Chapter 12 We Know You Are
We Know You Are
Training with his Diarmuid side wasn’t getting me any closer to that door, and I had a tentative notion that even though I was deeply unwilling to be his fated mate, this fated mate stuff might be the one way I had to convince Aengus to take me to that door.
Mata Hari angles—using romantic connection to get the information you wanted—was a known trick of the trade. Not my thing at all. I’d hidden behind a baby koala named Kiwi for over a decade, and Mata Hari angles weren’t particularly ethical.
But it was the only tactic I could think of right now, and I had to try if it meant gaining access to the key’s door.
We’d been on a run of boar over the last few days, which reminded me of my dear Da. Boar stew and marmite were pretty much the only things he knew how to make. I fondly remembered him serving bowls of it to me while my mother recovered from her injuries, shortly after we arrived in Scotland.
And that morning, Aengus surprised me with two wild pears as my side and pine nuts for my Pleistocene salad. This was the closest he’d come to a romantic gesture since the journal, so it felt like the right time to bring up the elephant in the room.
“Aengus…” I nervously set my plate and fork back on the tray sitting between us after I finished first meal. “Can I ask you something?”
Come on, Mata Dorie, you can do this!
“You may ask us anything,” Aengus answered without hesitation. “But be aware you will perhaps not—”
“I know, I know. I probably won’t like the answer.” I waved his caveat away, even as my stomach rolled with nerves. “I was just wondering, um…”
I wrung my hands in my lap. “Do you think I’m your fated mate?”
He stilled. And did that long, long processing thing.
“We know you are.” He winced. As if I’d touched a bruise. “The fertility portal has specifically designated you to be here with us.”
I didn’t know what surprised me more. The conviction in his voice. Or the fact that it matched my gut feeling.
I’d spent two weeks telling myself that being fated to a dragon might only be a possibility. Like, maybe there was some nearby wolf I was supposed to match with. But deep inside, I’d known… known it was him.
However, that knowing did not make my transition into Mata Dorie mode any less awkward.
“The thing is…” I composed my face into a pleasant, conversational smile. “I’ve been here a few weeks, and I understand why I haven’t gone into heat since I’m on the heat control shot, thanks to modern medicine, but…”
Aengus did not pick up the lead I was laying down, only stared back at me expectantly, his emerald eyes burning.
Which forced me to spit it out. “I’m wondering why you haven’t made a move.”
“Made a move?” He cocked his head, repeating the words slowly. “We do not know this phrasing.”
Heat crawled up my neck in a way I knew was probably turning my entire pale-brown face red. “Um, it means shoot your shot—wait, that’s slang, too. I guess the best definition would be, to try to initiate intimacy. Why haven’t you done that… with me?”
“Initiate intimacy,” he repeated slowly, lowering his eyes like this was a foreign concept. But then he raised them again, trapping me in his emerald stare. “Is this about the copious amount of arousal you have been emitting in our presence?”
The pleasant, conversational smile remained on my lips.
But only because my face was in a rictus as my brain detonated and my entire nervous system announced it was filing for divorce before imploding.
“I haven’t… I didn’t… That’s not what… I don’t know what you think you smelled but….”
I hadn’t known the knot that kept tightening inside me was releasing a scent, but all attempts at denying it died upon arrival under the weight of the knowledge that he could see every stress response going off inside of me.
Not anger at being falsely accused, but the elevated heart rate, blood rushing to face, abject horror of being called out.
Aengus just sat there with the patience of someone who was way, way better at waiting out a reluctant interviewee than me.
Seriously, he was born in the wrong millennium. He should have been the holoscribe.
In the end, I could only hedge, “I wouldn’t call it copious….”
He tilted his head to the other side. “Is it normal, then, for you to emit this scent whenever a male enters the room? Are you generally in a heightened state of desire? Is this high level of desire why you enjoy the bath as you do?”
“Okay, okay. Can you stop?” I had to press both hands into my cheeks, which felt like they were about to burst into flames. “I didn’t even know you could smell arousal. I thought that was just a male wolf thing.”
“Our receptors are on our tongue, so whenever we open our mouth to engage in conversation with you, we can taste your desire. The same as a meal. We can also see it in the way your genitalia and mammary glands burn deep orange now, even as the red burn of your embarrassment rushes into your face.”
Embarrassment was an understatement. More like the kind of mortification that would make me agree to go even farther back in time, just to get out of this conversation. “Okay, I get it. We can drop the subject now. I’m sorry I asked.”
“We are not sorry you asked.” He frowned, eyes narrowing. “But we are confused. Do you wish us to make this move you spoke of to initiate intimacy?”
I covered my eyes like a little kid at a horror movie. “Not anymore! Could you go?”
No answer.
And when I uncovered my eyes, Aengus was still sitting there. “Is that an order?” he asked quietly. “Do you truly wish for us to leave you mid-conversation?”
