“Are you hurt?” He slid his hands along her arms, running them along her ribs. Looking for breaks, for blood, for damage. “Juni, talk to me. Are you?—”
“I’m okay,” she whispered. “I’m okay. I just... was doing chores. Hauling feed. I didn’t—” She sucked in a breath, eyes welling with fresh tears.
The fear that had driven him across the field twisted. Became something else. Something hot and sharp burning through his chest.
“What the draanth were you thinking? I told you not to go in there with them!”
She flinched away from him, and some small part of him knew he was being an ass, but he couldn’t stop.
“I told you they were dangerous.” He pushed himself to his feet, needing to move before he did something stupid like try to shake some sense into her. “They’re not pets, Juni. They’re not your Earth animals that you can just walk up to because you think they’re pretty.”
“I know. I’m sorry, I just?—”
“You just what?” He was pacing now, hands shaking so hard he had to clench them into fists. The pain from his injuries was starting to register, but he ignored it. Pain was nothing. Pain meant he was alive. She was alive. For now. “Decided my warnings didn’t apply to you? Thought you knew better?”
She pushed herself up, wincing. There was a scrape along her jaw he hadn’t noticed before, beading with blood.
“That’s not—I didn’t think?—”
“No, you didn’t think.” He growled. “You could have died. Do you understand that?”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t bring you back from dead. Sorry doesn’t undo watching you—” He cut himself off, jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached.
She was crying again. Not sobbing, not making a sound, but tears rolled down her cheeks steadily, cutting new tracks through the dust. She looked small and lost.
And her hands… draanth, her palms were scraped raw from the fall, blood welling up in the deepest cuts. She kept curling and uncurling her fingers like she didn’t know what to do with them.
She was hurting, looking at him with those wide, hurt eyes while he stood here yelling at her like she was some young warrior who’d draanthed up on maneuvers instead of a tiny human female who’d made a mistake.
“I didn’t mean to be a nuisance,” she whispered, and her voice broke on the last word. “I know you got hurt because of me. I’m sorry.”
Something inside him snapped.
He crossed the space between them in one stride. She had just enough time to gasp, eyes going wide, before his hands came up to frame her face and his mouth crashed down on hers.
It wasn’t gentle. Couldn’t be. Not with the taste of fear still thick in his throat, not with the image of her about to die burned into his retinas.
He kissed her like he was trying to prove she was alive, solid, here. Like he could somehow pour all his terror and relief and desperate need into this one point of contact.
His fingers tangled in her hair, tilting her head to deepen the kiss. She made a sound against his mouth, surprise or protest, but then her hands came up to fist in his shirt and she was kissing him back.
And gods help him, she kissed like she did everything else. Wholehearted. Fearless. No hesitation, no holding back, just pure Juni throwing herself into the moment like tomorrow didn’t exist.
Her mouth opened under his, soft and eager and everything he’d been denying himself. She tasted like dust and sweetness and something uniquely her that made his control shatter into a thousand pieces.
He’d kissed plenty of females in his life, but nothing had ever felt like this. Like coming home. Like every cell in his body suddenly remembered what it was for.
Mine, his instincts roared. Mine.
He walked her backward until her back hit the fence post. One hand dropped to her waist, pulling her against him. She made a sound, half gasp, half moan, that shot straight through him like lightning.
Her hands moved from his shirt to his shoulders, fingernails digging in through the fabric. The slight pain grounded him, reminded him this was actually happening. He was kissing Juni. This tiny human who smiled too much and made midwinter decorations from scraps and had nearly given him a heart attack by almost dying.
He should stop. The thought flickered through his mind and died immediately when she pressed closer, going up on her toes to meet him. Her tongue touched his, tentative and then bolder when he groaned.
This was what he’d been fighting.
