Page 145
Today wasn’t going to be the day.
Then the other part of what he’d said caught up with me.
Attraction could become stronger. Fascination. Attachment. People feeling things around him more intensely than they otherwise would. The unpleasant feeling in my stomach turned cold.
“What about me?”
Max didn’t answer quickly enough.
“Max, what about me?”
“I don’t know.”
I stared at him, certain I’d misunderstood. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I don’t know how much being lifebound has affected you, if it has at all. I know you’re my mate because what happened in the clearing couldn’t have happened otherwise, but I don’t know what being my mate means in relation to this.”
“You don’t know whether being your mate makes a difference. Whether it protects me from whatever this is.”
“No.”
The single word hit me harder than it should have.
“And you don’t know whether anything I feel for you has been affected.”
Pain flashed across his face before he answered. “I don’t know.”
I turned away because the barn suddenly felt too small.
Five minutes ago, I’d been standing in exactly the same place wearing Max’s sweatshirt and trying not to grin like an idiot because apparently I was his mate. Now I couldn’t stop hearing one sentence.
Attraction can become stronger around me.
“How long have you known?”
“I’ve known I was lifebound since I was a child.”
My head snapped around. “That isn’t what I asked.”
He closed his eyes briefly, and the answer was already there before he gave it to me. “My dragon suspected you were my mate for weeks.”
“And you?”
“I suspected.”
I tried to understand what that meant and found another question waiting underneath it. “Did you try to find out?”
“Yes.”
That stopped me completely.
“What?”
“I asked Ignatius whether you were in danger from me. He told me it wasn’t that simple and that there were things about being lifebound my father hadn’t taught me. He said there were records of other lifebound dragons who’d found their mates and that we would talk properly when everything with your father was dealt with.”
He stopped.
I waited for the rest of it until I realized there wasn’t any. “You didn’t go back.”
