“I’ve thought so for some time.” The words came out low, stripped of their usual careful neutrality. Gregor heard himself say them and felt the ground tilt beneath his feet. The same tilthe’d felt in the hallway two years ago and in the training room. The same tilt that happened every time Fergal breached another layer of his defenses and found something true underneath.
One step. That was all that separated them. Twelve inches of workshop air, and Gregor could feel the heat of Fergal’s body across that distance like a hand pressed against his chest. The fire in the stove had burned low, casting everything in amber and shadow, and in that light, Fergal’s eyes were nearly black.
Gregor took the step.
Fergal kissed him.
Not the kiss Gregor had imagined in the dark, shameful hours when his discipline faltered and his mind wandered where he’d forbidden it to go. Those imagined kisses had been desperate, hungry—the violent release of years of suppression, all heat and teeth and the kind of need that left bruises.
This was nothing like that. This was soft—Fergal’s mouth brushing his with a tenderness so careful it felt like a question rather than a statement. Warm breath and the faintest pressure of lips, barely there, as if Fergal was afraid that too much force would shatter something fragile between them.
Gregor stood frozen. His hands hung at his sides. His eyes were open. Every muscle in his body was locked in the paralysis of a man experiencing something his mind had classified as impossible.
Fergal pulled back. Just an inch, just enough to search Gregor’s face with those dark eyes. “Stay with me. Don’t go behind the wall. Stay right here.”
Gregor’s hands moved. They rose slowly, as if through water, and came to rest on Fergal’s waist. His fingers curved around the lean muscle there, feeling warmth through thin fabric, and the contact sent a tremor through his body that started in his palms and radiated outward until every nerve was singing.
“I’m here,” Gregor said, and his voice belonged to someone he didn’t recognize. Someone who hadn’t spent centuries building walls. Someone capable of standing in the open and letting himself be seen. “I’m here.”
Fergal smiled. Radiant. Triumphant. Trembling at the edges with an emotion too vast to contain. And then he leaned in again, and this time, Gregor met him halfway.
The second kiss broke something open inside Gregor that he hadn’t known was sealed. His mouth opened under Fergal’s, and the sound that escaped him was low and broken and came from a place so deep he hadn’t known it existed. Fergal’s hands slid from his jaw into his hair, fingers threading through the strands. Gregor pulled him closer by the waist until their bodies pressed together from chest to thigh and there was nothing between them but heat.
Fergal was warm. Impossibly warm. Dragon fire burning beneath his skin, and Gregor’s body responded instinctively, his own fire rising to meet it until the air between them shimmered. They were pressed so close that Gregor could feel Fergal’s heartbeat against his own chest—fast, hard, hammering with the same desperate rhythm as Gregor’s.
The kiss deepened. Fergal’s tongue touched his lower lip, tentative, asking, and Gregor opened for him with a groan that vibrated through them both. Fergal tasted like coffee and something sweeter underneath, and he kissed the way he did everything else—with fierce, focused intensity, holding nothing back, pouring himself into the act so completely that Gregor felt it in his bones.
Gregor’s hands tightened on Fergal’s waist, then slid to the small of his back, fingers spreading across the base of his spine. He felt muscles shift and flex beneath his palm, and Fergal arched into the touch with a soft, shattered sound that nearly dissolved what remained of Gregor’s restraint.
He wanted more. He wanted to lift Fergal onto the workbench, stand between his thighs, and kiss him until neither of them could think. He wanted to peel that shirt off and map every inch of skin with his mouth. He wanted to hear every sound Fergal was capable of making and commit each one to memory. He wanted to bury himself inside Fergal—if he was even open to that, what with both of them being alphas.
But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
He’d already crossed a line tonight he never thought he would, and he wasn’t sure how he’d look at himself in the mirror tomorrow. For now, this would have to be enough.
And so he kissed him again until everything faded but Fergal.
CHAPTER NINE
Fergal was going to kill him.
Not literally—though the temptation was growing by the hour—but the fantasy of wrapping his hands around Gregor’s thick neck and squeezing until some honest emotion came out of the man was becoming alarmingly vivid.
“Section Twenty-Three addresses the protocol for emergency succession,” Gregor said, his eyes on the Codex, his voice carrying the same flat, professional tone he’d been wielding like a shield since Fergal had walked into the library twenty minutes ago. “In cases where the king dies without a designated heir of age, the Code provides for a regency council to?—”
“Are we really doing this?”
Gregor looked up. His face was a mask of polite inquiry, as if Fergal had asked about the weather rather than the fact that they’d had their tongues in each other’s mouths twelve hours ago. “Doing what, Your Highness?”
Your Highness. The verbal equivalent of a castle gate slamming shut, complete with the portcullis and the boiling oil.
Fergal leaned back in his chair, studying the man across from him. Gregor looked exactly as he always did—immaculate dark shirt, sleeves rolled to the forearms because apparently the manhad taken a sacred vow to torment Fergal with those forearms until one of them died, posture straight enough to make a ruler jealous. Not a hair out of place. Not a single indication that anything had changed between them.
Except for the coffee.
Gregor had brought two cups today. His own—the familiar ceramic mug of tea, steam curling from it—and a second, placed at the far corner of the table, as far from Fergal as geometrically possible while still being on the same surface. As if Fergal’s coffee had been relocated to a different postal code. Plus, the mug was black—as dark as Fergal’s mood by now.
Yesterday, the coffee had been at Fergal’s right hand, placed there by Gregor with the care of a man who’d memorized exactly where his student liked it. Today, it was in exile.
