“Little one,” he warned her, though it came out ragged.
She moved her hand back to his chest, spread her fingers flat, and stroked down over his stomach. His muscles clenched under the gentle touch. His shaft pressed painfully against his sheath, and he knew it wouldn’t take much more to make it spring free.
Her hand drifted lower, and she glanced up at him, her eyes were wide and dark and full of questions.
“Can I?—”
“No.” The word came out harder than he intended, harsh with need. “Polly, no.”
She flinched, her hand drawing back. “Oh. I thought?—”
“It’s not that I don’t want you to.” He closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe slowly through his nose until he regained control. Then he opened his eyes and gently took her hand andplaced it back over his heart. “By all the gods, little one, I want you to. But not tonight. Not yet.”
She searched his face for a long moment, then nodded, just slightly. Her body relaxed again, settling into the curve of his arm, and he bent his head to press his lips to her hair.
They stayed like that, wrapped together in the dark, until her breathing slowed and she fell asleep. He lay awake for a long time, listening to her, feeling the warmth of her small body tucked up against his, and the ache of his unsatisfied body. He was half-certain he wouldn’t survive until morning.
But he would. He would hold her as long as she let him. He would wait for her, no matter how long it took, because she was his mate. He would wait forever, if that was what it took.
CHAPTER FIVE
“You could run, you know,” Tess said around a mouthful of the flatbread Cera had left them. “Right now. Nobody’s watching. The door’s open.”
“I don’t want to run.”
“That’s what they train you to say.”
Polly set down the small comb she’d been carving to keep her hands busy. For three days now, she’d come to the healer’s cave every morning, and for three days Tess had circled the same ground like a wary animal pacing the edge of a snare.
“Nobody trained me to say anything,” she said. “Try it, if you don’t believe me. Get up and walk out. Cera won’t stop you. Njkall won’t. I won’t.” She picked the comb back up. “It’s at least a one-day walk to Port Eyeja through the snow, though, and your feet are still wrapped, so I wouldn’t recommend it today.”
A quick, involuntary flash of fear crossed Tess’s face, gone almost before it showed. That was the thing she had worked out on the first day. It wasn’t the Hothians that kept Tess in this warm stone cave with the crystals glowing in their sconces. Itwas the memory of the ship that had put down on the northern field. Better a cave full of yetis than a port full of alien males.
She understood that fear all too well.
“One day.” Tess snorted and set the cup down. She’d stopped hiding the metal bar under her blanket yesterday. That was progress, she supposed, even if Tess still slept furthest from the door with her back against the wall and jumped every time a shadow crossed the entrance. “So it’s just a nicer cell.”
“It’s not a cell.”
“Everywhere is a cell if you can’t leave.”
“I already told you that you can leave,” she snapped, then sighed and softened her voice. “That’s what makes it not one. Cera showed you the passage to the main cave yesterday. You walked to the garden. Remember? You touched the plants and you came back on your own and nobody came after you.”
Tess didn’t answer that. She pulled her knees up under the fur and wrapped her arms around them, and for a while the only sound was the scrape of Polly’s knife against bone and the far-off drip of meltwater somewhere in the rock.
“How long were you there?” Tess suddenly asked and Polly’s knife jerked. “In the mines.”
Tess looked at her, fixed and unblinking, and there was nothing cruel in her eyes, just a terrible, hungry need to measure herself against someone. To find out if her own thing had been as bad as it felt, or worse, or survivable. “Cera let it slip. That you were in the mines. Before.”
“I don’t talk about that.”
“How long, though?”
“Tess.”
“Was it years? It was years, wasn’t it. You’ve got that—” Tess made a small gesture at Polly’s body and the way she was sitting, and she felt herself trying to shrink and hated that she still knew how. “That way of sitting. Where you take up as little room as you can. You only get that after years.”
She looked down at the half-made comb in her hands. The teeth were uneven. She’d have to sand them flat, or start again.
