“Keith’s teammates aren’t familiar with our kind of marriage,” Iris said. “They’d be more at ease if we conformed to their expectations a little.”
Lady Marianne closed her eyes for a moment, like this was all too much to be borne. “We shouldn’t have to bend to them. They should be learning from us.” She sighed. “But tributes do have some responsibility to build these kinds of—bridges. If you spending a week here with Iris will reassure them that we’ve chosen this match wisely, I suppose we can accommodate that.”
Iris had never thought she would have an assigned match, let alone a true mate. Now, by unicorn standards, she had something even more bizarre: a boyfriend.
And she had absolutely no idea what to do.
4
She was his mate.
Hismate.
The realization had flooded his life with color and light, like he’d spent years walking around with some kind of internal dimmer switch on until the second his eyes met hers.
This Council reception chamber was lit only by a skylight high up in the vaulted ceiling, and the sunlight that filtered down was, even at the height of summer, too weak to take away the pervasive chill. But not when he looked at her. Suddenly he felt warm all over. He was more comfortable than he’d ever been in his life.
Then he noticed that the barely tamped-down panic in her expressive eyes.
She wasn’t smiling. If she was experiencing all this as a flood of light and color, she wasn’t showing it.
Maybe she thought he was still the same stuck-up prick he’d been when he’d left. Maybe she was already in love with someone else, and now she felt trapped. Maybe she’d only taken this meeting as a courtesy, and she’d been all set to turn him down.
It could be anything, and he had no way of knowing, because he didn’t knowher, not yet. The mate bond told him what they could be to each other, but it didn’t download her whole history and personality into his brain. You could fall in love at first sight and still have to take some time to get to know somebody.
Every other shifter community in the world understood that, but not this one.
Well, fuck it. He’d never openly defied the Silver Council in his life, but he’d do it now. If Iris didn’t want to jump into this head-first, he wasn’t going to let anyone make her feel like she had to.
He wasn’t sure that the getting-to-know-you period he’d proposed had relieved her anxiety all that much, but he hoped it had at least taken the edge off. If nothing else, it had bought them some time ... and, crucially, it was time they could haveoutside of Council chambers. There was no way for either of them to relax with the Silver Council’s presence looming over them.
He should know. His childhood bedroom was in the Council House annex, after all, and there was a reason there was no nostalgia attached to it for him. He didn’t feel the slightest urge to go back for old times’ sake, and even if he had, he was pretty sure they hadn’t preserved anything from his years there anyway.
The Council House had never felt like home. Maybe that was why he felt so stiff and unnatural now that he was back here. Once they were safely in the outside world, Keith could start showing Iris a better side of himself. Maybe that would make a difference.
Once Lady Marianne gave them her reluctant, halfhearted permission, Iris turned to Keith and said, “Will I be staying with you?”
