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Silence settles for a moment after that, thick with the entire conversation we’ve just had. My humiliation cools enough that I can think around it again. I’m absurdly aware of where he touched my face, and I can smell Labrador tea everywhere.

“You really felt everything this morning,” I say before I can stop myself.

The bright look in his eyes says yes before he sends it through the bond. Then, he adds, Heard my name.

I make another undignified noise, and the bastard smirks. How the hell? “You’re enjoying this too much.”

Yes, he sends, and I laugh despite everything, helpless and horrified all at once.

“You’re getting an attitude way too quickly,” I grumble, and he flashes me another smile that has my cheeks heating.

The bastard is learning.

That realization hits me with the same force as everything else he’s said tonight. He’s adapting, picking up my cadence, my meanings, and my tone. The bond isn’t just some static connection; he’s actively meeting me where I am. If he can do that, then whatever this is between us is only going to get harder to ignore.

I shake my head, muttering something unflattering under my breath, and the clearing around us seems to breathe easier with the sound of it. The weirdness hasn’t gone away. He’s still too tall, too warm, too beautiful, and too strange, and I’m still standing in my woods negotiating privacy boundaries with an ancient creature who felt me get off in the shower.

But the terror I expected never really arrived. In its place is something more dangerous. Ease. Not complete, not settled, but enough to be noticed.

The easing in me must move through the bond in some obvious, glowing way, because something shifts in his face the second it settles. Not relief exactly. Relief feels too small and human a word for the way his whole presence seems to loosen. The forest itself feels less tight too, the trees no longer holding their breath around us.

I don’t think about what I’m doing before I do it. Maybe if I did, I’d stop myself. Maybe I’d remember this is still strange and new, built out of impossible things I don’t understand. Instead, I just lift my hand and reach for him.

Onyx freezes and stays focused down to the marrow. Every part of him turns toward the movement of my hand, waiting to see what I’ll do with it. My fingers hover for half a second, and then I touch him.

His skin is warm. Warmer than any human skin should be, but I know that now. I know the texture too, though it still catches me off guard: the faint difference beneath my fingertips where the dark markings climb over his neck and disappear into his hairline; denser somehow.

When my palm settles properly against his cheek, a pulse of sensation ripples through me so suddenly I suck in a breath.

Pleasure.

Not mine—his.

It moves through the bond in one warm, deep wave, not sharp or greedy, just profoundly pleased. The emotional equivalent of a massive animal finally lowering itself to the ground after pacing too long. There’s calm in it too; that’s what surprises me most.

“You were waiting for me to do that,” I say softly.

His eyes stay locked on mine. The answer comes into my head smoother than before, rich and low and steady.

I hoped.

I don’t move my hand. If anything, my thumb brushes once, lightly, over the line of his cheekbone before I can think better of it. Another warm pulse answers, gentler this time, and I realize with a kind of startled awe that I’m calming him. Me. A sleep-deprived park ranger with dirt under his nails and a disaster of a love life.

I touch the ancient thing in my woods, and he settles.

15

Onyx

Little Ember touches my face, and the world inside me goes quiet.

The sensation is nothing like the contact in dreams before this. I have touched him in sleep as shape, scent, bond, desire, and chase. I have felt him through the distance between us, learned the rhythm of his heartbeat, and the way his body warms when he becomes embarrassed.

But this is different. His fingers are rougher than they look, callused from tools, rope, wood, weather, and the endless small labors of a man who belongs outdoors. He touches the line of my cheekbone, then the faint ridge along my nose, where the skull beneath this shape remembers its true structure.

His thumb pauses over one of the marks near my jaw, and pleased warmth breaks through me so strongly that my eyes slip closed.

It ripples out from his touch—calm. A deep settling, as if his palm tells the wildest parts of me to lower their heads and listen.