Chapter 21 Backstory #2
He winced. “A bit loud, I’ll confess. But Ravik is the best first maul anyone on Bear Mountain could ask for.”
His expression warmed. “Always willing to be of aid and assistance. Capable at everything. He truly cares, and he never mutes his side of the bond.”
“Never?”
“Never,” Zion confirmed. “So I’ve never had to suffer being unable to tell how he really felt underneath that stern exterior. There’s never any misunderstanding between us.”
Zion paused, as if considering another aspect of his first maul. “But I imagine it must have been hard for you during that row today. Not being inside his head.”
My throat felt tight. “I just don’t understand why he thinks it’s his job to protect me—or why he would even want me to be his mate.”
I shook my head. “The smell thing isn’t a good enough reason.”
“I had similar thoughts at the start of my first maulship.” An empathetic smile rose on Zion’s lips.
“Niska was incredibly enamored with me from the beginning—wouldn’t leave me alone, kept finding excuses to touch me or talk to me.
Once I bit her back, I understood why. The bond. .. it clarifies things.”
“So you loved her?”
“I did. Eventually.” His smile became soft with memory.
“Though we weren’t an expressive maul. We never said those words to each other.
But Niska challenged me, redirected me from a path of becoming a doctor—a job I would have disliked much more than teaching my ungrateful horde.
She appreciated me for all the reasons my father did not.
She liked the way I talked. Said I’d introduce necessary drama into what had been, until then, a mostly boring life. ”
“So, she was bored with Ravik before she bit you?” I asked. “If that was the case, why did she agree to mate him in the first place?”
“For the same reason he agreed to marry her. The Ayaska’s concept of love isn’t quite as heart-based as ours.
It’s practical, nearly to a fault.” Zion gestured like he was teaching a class.
“If two people smell good together and aren’t too closely related, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be together.
In the Ayaska definition of romance, Niska and Ravik were the most practical match—similar scents, no shared relatives.
But Niska found that kind of compatibility boring.
She couldn’t see the romance in marrying someone she’d known her whole life.
However, their marriage was arranged from her birth. ”
“And Ravik?” I found myself asking. “How did he feel about their arranged marriage?”
“I’m not certain Ravik ever assayed his feelings around what he considered his duty.” Zion tilted his head in that professorial way again. “If Ravik had been allowed to pick their maul, he would have chosen two other Ayaska who smelled and acted exactly like him. Practical, quiet, efficient.”
Zion’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “Niska used to joke that he was so dangerously close to basically duplicating himself and calling it a maul that she’d been forced to stall until she bit me.”
“Without your consent,” I said, a chill going down my back.
Zion spoke of his past so drolly, but as someone who’d been knocked far off her original path at a similar age, I knew too well what it felt like to have your entire identity reshaped by somebody else.
“Without my consent,” he agreed. “But do not worry yourself, Bell.”
He leaned forward, hovering his hand above mine, but not touching it.
Somehow, the almost-touch felt more intimate than if he’d actually made contact.
“I assure you, we would never, under any circumstance, do that to you. As Boone told you before we revealed our shifted forms, we will never hurt you.”
The words were meant to be reassuring. Instead, they made my chest twist with another kind of fear.
“You’re going to be so disappointed,” I warned him. “I’m never going to agree to let you bite me.”
Zion regarded me for a long moment, then abruptly turned to click off the television on the show’s champion, laughing through her post-win interview. “I’m rather wiped from auditions. Shall we call it an evening?”
“Yes,” I agreed, standing up. I headed for the dresser.
I was relieved to be released from the conversation that was making me reconsider how I’d handled Ravik that morning.
Still, I found myself wondering out loud, “What does Ravik smell like, anyway?” I tried to sound casual as I rooted around my leggings and tops drawer for something to wear to bed.
“You’ll have to ask him about that,” Zion said from the vicinity of the aged leather chair where he’d dropped his overnight bag. “But I smell like raspberry jam. Which I’ve discovered can be baked inside sugar cookies. I believe that version is referred to as thumbprint.”
His voice dropped, his words rolling down my spine. “Perhaps we could make that version together sometime. I hear they’re especially delicious.”
Heat crawled up my neck, and something low in my belly tightened. It was true that thumbprint cookies were delicious. But this conversation felt dirty somehow. Like we weren’t just talking about variations on sugar cookies.
“Bell, I’ve an offering for you.”
I turned to see what he meant, only to jump when I found him standing directly behind me with another button-up shirt in his hand. This one was a dark-sage green, like the turtleneck he’d worn the morning he showed me his bear’s head.
“I’m assuming,” he said with a knowing twinkle in his warm brown eyes, “that after this morning’s activities, the other one is… dirty.”
My entire face heated this time, realizing Boone must have shared that experience over their mental bond.
Then I quickly took the shirt just so I wouldn’t have to talk about what happened to the other one.
“Good night, sweetheart,” he said.
The endearment caressed my bones.
“Bathroom’s right over there for changing. Night!” I pointed in the general direction of the cottage’s tiny toilet and fled to the loft.
Upstairs, I changed into the shirt, trying not to think about who it belonged to as I slipped it over my bare skin.
Or that amused, all-knowing look in his eyes when I took it….
Or raspberry jam being pressed into sugar cookies.
I just flopped down into bed, waiting to hear the sound of him going into the bathroom. But it never came.
Was he not going to get undressed, like Boone did before he shifted? I peeked over the loft’s edge…
To discover that yes, yes, he was going to strip.
Right in the middle of the front room. Completely naked and totally unselfconscious.
His dark body was lean and surprisingly muscled, without any of the droop of age. He folded his clothes and placed them in his overnight bag, all elegant lines and economical grace. No wonder he wasn’t the least bit self-conscious. He was beautiful underneath his academic costume.
I should look away. I knew I should look away. Give the man some privacy, for goodness’ sake.
But my sculptor’s eye wouldn’t let me stop cataloging the shift of muscle, the line of his spine, the warm gray curls on his chest. His tight, dimpled butt.
At least he didn’t know I was up here, ogling him like a first-year Anatomy 101 student—
But then he stopped and raised his head. To look directly at me.
Oh God! Oh, God! Oh, God!
My freeze response went off before I could think to duck out of sight.
“In case I’m needed in the night, you should know…” Zion held my gaze like the professor vampire on that Sorority Slayers show Noelle loved so much as a teen.
And I’m not gonna lie, I wasn’t a hormone-riddled college student with a (questionable in hindsight) on-and-off-again relationship with her 400-year-old history professor, but I felt totally trapped in his gaze, unable to look away.
“Boone is good with his hands,” Zion told me. “But I am particularly adept with my mouth.”
Before I could process what that meant—before I could breathe or think or respond—he transformed.
The mostly gray black bear that settled onto the floor was massive and solid. It was hard to believe he’d come out of the guy I’d just been speaking to.
He arranged himself carefully, then looked up with gold glowing eyes to where I was peeping down.
Eyes that were definitely laughing at me.
Finally, I managed to retreat from the loft’s edge.
But that didn’t mean I was able to fall asleep anytime soon.
I lay in bed, my heart pounding. And my body thrumming…
In a way that reminded me of the block of wood outside… and the animal inside of it. Waiting to be freed.