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It felt like coming home.

By morning I would have a choice to make.

I was beginning to understand what my answer would be.

20

GUY

Iwoke before the light settled across the land. In my arms was the outlaw omega I’d been chasing for what seemed like a lifetime, asleep on my chest.

I had no idea what to do about how happy the sensation of her against my skin made me.

She had gotten herself arranged across my good side in the night with her cheek on my shirt, which she had taken out from under the pillow at some point. She’d put it to its intended use, and one leg thrown over mine as though she intended to prevent my leaving by sheer weight.

Her dark locs had come loose everywhere. Her grandmother's compass sat on the chest within reach of her hand, and her father's green coverlet was over the both of us. The whole of it was banked around us in that ridiculous careful wall of wool she’d built with her own hands and refused to discuss.

As a man who’d slept alone for twenty years, I had no defenses against a thing like that. None whatsoever.

Her scent had changed again overnight. It had gone sweet and heavy and very close, and it filled that cabin until the air was thick with it, and everything in my body that answers to such things stood up at once and leaned toward her. My canines ached. My arms wanted to close.

What I actually did was reach over her, pull the coverlet up over her shoulder where it had slipped, and keep still.

Because I had been awake half the night with her question sitting in my chest like a swallowed coal.

If I asked you to claim me, would you?

A thousand times yes, and I would have said so in the dark if saying so had been the honest thing. But she had asked it at the edge of a heat, in a nest she had built without knowing she was building it, and I had meant every word of what I told her. She would come to it clear or she would not come to it at all, and if she woke up in three days with a bond she had agreed to while her body was shouting, I would spend the rest of my life never being certain she had chosen me.

So I lay there and did nothing, which was the hardest work I had ever done.

"You're staring again," she murmured, without opening her eyes.

"I find you difficult to ignore."

"That's unfortunate. I was hoping to remain mysterious."

"You have stolen half my wardrobe and built a fortress out of blankets. The mystery is fading."

She smiled into my shirt, sleepy and entirely unrepentant. "You're welcome to leave."

I glanced down at the arm she had locked around my waist. "Am I?"

"No."

"Then I suppose I'm your prisoner."

Her smile widened without her ever opening her eyes. "Finally. After three years, I've captured the Sheriff of Nottingham."

I had held the King's commission in this county for three years. I had been toasted in halls and thanked by magistrates and handed authority that made grown men go quiet when I entered a room, and not one minute of it ever felt like being wanted. It felt like being useful.

This woman wanted me in her bed because I was the one lying in it, and it very nearly finished me.

She was sitting up by the fire when I came back in from the horse, with the quilt around her shoulders and her hands around a cup she was not drinking from. Her face had the particular stillness it got before she said something she had tumbled over in her mind for a while.

"Sit down," she said.

I did as she commanded.