It was not a question. But he paused, his hand still cradling her face, his eyes searching hers for objection. For hesitation. For any sign that she wanted him to be the controlled, measured warchief he always had been.
She gave him none.
He rose from his chair and circled the table without releasing her face, his palm sliding from her cheek to the curve of her jaw, tilting her head back as he came to stand before her.
Verity looked up. The angle was absurd. She was seated in a chair built for someone twice her size, feet not quite touching the floor, and he was standing over her like a mountain.
His other hand found the arm of her chair. He leaned down.
The first brush of his mouth was careful. His lips were rougher than a human man's, the texture different, and his tusks pressed cool and smooth against the corners of her mouth.
A low, unguarded sound broke from the back of her throat.
He pulled back. "Verity."
"Again," she said.
He kissed her properly then.
His hand slid from her jaw to the back of her neck, fingers threading into her carefully arranged hair and destroying it utterly. He pulled her up, and she went, rising from the chair to meet him, her hands finding his chest because she needed something solid to prove this was happening outside her own fevered imagination.
His tusks pressed against her cheeks as he deepened the kiss, and she should have found it strange—should have been cataloging the differences, the anthropological curiosities—but her mind had gone quiet for the first time in years.
There was only this. His mouth. His hands. The vibration under her palms, low and constant, rattling through her wrists.
He broke the kiss to breathe, his forehead pressed to hers. His breath came ragged. Hers was worse.
"If you stay," he said, "I will not stop at a kiss. Do you understand?"
She understood.
She understood that she wanted him. That her body, which she had spent years treating as merely a vehicle for her mind, was suddenly and insistently making demands.
She also understood that she was not ready. That the wanting was real but so was the fear.
"I need—" The word caught, split in half. "I need time."
He released her, stepping back, creating distance. His expression was carefully neutral again, but she could see the strain around his eyes and the grip of his hands at his sides.
Verity stood in the space he had made, her hair ruined, her lips swollen, her body humming with something she had no framework to process. The distance between them felt vast and insufficient at the same time.
"I should go," she said.
"Yes."
"Thank you," she said, "for dinner."
"Thank you for the report."
They stared at each other across the space between them. A warchief and a scholar, trading courtesies over the wreckage of a professional dinner.
Verity began to laugh.
She pressed her hand over her mouth, but it came through anyway—a sharp huff, then another, then her shoulders were shaking with it. Targesh watched her.
"I have amused you," he said.
"We're ridiculous." She wiped her eyes. "Standing here thanking each other for dinner and reports like—like—"