I wanted to say yes.
But in the end, honesty was the only shred of dignity I had left.
“No, I’m… I’m just embarrassed. You don’t blink.
And I get that’s because you don’t have to lubricate your eyes or whatever.
But sometimes it feels like you like me more than you do, and obviously, I misread it.
I’m sorry I confused you with all this talk about making a move. ”
His expression fractured for just a moment, then firmed. “Our confusion has confused you. We do not wish for you to feel this way.”
“I’m not confused. Not anymore. Can we just drop this? You know what, you said I need to give you an order, so, yes, that’s an or—”
“Dorcas, we would very much like to initiate intimacy with you,” he said before I could finish.
“It is all we have thought of since the time we caught you in our arms. We think of nothing else but you. While we sleep, while we scour our Zone for food you might like. While we wait for you to finish your bath, wishing we could be the water.”
He laid a hand on his chest. “We would be honored to make a move on you.”
I blinked. And lowered my hands. “Aengus. I…” wasn’t expecting that and had no idea how to respond.
“May we kiss you?” he asked. His smoke-and-glass voice was low, urgent.
I didn’t know… I didn’t know what to say.
But the knot tightened again.
His emerald gaze dropped to the area of my body that had apparently been telling all my business over the past two weeks. “Isss that a yesss, Dorcasss?”
The hiss was back. Knowing he was affected by this, too, loosened something in my chest.
And made me nod.
He set aside the tray, then leaned forward like the guy in that reboot holo of Sixteen Candles.
Aengus cupped the back of my neck with one large hand, steadying me like he suspected I might startle. Then he pressed his mouth to mine, and suddenly…
I was the girl in the romance, being kissed.
His lips were gentle. Careful. Like he was asking a question and waiting for me to figure out the answer.
It did not take long, especially when his tongue snaked into my mouth. It was forked, yet strong, which set off my curiosity even further. I pushed at the v of it—exploring, licking, reveling at the way it intertwined around mine.
The kiss deepened into something that tasted like woodsmoke and sweet Pleistocene pears. I stopped thinking about doors and dragon keys and unbinding spells entirely.
Suddenly, I was in his lap without remembering ever climbing into it. The bulge was back, and my legs wrapped around his waist, trying to get the secret part of me the bathwater soothed post-training closer to it.
I loved my jumpsuit. It was the perfect piece of clothing as far as I was concerned. But that morning, I hated it. Why couldn’t it be gone? This kiss was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I wanted to get closer to him. I needed more. I—
“Dorcasss, no.” Aengus wrenched away from our kiss. Like I was a painful bandage he was ripping off. “Thisss is too much for usss.”
It was the best thing that had ever happened to me. Then, suddenly, it was over.
“You have training in a pair of pauses.” His voice had a tight quality to it, the same as when he became Diarmuid and could barely control his obvious disapproval at my poor conditioning. “We must take leave.”
Pauses were approximately what I’d called an hour. So it was plenty of time.
Yet, Aengus lifted me off his lap and set me aside like I had somewhere urgent to be.
I felt bereft. Abandoned in a way that didn’t make sense.
“Did I do something wrong?”
He rose to stand in that liquid way of his. “We will talk at last meal.”
“I don’t have to go to training,” I climbed to my feet, too, even though my legs felt like jelly. “I can skip one day.”
“You cannot. It is important that you increase your stamina and physical condition. Just in case…”
“Just in case, what?”
Needing some reassurance—any reassurance—I desperately wanted to hear the words he said three weeks ago after I met his dragon. Just in case we get to keep you.
But no answer came.
He raised his hand. Hovered it. Then dropped it at the last moment. “There are things we must attend to. We will talk again at last meal.”
He’d warned me about my temper. So many times before unshelling his dragon and knocking me on my back, despite my best efforts.
But I couldn’t keep my anger in its container.
“I want to talk about it now!” I growled. My wolf paced back and forth inside my chest, awakened after that kiss. Technically satiated on the boar meat we’d eaten that morning, but not at all satisfied.
“You have your training,” he said again.
I silently fumed. I didn’t want Diarmuid in a couple of hours. I wanted Aengus now.
The knot in my belly was so tight, I could only imagine how I smelled on his forked tongue.
But if he could taste my desire, as he’d claimed, it didn’t show on his face.
“We will take our leave of you,” he announced with a formal bow, picking up the tray he’d set aside before he kissed me.
His eyes no longer burned green fire. His words no longer hissed.
Before I could protest again, he headed for the door, back stiff as if he hadn’t confessed to me like a character in a romance anime holo earlier.
He left me standing there in the middle of the Pleistocene Age, lips still warm from the best kiss of my life, watching my fated mate walk away with a breakfast tray. Frustrated beyond all belief. And no closer to getting to that door.