"Six months, Rex." The words come out low and even, which is worse than if she'd yelled. "You've been carrying that around for six months and you let me think I was just some girl you fucked when you felt like it."
"That's not—"
"Don't." Her hand comes up. "Don't tell me what it wasn't. Tell me why you didn't say anything."
"Because the last time I let myself believe something would last, I ended up in the back of a social worker's car."
My pulse hammers loud enough to hear in my ears, and my scenting catches a note on her I can't place—not anger, not grief. Layered. Complex. I've spent months reading Holly's emotions through scent, and this one is new.
"Tell me again." She takes a single step closer. Close enough that the bourbon-and-dark-cherries scent of her skin fills my lungs, the warmth underneath that I've chased through every mile of highway between here and nowhere.
I meet her eyes. The word rises and I let it come.
"Mate." The old language. "You're my mate. My fated mate. Mine. And I love you. I've loved you since the moment I met you, I was just too stupid to see it. I couldn't say it because every time I've loved something, it disappeared. And I thought if I said it out loud, it would happen again."
Holly doesn't move. Her jaw tightens and her eyes go glassy and she lets me see all of it—the anger and the relief and the six months of hurt I put there. She bites down on her bottom lip hard enough that the skin goes white, holds it, and then lets go.
"The first thing I did when I left was text Knox. Two words.Protect her.Before I packed my bag. Before I started the bike. The only thing in my head was making sure someone had eyes on you."
Her hand lifts and presses flat against my chest, right over my heartbeat. She holds it there for a long moment.
"If you're here in the morning," she says, "we talk about what happens next. If you're gone, then don't fucking come back. I mean it, Rex. I won't do this again."
"I'll be here, I promise."
"Don't promise me. Prove it to me."
She takes my hand. Her fingers lace through mine and pull, and I cross the threshold into her apartment. The door closes behind me. She turns the deadbolt. The click echoes in the kitchen.
Her fingers curl into my jacket and she tugs me down the hallway. Past the photographs on the clothesline. Past the kitchen counter where she sat in October with her legs crossed and a glass of bourbon and told me to stop hovering. Into the bedroom where the streetlight falls through the window in a stripe across the unmade sheets.
She turns and faces me and puts her hands on my jaw. Her thumbs trace the edges of my tusk caps, slow, deliberate, andMatefires again—but I don't shove it down. I let it burn.
Holly pushes my jacket off my shoulders and drops it on the floor. Her hands slide under my shirt, palms flat against my stomach, and she lifts it over my head. My skin prickles in the cold air and then her palms smooth across my ribs, tracing the tattoo sleeve down my left arm, every line of ink she's touched a hundred times in the dark but never like this. She takes her time. Reading me with her hands the way she reads light through a camera lens.
I pull her tank top over her head and her breasts press bare against my chest, nipples hard from the cold, and the heat of her skin against mine sends a shudder through me that has nothing to do with temperature. My hands settle on her waist and I press my forehead to hers and breathe her in, my scenting cracks wide open.
Not just bourbon and dark cherries. Not just the warm leather-and-sun base I've memorized over months of pulling her scent into my lungs and pretending I didn't need it. Underneath all of that, for the first time—clean and steady and green, like new growth after a burn.
Trust.
I've scented anger on her. Arousal. Grief. Hurt so deep it bruised the air between us. Never trust. The fated mate bond—months of suppressed connection—tears loose in my chest and my hands tighten on her waist because my knees almost buckle.
"Rex." She says my name against my mouth. "Stay the whole night."
"I'm staying."
"Promise me."
"I promise, baby."
Her mouth finds mine. Her lips part and I taste coffee and Holly, the taste I know alongside every sound she makes when I touch her. I kiss her back with my hands cupping her face, thumbs against her cheekbones, pulling her so close her breasts flatten against my chest and I can feel her heartbeat against mine.
Her sweats hit the floor. My jeans follow. I run my hand down her stomach and hook my fingers into her underwear and drag them over her hips. She steps out of them and stands bare in front of me. My boxers go next and her gaze drops to my cock, hard and thick between us, and I catch the hitch in her breathing, the way it catches every time, like the first time all over again.
I reach for her and she catches my wrists and guides my hands to my sides.
"Let me." Her voice is low, steady.
