I won’t deny him this. “I was in a car accident a little over a year ago. My twin sister, Marion, was driving. The scar is from my seat belt.” He smooths a comforting hand along the back of my head, down my spine. I’ve never told a single soul the entire story. “Marion was wearing her seat belt too, but she had the steering wheel in front of her. When the airbags went off, the force, along with the crash, killed her instantly. I had more room. That’s what they tell me anyway about why I survived and she didn’t.”
He winces, I sense he’s feeling what I am, down our bond. It’s intensely intimate. “To lose your sister like that and then have to recover physically while you were grieving…” He shakes his head.
I take a deep breath. This is a depressing conversation to have when only moments ago all signals pointed to us getting naked. But Connor is right—it’s better if we can share the things that made us who we are. Marion is part of that. If he wanted to, he could enter my mind and see it all for himself, but he’s asked me to willingly share it with him. It means a lot, and if he’s brave enough to listen, I need to be brave enough to share. My voice comes out strained as I continue. “More difficult because we’d only recently reunited. We neverknew our parents. We were both abandoned at a religious orphanage as babies.”
“You’d recently reunited?”
“Three years after we graduated the orphanage, Marion joined a convent. She became a nun with the same order of sisters who ran our orphanage.”
“No shit? A nun?” He looks perplexed, which I get because no one was more perplexed than me when Marion took her vows.
“Yes. A Catholic nun. One of the Sisters of Mercy.” I catch myself trailing my fingers through the scattering of ash-blond hair on his arm. I stop petting him, but he makes a disappointed rumble deep in his throat and I start again.
“The convent is why you lost touch?” he asks in a low, gritty voice. “I don’t know many nuns. Their way of life is a mystery to me.”
“She was a cloistered nun. They take vows to live a life separate from the rest of society and rarely journey beyond the boundaries of their abbey. When they join their order, they leave their families behind and consider the other sisters their new family. As you can imagine, that was particularly difficult for me as her twin. She was all the family I had. When she chose them over me, she was orphaning me all over again. I don’t remember my parents giving me up. But I remember Marion leaving me.”
Pain lances through me at the memory.
“But you reconnected.”
I can tell he’s trying to puzzle it all out, and I don’t blame him for the confusion furrowing his brow. Thetruth is I’ve spent years trying to understand her choices. I take a deep breath and continue. “About two years ago, she called me. One of the things the sisters were allowed to do is take long walks on the property where they’d engage in prayers and meditation. My sister found a sliver of land adjacent to the abbey’s property that she felt repeatedly drawn to, a spiritual connection she couldn’t explain. She thought it was… angelic. I know that sounds weird, but it was part of her belief system.”
Heat radiates off him in a wave that goes straight to my core. I shift in his lap and feel his nose brush the skin behind my ear as he says, “Dragons believe in angels, both light and dark. They’re part of our mythology as celestial beings. Was the angel speaking to her?”
I sigh, leaning more fully into him. His hand lands on my inner thigh, just above my knee, and holds me in place. I hear him swallow. He’s holding himself back, giving me time to share everything. “More like guiding her,” I continue. “The wooded acres were home to a small chapel and a cemetery, all of it run down and long overgrown from lack of use. Marion didn’t even know the land wasn’t owned by the abbey until a For Sale sign appeared. Some steel magnate had died unexpectedly. The family hadn’t even known the property existed until his death, and they sought to unload it quickly.
“Marion wanted it, but nuns aren’t allowed to own things individually. I’m not sure what she’d tried before she called me, if she’d asked the Mother Superior to obtain it or simply wanted it for herself, but one day she reached out. Begged me to buy it for her. The sheer desperation in her voice… You would have thought it was life or death. I hadn’t seen her in almost a decade, and she was weeping on the phone, asking for my help. So I helped her. I bought it, under my name, for her. I made the payments. She still had no money, of course. The Alex Rogue series had taken off. But one thing was still missing in my life, and it was her. I wanted my family back, so I bought it for her under one condition.”
“What was that?”
“On the days she was allowed to walk and pray, I required her to meet me on that land. We met every Tuesday afternoon for over a year.”
“In secret, I presume?”
“Oh yes. She was breaking her order’s rules by meeting with me. Anyway, one afternoon she wanted to show me something. She said it was important, and at her insistence I allowed her to drive. To make a long, painful story short, we... crashed. She died. And I got this.” I run a finger over the scar. “Between my medical costs and not being able to make my deadlines because I was recovering, I am officially broke and in danger of losing the very property I bought for her.”
Our eyes lock. Connor’s rapt attention is focused on me with an intensity that makes my breath catch. Marion’s death holds so many questions for me. If I’d told her no that day, or if it had been me behind the wheel. My memory of our last meeting is wrapped up in guilt and confusion. But Connor seems to accept all of it. I adjust myself on his lap, my lips only a breath away from his.
“So that’s how Roman sank his claws into you. You were lonely and desperate.”
Anger sparks and surges in my veins. This again!Fuck, the way he says it so matter-of-factly, as if it’s a forgone conclusion, is utterly insulting. “Lonely and desperate?” I shove against his chest and leap to my feet. “Oh, I forgot. You’re sure I was marrying him for his money! Fuck. You.”
I whirl, my hands balling into fists as I stride for my room, but he snags me around the waist, his rough whiskers scratching my neck when he pulls me flush against his chest and growls into my ear, “Oh no you don’t. Not this time.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
CONNOR
Fiona struggles against me, kicking and trying her best to squirm from my grip, but it’s not happening. Not today. Not after she finally shared her darkest memory with me. Down the bond, I felt her need to share that memory of her sister with me and also fear, slick as black ice in her mind. But I know my mate. That chain I saw in her head that stifled her creativity for so long, it came from that accident and her telling me just now was necessary to free her from another set of chains, ones that were keeping her from giving herself to me completely. Now that she’s opened up, I won’t let a few careless words ruin this. I wrap my hand around her throat and hold her to me, my cock hard against her backside with the need to claim her. I won’t force her, but I won’t let her cower from it this time. Not now. Not when we’re this close.
“Stay with me,” I growl into her ear. “You’re safe with me, Fiona. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for that to come across the way it did.”
She swallows, and I can feel it against my palm.
