“Huh.”
He cracked his eyes open and peered at her. “Excuse me?”
“You never—” Her gaze darkened. Suddenly her lioness was all he could see, a creature of sleek strength and barely controlled violence. “When?” she growled. “Did Harper—”
“This was long before him.” He reached for her mind and hissed in a breath at what he found there. All that rage. Forhim.“There was never anything like that while I was his prisoner.”
“Good.”
The fire in her eyes receded, but her lioness’s rage was still there beneath the surface, twitching tail and sharpened claws. She let out a ragged breath. “I guess it’s not like I can kill him again, anyway.”
“If you were the sort of person who went and killed people.”
Her eyes flashed. “If.”
He kissed her—tentative in a way he hadn’t been the first time they kissed or even only moments ago. “I do not know what I like,” he told her, “except that I like everything about you. And I am willing to learn.”
Francine swore under her breath. Then she kissed him back, excitement sizzling in her thoughts.
*All right,*she murmured, sweet and sinful. *What would you like to learn?*
29
Francine
In any other circumstance, Francine would have rebelled against being asked to lie back and let someone explore her body.
But this was her fated mate. Which didn’t make it any less terrifying.
But it made it exciting, too.
Julian had little experience. She should have realized that earlier. She knew his history: growing up in isolation here in Antarctica, and then his imprisonment.
But she had assumed there must have beensomething.Someone. People went to Antarctica, didn’t they? Presumably that included people who would happily jump into bed with a dragon shifter. And—
“Reallynobody?” She shouldn’t have spoken out loud. Her words were too rough, too scarred with disbelief. “You were exploring the world for the first time and it wasn’t top of your bucket list?”
“Whatever a bucket list is,” he murmured. She was leaning back against the side of the pool, arms stretched along the edge, water lapping at the tops of her breasts. Julian was beside her.
He hadn’t eventouchedher yet.
“A bucket list is a list of the things you want to do before you die,” she growled. God, she wanted him to touch her. What was the point of this if he wasn’t going to?
She assumed he’d talked to his family already, or they wouldn’t be spending their time like this—luxuriantly, wastefully,frustrating…
“I wasn’t looking for any lover when I left home,” he said, his voice like the water that lapped at her skin. “I was looking for my fated mate.”
He raised his eyes. She caught her breath, caught in a gaze like the deepest part of a glacier.
“And now I have found you,” he whispered. “How does your arm feel?”
She blinked, then flexed her injured arm. It twinged, but— “Fine,” she said, surprised.
“Good.”
He kissed her wrist first, still holding her gaze with those eyes like chips of ice. His lips left fire in their wake, a need that burned higher and brighter the further he got.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmured as he reached her shoulder. “A fact of which I am sure many people have informed you before.”
