*I thought I sensed something wrong.*
*I’m surprised your senses can distinguish any one wrong thing from all the fucked-up things on this ship.*She sighed. “The storm’s going to get worse, apparently. We’re still expected to show up to dinner for each headcount.”
“The below decks’ staff are a hair’s breadth from panicking.”
“Maybe they should be panicking.” She covered her face. “I don’t know how much longer I can—”
His dragon stirred beneath his skin. He slid onto the sofa beside her before he knew what he was doing, gently pulling her hands away, tipping her head back with one finger beneath her chin.
Kissing her.
Her lips were soft as— His head spun. This wasn’t the first time they had kissed, but it was still like seeing the sun rise for the first time. He had nothing to compare them to. Softer than the first touch of new snow, softer than a seal’s pelt or a sea bird’s feathers, softer than anything in the frozen land of his home. And like nothing he had found in the world beyond. Spring blossoms, luxury fabrics, silky desserts were nothing to the melting gentleness of her kiss. It was a kiss of summer, of sunlight before it grazed against the hard ground or rough edges of grass and trees.
Francine gasped. He knew at once it was by accident: a sudden, unbidden fracture in her self-control. Then her lips moved against his, deepening the kiss, and he realized how wrong he had been.
The sunlight in her wasn’t soft. It burned. It was the searing heat he had never known before he left Antarctica—that he hadn’t truly known until now, finding it in her touch. Heat that scorched. Heat that licked at his skin and through his veins, consuming him and inviting him to consume in return.
His hands were in her hair. On her skin. One thumb ran down the long column of her neck, caressing the blaze of her pulse; his fingers dug into her scalp, angling her head so he could kiss the stubborn line of her jaw, kiss that blazing pulse, sink his lips against the curve of her shoulder.
She made another noise, a noise as soft and as burning as her lips, and his senses caught fire. Suddenly there was no space between them. Her body fitted against his as though they were made to hold one another.
He breathed in, and her scent almost overwhelmed him.
Julian’s dragon rose up inside him. It had been curious. Wary. Now itwanted.The fracture in her armor he had felt when she first gasped against his lips had grown. His dragonarced towards it, a whip hissing through the air, an orca through frozen waters.
Something in her rose up in response. Golden eyes camouflaged in the shivering heat of her. His dragon reached for them, itswantsharpening to something that caught at his breath.
The eyes jerked away. The chink in Francine’s armor slammed shut. She pulled away from his arms, panting.
Their eyes met. Hers wide and wild, his shuttering behind his prisoner mask before he realized what he was doing. She swallowed, her throat bobbing, her eyes searching.
All they found was the ice of his mask.
Inside, he was screaming at himself to take off the mask, to cross the distance that was already stretching between them. But he couldn’t move. The mask was frozen onto his face. He had trained himself too well in Harper’s prison. Whenever strong emotions flooded through him, he wore the mask, and now he couldn’t take it off.
He shouldn’t want to. He was going to leave her. He should be everything he pretended so hard to be—emotionless, cold, disconnected.
He shouldn’t be this.
Francine stood.
His chest twisted at the obvious effort it took her to resume her own mask—and it was a mask, he knew now. Damn.Damn.His heart thudded in his chest.
“That was too close,” she whispered.
Words turned to dust on his tongue.Last night, you wanted— But I thought—
Meaningless. He understood her. Drunken desperation was one thing, the pretense that they were only doing it for appearance’s sake, to fool Eloise into thinking the mate bond between them was—was what? Real?
It was real, and what had just happened was too close to admitting that truth.
The woman in front of him was no Harper. She played the cold-hearted monster, but the confusion and vulnerability flaring in her eyes was truer than any of her arch, knowing smiles or chilly stares.
She looked hunted. And suddenly, devastatingly, the only thing he wanted to do was protect her.
The knowledge hit him so hard he staggered. A silver thread shimmered from his heart. It spun his soul into a single note of a song that tore the breath from his lungs.
He jerked backwards. Francine mirrored his movement, stepping away and then spinning on her heel. The door to the bedroom slammed shut and locked behind her before he finished reeling from the sudden need to protect her. And the first shimmering dread of the mate bond that need had sung into life, like a green bud pushing through the frost.
