“Unless you’d prefer to crawl.”
“Lucian.”
“Mira.”
She reached for me. Her arms circled my neck and I lifted her off the log, one arm beneath her knees, the other supporting her back. The bump pressed against my chest with three heartbeats I could count through my shirt.
Her fingers laced behind my neck. The contact shouldn’t have registered the way it did. I’d held soldiers through wounds, carried casualties from battlefields, lifted bodies without my pulse shifting a single beat. But her fingertips brushing the skin above my collar sent a current down my spine that settled low in my gut.
“Comfortable?” I asked.
“You smell good.” The words left her mouth before she caught them. Her eyes widened and a flush crept up her neck. “I mean... it’s the pine. The forest smells good.”
“The forest, huh?”
“Shut up.”
The walk back to camp took four minutes. I could have covered it in two but the pace I chose was slower than necessary. Each step measured to extend the duration of having her weight against my chest.
Her head found my shoulder. Gravity and exhaustion pulling her into the curve of my body, and the warmth of her breath against my collarbone made my cock twitch in my pants. Involuntary. The proximity and her scent and the way her fingers kept moving against the back of my neck in absent, mindless strokes that she probably didn’t realize she was doing.
Every single one fucking registered.
Her thigh shifted in my grip and the hem of her shirt rode up beneath my forearm. Bare skin against my sleeve. My fingers tightened on her leg and the adjustment wasn’t subtle enough because she glanced up at me and the awareness between us compressed.
“Your heart is racing,” she murmured.
“I’m carrying additional weight uphill.”
“It’s flat terrain, Lucian.”
“Then I have no explanation.”
Her mouth curved against my collarbone. The smile pressed into my skin through the fabric and my jaw clenched hard enough to ache. Five hundred years of composure and this woman undid it by smiling against my shirt.
The camp materialized. Percy saw us first. Dimples appeared. He said nothing, which for Percival constituted extraordinary restraint. Solomon glanced up from the map table. His gaze moved from Mira’s wrapped feet to my face. A single nod.
I carried her to the den. Set her on the bedroll, and the loss of her warmth against my chest registered as a physical absence that made my wolf snarl.
“Stay off those feet until morning.”
“I have a rotation at dawn.”
“Then rest until dawn.”
I had to leave before I changed my mind.
“Lucian.” I paused at the entrance. “Thank you.”
It wasn’t quite forgiveness. But a door left unlocked, if not yet opened.
“Rest,” I said. And walked back into the camp that needed its king.
The camp settled by midnight.
Soldiers at posts, converted hunters back through the tunnels. Four in the morning found me at the den entrance.
The tether pulled me the way it had pulled me to the stream, operating beneath strategy, above instinct.
