She pressed both hands tighter against his chest, over the heart that had begun to pound now, hard enough that she could feel it against her palms. “But that’s not what this is. It doesn’t feel like a wall closing, but like the truest thing I’ve ever said out loud. It feels like something I’ve been holding my breath around for a year and I finally get to breathe.”
Her voice cracked, and she laughed through it, and there were tears standing in her eyes but they were good tears, the best tears she’d ever cried. “Njkall, it feels like freedom. How does saying I love you feel like freedom?”
“Because you chose it.” His huge hands came up out of the water and cupped her face, his thumbs brushing away the tears. “No one chose it for you. No one made you. You said it because youwanted to. That is what makes it free, little one. That is the only thing that ever makes anything free.”
“Then I want to choose something else.” The words came out before she’d fully decided to say them. But she’d already decided down in the dark, with the mountain pressing in and Tess shaking in her arms and the sure and certain knowledge burning in her chest that if she got out of that pit there was exactly one thing she wanted. “I want to choose you. All the way. Not just your bed. Not just the nights. I want to be your mate.”
He went utterly, absolutely still.
“You do not have to?—”
“Don’t.” She pressed her fingers to his mouth, laughing again, half exasperated and wholly in love. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare tell me what I don’t have to do, not right now, not this. I know I don’t have to. That’s the whole point.” She slid her fingers from his lips to his jaw, feeling the rough warmth of him under her hand, and she held his gaze and refused to look away. “Needing you isn’t weak. Wanting you isn’t a cage. It’s just love, and it’s mine, and I choose it. I choose you. Be my mate.”
For a long, long moment he simply looked at her, and she watched the last careful restraint, the final door he’d kept bolted shut, open at last. His hands trembled where they cupped her face. When he spoke his deep voice had gone thick and rough, all its practiced calm gone.
“You are certain?”
“I have never been more certain of anything in my life.”
“Then say it once more.” He was shaking again, this great mountain of a male undone by three small words and a choiceshe’d made freely in the steam. “So I know it is real. Tell me you want this. Tell me you want me.”
“I want you,” she breathed against his mouth. “I love you, and I want to be yours, and I want you to be mine. Right now. Tonight. Please.”
He kissed her and there was nothing tentative in it. All the tender restraint she’d coaxed him past, all the gentleness she’d loved and been frustrated by in equal measure, burned away in the heat of that kiss, and what was underneath it stole the breath straight out of her lungs. His mouth took hers like a male who’d been starving and had finally, finally been given leave to feed. His hands slid from her face down the wet line of her back and gathered her against the whole hard length of his chest, and she felt the deep sound that rolled up out of him, half growl and half something wordless and wrecked, and she answered it with a small helpless sound of her own and kissed him back with everything she had.
She’d been the one reaching. She’d been the one pushing forward, pressing past his caution one careful inch at a time. Now, for the first time, she felt him meet her all the way. He wasn’t holding his desire at a careful distance anymore, wasn’t treating her as though one wrong move might shatter her. He believed her. He believed her. He believed she wasn’t going to shatter, and the freedom of that flowed off him and into her and made her bold.
Her fingers found the thick fur at the back of his neck and fisted there. She pressed herself flush against him, chest to chest, the hot water swirling around their joined bodies, and she felt every place they touched light up like the lichen overhead. His mouth left hers and found the line of her throat, and she tipped her head back and gasped at the scrape of his teeth, gentle evennow but no longer holding back the wanting behind it, and the steam and the heat and the low rush of the falling water wrapped around them both like the whole world had narrowed to this single warm and secret place.
“Not here,” he rumbled against her collarbone, and he was already rising, already lifting her, water streaming off them both. “Not the first time. Not the time that binds us.” He carried her up the smooth worn steps as easily as he’d carried her across the snow, her legs wrapped around his waist, her arms locked around his neck, her lips pressed to the pulse hammering in his throat. “I want you in our bed. I want you where you chose to stay.”
Our bed.The word rang through her, bright and clear and absolutely true.
He wrapped her in a fur to carry her through the caves, and if any of the clan saw their leader carrying his soaked, laughing, half-wild human female towards his quarters, she found she didn’t care in the slightest. Let them see. Let all of Hothrest see. She was his and he was hers and she wanted everyone to know it.
And then they were in the warm dark of his sleeping cave,theirsleeping cave, and the deep soft pile of furs where she’d woken almost every morning for the past year, and he laid her down in it and followed her down, and the fur fell away, and there was nothing left between them at all.
She’d thought she might be afraid, at the end. She’d braced some old ghost to rise up at the last moment and grab her by the throat. But when he settled his great weight over her, careful even now to bear it on his arms, and looked down at her with those blue eyes gone dark and desperate and loving, she felt no ghosts at all. She felt only him. Only the warm solid safety ofhim, and the wanting that burned under it, and the astonishing knowledge that she’d chosen this.
“I love you,” she told him again, and pulled him down to her.
He groaned and kissed her hard, one big hand sliding down her hip to her thigh, nudging her legs apart with the same patient demand he’d shown all along. She opened for him, the way she’d been opening for him all year, and the heat of his body covered her like the furs covered the stone—wild and sheltering all at once.
“I cannot be gentle now,” he said, the words almost an apology, and she laughed up at him and ran her hands down the broad white expanse of his back.
“Don’t be gentle.”
He made a low rough sound of need, and his hand slipped between them, finding the heat of her. One huge finger stroked slowly up through her folds, testing, and she arched into it with a gasp.
“So ready,” he murmured against her mouth. “You are so ready for me.”
“Yes.” She rocked against his hand, shameless now, past shame. “I’m yours, Njkall. Because I want to be?—”
He closed his eyes and shuddered, a full-body shudder that rippled through his massive frame and into her beneath him. When he opened them again, the last of the restraint was gone, replaced by a hunger she could drown in. As his mouth took hers, she reached down, feeling the hot solid weight of him in her hand. He was huge, and hard, and a wild, wanting ache shotthrough her at the thought of all that strength focused only on her, only for her.
“Njkall,” she breathed, and her fingers tightened, and when he made that rough growling sound again and pushed forward against her hand, she guided him to her entrance and felt the blunt head of him press against her.
He stopped. His whole body shook with the effort of stopping. She knew it was costing him, and the sheer scale of his control made her love him even more.
