"I want you to stay," she whispers. "But I don't want you to stay because I'm paying you. I want..."
"What do you want?" I ask the question rough, urgent, needing to hear her say it.
"I want you to stay because you want to," she breathes. "Because this is real for you too. Because I'm not just a mission."
"You stopped being a mission the moment you giggled at my threat assessment of the valet," I tell her, absolute truth in every word. "You became something I did not have operational parameters for. Something that required me to adapt, to improvise, to feel things the contract did not account for."
"Like what?" Her hands find my chest again, palms flattening over my heart the way they did in the vineyard.
"Like pride when you caught the egg I threw." I cover her hands with mine, holding them against the evidence of my racing pulse. "Like fury when Derek attempted to diminish you. Like fear when you ordered me to leave, because I did not know how to exist in a world where I could not protect you."
"Kruk..."
"Like love," I finished, the word foreign and perfect on my tongue. "I love you, Colletta Fears. That was not in the contract terms. But it is the current tactical reality."
She stares at me for three heartbeats, eyes wide and wet and full of something that looks like wonder.
Then she kisses me.
CHAPTER 11
COLLETTA
The kiss slams into me like every terrible decision I have ever made crashing together at once, except this one feels like the first right thing in years.
I kiss him back with everything I have. Desperation, relief, three days of pent-up tension, the lingering taste of champagne and fear and this wild, reckless hope that maybe I have not ruined everything after all.
Kruk makes a sound low in his chest, something between a growl and a groan. His arms lock around me like steel bands. He lifts me off the ground without breaking the kiss, my feet dangling in the air. Suddenly I am pressed against the rough bark of a tree I did not realize was behind me.
"Inside," I gasp against his mouth. "Room. Now."
He does not argue. He just turns and starts walking, carrying me like I weigh nothing, his hands gripping my thighs as I wrap my legs around his waist. I bury my face in his neck, breathing in the scent of him, clean sweat and something earthy and warm, something that causes my brain to short-circuit.
We pass a pair of elderly guests on the garden path, white-haired and holding hands, probably married for fifty years. Irealize with dawning horror that I am being carried like a sack of extremely horny potatoes by a seven-foot orc in a tuxedo t-shirt.
I lift my head from where I've been attempting to leave what will definitely be a hickey on Kruk's neck and offer them a cheerful, mildly unhinged wave.
"Beautiful night!" I shouted, my voice too high, too bright.
The woman's eyebrows climb toward her hairline. The man's mouth falls open slightly.
Kruk does not acknowledge them. He does not slow down. He does not even glance in their direction. His stride remains purposeful, relentless, his hands still gripped firmly under my thighs as he carries me toward the resort entrance like a man on a mission.
I press my burning face back into his shoulder and pray they're too old to remember this tomorrow.
The elevator ride is torture. I try to kiss him again but he catches my jaw in one massive hand, forcing me to meet his eyes.
"When we reach the room," he says, voice rough and commanding, "you will not change your mind. You will not panic. You will surrender control. Understood?"
My pulse hammers frantically against my throat, each beat visible, my heart practically throwing itself against my ribcage in a desperate attempt to escape. My mouth goes dry. I try to swallow, try to find moisture somewhere in the desert that my mouth has become, and manage only a strangled sound that might generously be called a whimper.
His golden-capped tusks catch the harsh fluorescent lighting of the elevator, and his eyes, those impossibly dark, intense eyes that see through every defense I've ever constructed, don't waver from mine for even a second. The grip on my jaw is firm but not painful, grounding me, anchoring me to this moment when every instinct is screaming at me to deflect with a joke or fillthe silence with some unhinged fact about Victorian mourning rituals.
I manage a nod instead, jerky and graceless, my curls bouncing with the motion.
His expression doesn't change. If anything, his gaze sharpens, becomes even more focused, like I'm a tactical problem he's determined to solve with absolute precision.
"Say it," he commands, his voice dropping even lower, rougher, leaving no room for evasion or my usual nervous deflection tactics.
