Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“There’s something I need to say.”
Njkall’s deep voice rumbled through his chest and into her where she leaned against him, and Polly felt it in her bones before she heard it in her ears.
She went still in the circle of his arms, the hot water lapping gently at her collarbone, the steam curling up around them like a curtain drawn shut against the whole rest of the world.
“So say it,” she said.
“I have been holding it for a long time.” His arms shifted, gathering her a little closer, and she felt the great slow beat of his heart against her own, still not quite calm even now.
“Longer than I have let myself admit. I told myself it would be a weight on you. That a male my size, in my position, saying such a thing to a female who came here in pieces—that it could only ever feel like a hand closing.” A breath moved through him.
“So I kept it. I kept it while you slept in my bed and I kept it while you learned to walk out under the sky and I kept it while you kissed me and I kept it every single day, and I am tired, little one. I am tired of keeping it.”
She put her hands on that broad chest, and looked up into that seasoned, powerful face—the strong jaw, the deep-set blue eyes with their fine lines, the eyes that had never once in a year looked at her with anything she needed to be afraid of.
“Then don’t keep it,” she whispered.
“I love you.” He said it plainly. Not wrapped in careful qualifications the way he wrapped everything else he gave her, as if to leave her a way out.
Just three words, laid down bare between them in the steam.
“I love you, Polly. I have loved you for a long, long while. And I need you to know it costs you nothing. It asks you for nothing. It is only true, and I am done pretending it is not.”
For a moment she couldn’t breathe.
She’d braced for it, somewhere deep. She’d spent a year braced for those exact words, because in the life she’d survived before this one, I love you had always been the sound a cage made when it clicked shut.
It was the thing they said right before they told you what you owed them for it.
It was the pretty ribbon tied around ownership.
She had heard those words used as a leash so many times that she’d half expected her whole body to seize up when they finally came, to feel the walls press in, to feel the old animal need to bolt for the nearest exit.
She waited for it. The trapped-feeling. The floor tilting.
It didn’t come.
She turned the words over inside herself, cautiously, the way she’d just tested each stone before she trusted her weight to it, and she found nothing sharp.
Nothing that closed around her. Just warmth, spreading up from somewhere under her ribs, filling the empty places, and a strange, buoyant lightness, as if she’d set down something she’d been carrying so long she’d forgotten it wasn’t part of her.
It doesn’t feel like a trap, she thought, wonderingly. It feels like the opposite.
“Say something,” he said, and there was a thread of real uncertainty in that calm deep voice that undid her completely.
That he could say it and not know. That this enormous, patient, unshakeable male had just laid his whole heart in the water between them and was actually, honestly afraid of what she’d do with it.
“I love you too,” she said, and his whole face changed.
“I love you,” she said again, and once she’d started she couldn’t stop, and she didn’t want to.
“I’ve loved you for so long I don’t even know where it started.
I kept not-saying it because I thought if I said it, it would become a thing I couldn’t take back, and I was so scared of things I couldn’t take back. ”
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 you wanted 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 choice she’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 even now 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, their sleeping 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 of him, 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 shot through 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.
“Look at me,” she whispered. “Watch me want you. Watch me take you.”
He opened his eyes, and the raw need there was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. And when she lifted her hips and took him in, just the thick first inch, his eyes flared wide and his hands tightened on her and he did exactly what she’d asked—he watched her.
He watched her face as she took him deeper, inch by slow inch, the thick shaft of him stretching her, filling her, a shivery, burning edge of pain and pleasure mingling into something entirely new, entirely theirs, until he could go no farther.
“Now take me,” she whispered. “Take all of me.”
He gave a groan that sounded like a prayer and obeyed.
He took her with all the strength she’d always known was in him, but he took her in a way that left no room for fear—only the overwhelming sensation of being completely and utterly possessed by someone who would never, ever hurt her.
She arched up into him, her hands in his fur, her legs wrapped around his waist, and she took him back with equal hunger, with joy and trust and no hesitation at all.
When she cried out at last it was his name, and when the great shuddering groan tore out of him in answer, it was her name on his lips as he grew suddenly, impossibly larger, sending another shockwave of pleasure through her, and he spilled inside her, hot and thick, and she realized that he’d held back even that, until this moment.
They came down together in a tangle of limbs and furs, panting, shaking, their bodies locked together the same way their hearts had been all along. She pressed her face into his chest and felt his heart hammering against her cheek, and her own tripped and stumbled to match its pace.
“It’s real,” she said, incoherent with happiness and exhaustion. “We’re really doing this. It’s real.”
“It’s real,” he rumbled beneath her cheek, his voice thick and slow and utterly content. “You are mine, little one. In every way there is. My love. My mate.”
“And you are mine. Say it.”
“Yours.” His arms tightened around her, and the rumble of his low pleased laugh moved through her. “I have always been yours. Since that first moment when you looked up at me, and I knew. I knew you were my mate.”
“Even then?” she asked, her voice soft and wondering. She’d been half out of her mind with fear and pain. She couldn’t imagine anything but desperation in her own eyes that day.
“Even then.”
“And you’ve been waiting all this time.”
“I would have waited forever.” He shifted so that he could look down at her, his big hand smoothing the hair back from her face. “It was enough that you were alive. I was willing to take whatever part of yourself you wanted to share.”
“And now?”
A slow, brilliant smile curved his mouth. “Now I get to have all of you.”
“Good.” She yawned hugely, sagging into him, warm and safe and happy. “Because I’m keeping you.”
“Now sleep, little one. I’m here,” he whispered, his hand on her back, holding her close, the way he always would. Forever.
And forever, she finally understood, was a word that had never belonged to fear.