Page 63

By late morning I’d decided to put on a shirt, which proved to be a serious undertaking.

It was my own, washed and mended with small ruthless stitches that matched the ones in my side. Getting my left arm into the sleeve required lifting it higher than my ribs were prepared to permit. I had gotten as far as the second fastening when she came away from the hearth and took the whole operation out of my hands.

“Stop.”

“I can manage.”

“You’re sweating and you’ve gone white, and you’ve been fighting that shirt for the length of time it takes to boil water.” She stepped in close and started on the fastenings herself, working upward from my waist. She was near enough that I could feel the heat coming off her. Her scent hit me hard.

Thick, wet, wanting. “Hold still.”

So I held still.

Her scent was stronger than it had been yesterday, and considerably sweeter, the heavy slick of an omega already wet for her alpha.

She had to know it.

Her fingers went from one fastening to the next with a deliberation that had nothing to do with linen, and at the last one, up at the hollow of my throat, they simply stopped and stayed, resting flat against my chest where she could feel exactly what she was doing to my heart.

“You’re staring again,” I said.

“You’re half undressed in my bedroom.”

“Would you prefer I finish dressing?”

“Not particularly.”

“Robin.”

“What?”

“You’re making it difficult to behave.”

She smiled, slow and entirely without mercy. “Who asked you to behave?”

I caught her hand gently, flattening it under mine against my own chest. “Is this what you want?”

The teasing went out of her face, and what came in behind it was steadier and far more dangerous. “Yes, Guy. I want you.”

I’d spent three years believing I understood this woman. I had read her raids like dispatches and her notes like a correspondence, and I had never once accounted for what it would do to me to hear her say my given name.

By afternoon the rain had come back soft on the thatch, and we sat together on the floor by the hearth with the fire roaring between us. There were things we wanted to say that weren’t being said.

“Do you regret it?” she asked.

“Regret what?”

“Kissing me.”

“My only regret,” I said, “is that I waited three years to do it.”

She turned the brass compass over in her fingers, which is what she does when she is deciding whether to tell the truth.

“I’m frightened of you.”

“I know.”

“Not the way you think.” She kept her eyes on the fire. “I’m not frightened you’ll hurt me. I’m frightened that I’ve stopped expecting you to, and that is the single most reckless thing I have ever done, and I have jumped off a weir to get away from your men.”