He closed his eyes. “I don’t have a choice.”
Her hand touched his cheek — hesitant and agonizingly tender.
His breath stopped and he opened his eyes. He had thought if he couldn’t see her he may be able to get more self-control, but her scent overwhelmed him.
“Aelanna,” he said, “don’t.” It came out more of a rasp than a word.
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t… I can’t protect you if I let myself—”
He broke. His hand rose, cupping her jaw, thumb brushing her cheekbone with a reverence he hadn’t allowed himself to feel. She leaned into him, soft and trusting, and something inside him shattered.
He pulled her to him and kissed her.
Not gently, not at first. It was a desperate, aching thing, years of restraint bursting through his fragile self-control all at once. She gasped against his mouth and stilled, then she kissed him back, fingers curling into his jerkin, pulling him closer.
He softened then, the fierceness melting into something slow, tender, devastating. Her lips were pliant, yielding under his, her breath trembling, her hands shaking as if she couldn’t believe he was real.
When he finally pulled away, their foreheads touched, breaths mingling.
“I’m not supposed to want you,” he whispered.
Aelanna’s fingers traced his jaw. “But you do.”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t push me away.”
He opened his eyes, and for the first time since Dhelta burned, he let someone see the truth in them, the yearning, the tenderness for her, the pain that she could never be his.
“I won’t,” he said.
And he meant it.
Darren shut the door of his room behind him and slumpedagainst it for a moment, letting the quiet settle over him. He still tasted her. His whole body hummed from the kiss,flare take it!He didn’t want to think about it and pushed it out of his mind. A sudden clarity doused him like a bucket of cold water. He always shrank from thinking about painful things... but awareness stopped his train of thought.
He wasn’t alone.
Lero and Blayze were already in his room. Lero sat on the edge of his bunk, elbows on knees, staring up at Darren like he was trying to burn a hole through him. Blayze, who was pacing up and down the small room, stopped and faced him.
He didn’t want to think about how irresistible she’d felt, how understanding, how she’d looked at him like he was something worth saving.
He’d taken the dresses with him to stitch them; not because he didn’t trust himself in the same room as Aelanna, that he struggled to keep from touching her, but because stitching took time. He told himself that, anyway, then he changed his mind. From that moment on, he would face his problems.
Blayze said, “You’re late. We need to talk about the plan for tomorrow morning, remember?”
Darren hesitated. He had Aelanna’s dresses over one arm, and he wasn’t inclined to give himself away by looking at them. Instead, he laid them over the back of an upright chair.
Lero sniffed the air like a Dheltan hunting hound. “Is that… perfume?”
To Darren, the quarters were sparse; he didn’t spend any time here, and his room smelled of stale neglect, but his jaw tightened. One exception to his newfound resolve: he refused to discuss his personal life with his brothers.
Lero slowly got to his feet. “Darren... ”
He didn’t reply.
Blayze’s eyes widened. “Oh,burn me in the flare! You were with her. That’s why you have her clothes.”
