“I know you didn’t, but I’d bet every piece of coin I have that something involving you prompted this.”
He sounded curious, not mad, and her mind raced as shesifted through her interactions with Rennick that day, slightly gagging at their time in the dressing room. Blond men never came up. After the dressing room, she’d given him the letters, and… Her wide eyes lifted to Finn’s bare head.
“Oh, no.” Her eyes raked over the soldiers; her hand rose to cover her mouth. “I wrote him letters too,” she began. “Over the years, I’d kept them all, and I gave them to him today and…” She pressed her fists into her eyes. “Gods, this is humiliating.”
Finn took a wide stance and folded his arms across his chest. “And?”
“And after you dyed your hair blond, I wrote that I liked men with blond hair,” she confessed, refusing to look at him.
Finn groaned and ran a hand over his freshly shaved head. “I’m lucky he didn’t kill me. Ren is dangerous when it comes to you.”
“I’m sorry,” she said with a gulp. “Will he always be like this?”
He hung his hands on his hips with a thoughtful look on his face. “I think once you marry, his jealousy will subside. Until then, the bond can still be broken.”
The new information made her uneasy. “How? I thought mate bonds were strong?”
He nodded. “They are, but if one of the mates marries another person before their mate bond is completed through marriage, the bond breaks.”
Oh.She chewed on her lip, feeling guilty for what he’d done to these fae because of her.Does Rennick think I would consider marrying someone else?The thought made more guilt slam into her. If he was that insecure in their relationship, she was a terrible mate.
“Do you know where he is?” she asked.
“The last I saw him, he was leaving his study. Check your rooms. The only other place he would be is here.”
Her skirts twisted around her legs as she skirted around Finnand ran toward one of the exits with her new shadow on her heels. She had to calm his insecurities before he burned the entire world to ash.
Amelia stopped a guard in a hallway of the palace for directions to her rooms. He was hesitant at first, but when she told him her name, he instructed her to follow him. Like everyone else she passed, he balked at the lynx trailing behind her but said nothing.
She thanked him at the door of their rooms and burst inside without a plan, a fact she realized when Rennick glanced up from the book in his hand. He lounged in an oversized chair in the corner of their sitting room, looking like a wet dream.
“You like to read?” she asked, trying to see the title.
Placing a bookmark between the pages, he snapped the book closed and set it on the side table. “I do.”
She peeked at the cover and made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a curse. “You gave me that book.”
He nodded. “I did. Normally I wouldn’t read a book on the birthing techniques of mountain lions, but if it interests you, I’d like to know a little.” His smile was brilliant, warming her from the inside out.
The odd book blasted her rational thoughts to bits.
“I love you,” she blurted, cringing at her botched delivery.
The grace with which he stood and prowled across the room was impressive for such a large man, but her heart hammered too loudly against her ribcage to comment. With his attention locked on her, he wrapped his hands around the sides of her neck and tilted her head back.
“You love me.”
She licked her suddenly dry lips. “Yes. I wanted to tell you in a grand way,”that Ihadn’t thought of yet,“but my mouth decided it couldn’t wait.”
He lowered his face, hovering his lips above hers. “Mine can’t either.”
Closing the distance between them, he claimed her mouth with his own. His tongue glided across her lips, and she gladly opened for him, greedy for more. Hearing that he was afraid she would break their bond had cracked something inside of her, and all she wanted was to show him love in every way possible.
It had always been him; the boy whose letters kept her warm when the icy shards of loneliness crept in, who’d deemed her beautiful when no one else had. The man who showed her his stunningly charcoaled soul time and again, whether through sending sweaters for a tiny fox or death threats to anyone who threatened what he knew they would have.
Bit by bit over the years, Rennick laid a sturdy path for love to cross from her heart to his. Some of his methods were fucked up and wrong, but she no longer cared. Loneliness was a cold feeling, like being buried alive in the snow, crushed and paralyzed, but love was a raging inferno, incinerating its victims from the inside out. They’d answer for their sins at Death’s gate, and should he look upon them and damn them to hell, they would burn together as they always had.
Breaking their kiss, he pressed his forehead to hers and closed his eyes. “I love you too, little mate. I always have.”
