“I didn’t climb. I fell.” A tired ghost of humor. “But I didn’t fall apart,” she added quietly. “I was terrified, but Tess needed me, and somehow I knew what to do.”
Her fingers traced his forearm beneath the water.
“I knew because of all the things you taught me when I was the frightened one.”
He pressed his mouth to the top of her head and held it there, breathing her in, and when he spoke again his voice was not quite steady.
“I have known warriors three times your size who could not have done what you did today.” His arms tightened around her small frame. “A year ago you could not cross the mouth of this cave without my hand in yours. Today you went into the dark, and you kept your head, and you helped her and you brought her back with you.” A breath. “Little one, I am so proud of you I do not have the words for it. And I am a male who always has words.” He shook his head against her hair. “But for this, there are none.”
She was quiet for a moment. And then she turned slowly in his lap, the hot water sheeting off her shoulders, until she could look up into his face, and what he saw there stopped his breath for the third time that day.
Not the old wary flicker. Not the reflexive dismissal of praise she’d worn like armor for a year, theoh, it was nothing, anyone would have.None of it.
“Thank you,” she said, and she held his gaze, steady as the stone surrounding them. Her small hand came up out of the water and rested flat against his broad chest, over the place where his heart still hadn’t quite slowed. “But Njkall, I need to tell you something.”
“Tell me.”
“I’m proud of myself too.” Her chin lifted, just slightly, her eyes shining. “You’ve been proud of me for a year. I loved it, and sometimes it was the only thing that got me out of bed. But it wasn’t mine. It was yours, and you gave it to me until I could find my own.” Her smile trembled. “Today I did.”
She tapped her chest, water dripping from her fingers. “This ismine. This I get to keep.”
For a long, long moment, the male who had faced blades and beasts and forty hard years without flinching, could not have spoken to save his own life.
Then he drew her against him, into the heat and the steam and the hush of falling water, and held her—not fragile, not broken, but simply and wholly her own. And he found that after all his careful patience, there was exactly one thing left in him that still needed saying.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“There’s something I need to say.”
Njkall’s deep voice rumbled through his chest and into her where she leaned against him, and Polly felt it in her bones before she heard it in her ears. She went still in the circle of his arms, the hot water lapping gently at her collarbone, the steam curling up around them like a curtain drawn shut against the whole rest of the world.
“So say it,” she said.
“I have been holding it for a long time.” His arms shifted, gathering her a little closer, and she felt the great slow beat of his heart against her own, still not quite calm even now. “Longer than I have let myself admit. I told myself it would be a weight on you. That a male my size, in my position, saying such a thing to a female who came here in pieces—that it could only ever feel like a hand closing.” A breath moved through him. “So I kept it. I kept it while you slept in my bed and I kept it while you learned to walk out under the sky and I kept it while you kissed me and I kept it every single day, and I am tired, little one. I am tired of keeping it.”
She put her hands on that broad chest, and looked up into that seasoned, powerful face—the strong jaw, the deep-set blue eyes with their fine lines, the eyes that had never once in a year looked at her with anything she needed to be afraid of.
“Then don’t keep it,” she whispered.
“I love you.” He said it plainly. Not wrapped in careful qualifications the way he wrapped everything else he gave her, as if to leave her a way out. Just three words, laid down bare between them in the steam. “I love you, Polly. I have loved you for a long, long while. And I need you to know it costs you nothing. It asks you for nothing. It is only true, and I am done pretending it is not.”
For a moment she couldn’t breathe.
She’d braced for it, somewhere deep. She’d spent a year braced for those exact words, because in the life she’d survived before this one,I love youhad always been the sound a cage made when it clicked shut. It was the thing they said right before they told you what you owed them for it. It was the pretty ribbon tied around ownership. She had heard those words used as a leash so many times that she’d half expected her whole body to seize up when they finally came, to feel the walls press in, to feel the old animal need to bolt for the nearest exit.
She waited for it. The trapped-feeling. The floor tilting.
It didn’t come.
She turned the words over inside herself, cautiously, the way she’d just tested each stone before she trusted her weight to it, and she found nothing sharp. Nothing that closed around her. Just warmth, spreading up from somewhere under her ribs, filling the empty places, and a strange, buoyant lightness, asif she’d set down something she’d been carrying so long she’d forgotten it wasn’t part of her.
It doesn’t feel like a trap,she thought, wonderingly.It feels like the opposite.
“Say something,” he said, and there was a thread of real uncertainty in that calm deep voice that undid her completely. That he could say it and not know. That this enormous, patient, unshakeable male had just laid his whole heart in the water between them and was actually, honestly afraid of what she’d do with it.
“I love you too,” she said, and his whole face changed.
“I love you,” she said again, and once she’d started she couldn’t stop, and she didn’t want to. “I’ve loved you for so long I don’t even know where it started. I kept not-saying it because I thought if I said it, it would become a thing I couldn’t take back, and I was so scared of things I couldn’t take back.”
