“Cera’s roots,” he agreed, and set them down by the door, and his voice came out steady even as that swallowed stone sat heavily inside him. “I’ll leave you to your work.”
“You can stay.”
“You’re teaching.” He met Tess’s wary glance and stepped back, giving the female the room she needed. “I only carry things. I’ll see you in our quarters, little one.”
So he went, and let her be the strong one, and carried the stone all the way back through the glowing passages to their rooms—proud past speaking, and afraid in a way he had no words for, and telling himself, as he had told himself all these nights, that patience was the answer. Patience was always the answer.
He was still telling himself that, hours later, when she came to him.
The crystals had dimmed to their lowest evening glow. He lay on his back in the sleeping cave, waiting until he heard the small bare feet on the stone. She paused at the mouth of his sleeping cave, as though asking a question she already knew the answer to.
“Come,” he said quietly, and she came.
He felt the furs shift and felt her fit itself against his side, and he curved his arm around her, bringing her closer. His mate against him in the dark. His whole body eased around it, but he held every other part of himself absolutely still.
But she didn’t curl up.
That was the first thing his body noticed, before his mind caught up to it. She turned towards him as she’d done the previous night, and after a moment he felt her hand come to rest flat on his chest.
She’d done that before, but this time she didn’t leave her hand still. She spread her fingers slowly through the fur over his rapidly beating heart, and she moved her palm across the breadth of his chest, over the old ridge of a scar and back again, with a slow deliberate attention.
She was learning him. By touch. On purpose.
He didn’t move, even though it took everything in him not to move. He lay under her exploring hand and made himself remain patient and still, a fixed point she could measure herself against, holding his breath so she wouldn’t feel him fighting it.
Let her set the pace,he told himself, and it was less a thought than a prayer.Whatever this is. However far it goes or doesn’t. She sets the pace. I do not reach. I do not take. I’ve waited a year, I can wait a lifetime.
Then she leaned up over him and put her hand on his face. Her thumb moved over his cheekbone, then traced the shape of his brow, the ridge of his nose, the line of his mouth, careful, unhurried, the way she handled a piece of bone she meant to make into something. She read him with her hands the way she read everyone with her eyes. His breath went ragged for one heartbeat and he mastered it. He kept his own hands where they were—one cradling her, and the other open and still against the furs. He did not close them. He would not close them.
“You’re holding so still,” she whispered, very close now. Her breath moved warm across his mouth. “You always hold so still. For me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“So you always know,” he said carefully, giving each word its full weight, “that nothing here moves towards you unless you move it first.”
She went quiet after that, her thumb still on his lip.
And then she kissed him.
It was small. It was clumsy with newness and it landed a shade off-center and it lasted no longer than two heartbeats—but there was no mistaking it. A kiss. Her mouth pressed against his, soft and uncertain and warm, and there was a tremble in it he felt all the way down through his chest into the deepest, hungriest part that he kept ruthlessly contained. His mate had kissed him.
And even though Hothians didn’t kiss, every instinct in his enormous body roared up at once and told him to kiss her back and return a hundredfold what she’d offered?—
He did not.
He held still. He let her mouth rest on his for those two heartbeats, and when she drew back, he let her draw back. He didn’t follow the retreat with so much as an inch of himself. He lay there in the dark with his heart going like a war drum and his hands open and empty and every muscle locked against wanting her, and he let the space open up between their mouths and did nothing to close it.
Because it was hers to close. Or not. It would always, always be hers.
He heard her breath shake. She settled back a fraction, looking down at him in the dark and he could feel the weight of her gaze.
“You didn’t move,” she said. Her voice had gone thick, and unsteady, with something in it he couldn’t name.
“No.”
“I kissed you and you just—” A soft broken sound that was almost a laugh. “You just let me. And then you let me stop.”
