You mean? Not hurt you?”
“Ellie, do you want to be here with me?”
She nodded and I smiled.
“Then we’re good. Do you wantmeto touch you?”
Another blush, but this time her lips parted, and her eyes drifted down to mine.
"Come closer, Daska.”
I moved closer, pausing just before I reached her, but she slipped her arms around my waist and urged me forward until we were standing with our bodies pressed together, her cheek against my chest.
I wrapped my arms around her and held on.
The water moved softly around us, steam rising in slow curls, and I stood there with my mate in my arms and tried to remember how to breathe. She was warm against me, her skin slick from the spring, her hands spread flat against my back, and I could feel the steady beat of her heart where her chest pressed to mine.
She chose me.
I kept coming back to it. Couldn't stop. The thought circled through my mind like a hawk riding thermals, returning again and again to the same point. Not because Karik had forced her hand. Not because Rivik had laid out the calculations and the consequences and the law. She had stood in that cave with flowers at her back and ochre on her brow and she had saidI chose you. I'm here.
I pressed my face into her braids and breathed her in. She made a soft sound against my chest. Not a word. Just a sound, low and contented, like something settling.
I ran my hand slowly up her spine, feeling the ridge of each vertebra beneath my palm. She shivered. Her hands moved. Slowly. Spreading flat across my back, tracing the lines of muscle there, exploratory and wondering. I felt every point of contact like fire, even through the warmth of the spring, and I focused very hard on breathing steadily and not doing anything she hadn't asked for.
"Daska," she murmured into my chest.
"Yes."
"Your heart is beating very fast."
"Yes," I agreed.
I felt her smile against my skin. She tipped her head back to look up at me, water droplets on her lashes, and the expression on her face was so open and warm and unguarded that something in my chest cracked clean through.
"Mine too," she said.
"Ellie," I said, my voice coming out rougher than I meant it to . "If you keep... I am trying to be—"
"I know," she whispered.
"I want to—" I stopped, frustrated by the gap between what I felt and what I could say. "I want to go slow. Be careful with you. But I also want—"
"I know what you want," she said quietly. "I want it too."
She looked up at me. Neither of us spoke.
I bent my head and kissed her, and she rose onto her toes to meet me, her fingers spreading warm across my back, and I felt the bond pulse between us like a second heartbeat, low and steady and utterly certain. Not the desperate, drowning thing I'd feared it might be. Not a chain or a cage. Just warmth. Just connection. Just her.
I deepened the kiss, and she made a sound against my mouth that undid every careful, patient intention I had left. My hands moved to her waist, then her back, drawing her closer, and she came willingly, her arms sliding up around my neck, her body pressing against mine. Feeling braver, I slid my hands back down her back and over the smooth curve of her ass. I rubbed gentle circles over her flesh, pulling her hard against me. She gasped into my mouth, her fingers tightening in my hair, and I did it again, pulling her hips tight against mine so she could feel exactly what she was doing to me, the hard length of me pressed against her belly through nothing but warm water and skin.
She didn't flinch. Didn't pull away. Her breath stuttered and her eyes went dark, and she rocked against me, a small, experimental movement that sent a bolt of heat straight through my core and made my vision blur at the edges. My hands tightened on her hips, fingers pressing into the soft flesh there, and I heard the low, rough sound that came from my own throat without any conscious decision to make it. The bear stirredinside me, not aggressive, not threatened, justawake—deeply, intensely awake and focused with every fibre of its being on the woman in my arms.
I kissed her harder. Her mouth opened under mine, warm and willing, and I tasted the sweetness of the berry cakes she'd eaten that morning and something underneath that was just her, just Ellie, and I wanted to drown in it. My tongue found hers and she made that sound again, the broken, gasping one that I'd first heard in my cave when I'd touched her, the one that had been playing on repeat inside my skull every night since, keeping me awake and aching.
She broke the kiss and looked up at me, her eyes dark, her breathing uneven. I watched her gaze drop to the water between us, then back up, and the flush that spread across her cheeks had nothing to do with the heat of the spring. I wanted more, I needed more.
I lifted her then, hands at her waist, and she made a startled sound and grabbed my shoulders as I carried her to the flat rock at the edge of the spring, the one that jutted out low over the water, warm from the heat rising off the surface. I set her down on the deerskin I'd spread there earlier, then slid my hands up under her thighs to gently push her legs apart.
