Chapter 40 #2
She was exactly my type. The mate bond hadn't fooled me into wanting her. The mate bond had only confirmed what every cell in my body already knew the first time I'd seen her in the river. That one. I would pick that one in any room.
I wet the cloth in the warm water at the basin and started with her shoulder.
I kept my hands gentle. Slow. I was not going to do anything about what I was feeling, she was wrecked, she was tired, this was care and not seduction, but the gentleness wasn't because the want wasn't there.
The gentleness was a choice.
I drew the cloth down her shoulder. Around the burn at her collarbone. Down the line of her arm. Her skin pebbled a little in the warm air and then smoothed out under the cloth, and somewhere around the inside of her elbow she let out a long slow breath I hadn't realized she'd been holding.
She was relaxing. Not all at once. In small surrenders, one inch of her at a time.
I felt every one of them.
"Draven."
"Mm."
"I felt you today."
My hand kept moving. The cloth across her sternum, careful around the bruise blooming there. I did not let my hand stop.
"I know."
I said it as evenly as I could. Which was not very evenly. She didn't seem to mind.
"Through the bond." Her voice was quiet. "Not the team comms. You. You were reaching for me."
"I was."
"I felt you."
"I know, Tess."
I moved the cloth lower. Her ribs. The soft place at her side. I was on my knees in front of her in my own bathroom washing blood off her body, and she was telling me she'd felt me reaching through a bond we hadn't yet named, and I was not going to come apart.
It was a near thing.
She was watching me work. Her chin had dropped a little.
Her eyes were heavy but they were on me, and there was hunger in the way she was looking at me—quiet, steady, the pull of her attention on my face, on my hands, on the places where my fingers brushed her skin between cloth-strokes.
It had always been there between us. It had made her look at me in the river and made me have to look away.
She was looking at me like that now.
It cracked something in my chest I didn't have time to examine.
"You're looking at me like—" She stopped. Her voice had gone soft. Uncertain.
I met her eyes. Waited.
"No one's ever looked at me the way you do," she said.
The cloth stopped moving. I couldn't help it.
"How do I look at you?"
"Like I'm beautiful."
The words landed between us. Quiet. True.
I set the cloth down. Reached up. Cupped her face with one damp hand.
"You are," I said. "God, Tess. You are."
Her eyes went bright. She blinked once, hard, and nodded.
I picked up the cloth again. Kept going. Because if I didn't keep moving I was going to do something neither of us was ready for.
I finished her arms. Her hands. I worked the cloth carefully between her fingers, over the raw places on her knuckles where she'd gripped too hard or hit something she shouldn't have.
She let me. She was quiet for a while, and I thought maybe she was drifting—the exhaustion finally pulling her under.
But when I looked up, she wasn't drifting at all.
I waited. I'd learned by now that Tess didn't need to be pulled forward. She just needed the silence to step into.
When she spoke, her voice was different. Lower. Careful. Like she was handing me something fragile and watching to see if I'd hold it right.
"I had that dream."
My hand stopped.
I let it. I let the moment have the weight it needed. I looked up at her from where I was kneeling, the cloth forgotten against her hip, and I met her eyes.
"I remember."
She didn't look away. She'd been carrying it too. She had walked into my dream uninvited weeks ago and touched my face and let me kiss her, and then the alarm had gone off, and then the world had rolled forward, and neither of us had said the word for what it was.
She was saying it now. Sort of. The way Tess always said the things that mattered, sideways, in a quiet voice, while something else was happening on top of it.
"I didn't know if it was real," she said.
"It was real."
"I know."
I went back to the cloth. Not because the moment was over but because the moment was enormous, and I needed my hands to keep doing something, or I was going to do something I wouldn't forgive myself for.
I finished her arms. Her sides. The back of her neck. The line of her spine. The small of her back. She tipped forward a little to give me access, then settled again, and at one point her forehead came to rest against my shoulder for half a breath before she straightened.
When I was done I looked up at her, and she was looking back at me, and the bath was full.
"In you go."
I helped her up. Held her hand while she lowered herself in.
Watched her face when the hot water hit her—the long slow exhale, the eyes closing, the way her whole body seemed to remember what comfort was.
Her head tipped back against the lip of the tub.
Her shoulders went under. The small sound she made when the warmth went into her bones was the most honest thing I had heard from her all night.
I started to step back. There was a stool in the corner. I was going to sit on it and wash her hair and watch her soak and stay exactly where I was supposed to stay, which was nearby, not in the water with her.
"Draven."
"Mm."
"Get in with me."
I looked at her.
She was looking back at me from the water.
Hair dark and wet against the porcelain.
Eyes red-rimmed and steady. Her hand on the rim of the tub, palm-up.
There was a quiet steadiness in her face that hadn't been there in the corridor, hadn't been there on the couch, was only just barely starting to be there when I'd been on my knees washing blood off her ribs.
The exhaustion was still in her, but it wasn't the only thing in her anymore.
I didn't need to be asked twice.
The leash I'd been holding all night didn't snap. It loosened, one notch, the one notch she'd given me permission for, and my hands were already moving to the buttons of my shirt before my brain had finished processing.
I undressed in front of her.
I felt her watching. Clean and honest, the way attention from her always felt. The small pull of her toward me, low and steady. A little more of it now than a minute ago. A thread of want under the exhaustion, and the incubus in me read it the way a man reads a familiar song.
She wasn't hiding it. That was the thing that got me.
She wasn't trying to look away or pretend she wasn't looking, she was just letting herself watch.
Her gaze tracked from my face down to my chest as I undid the buttons.
Her tongue touched the corner of her mouth, once, small and unconscious.
Her breath went a little shallower when I shrugged the shirt off my shoulders.
I didn't perform. I just took my clothes off, shirt, holster, trousers, the rest, and let her look. Because she wanted to. Because I wanted her to. Because for the first time in my life I was undressing in front of a woman who wasn't trying to take something from me.
When I was naked I stepped into the water.
It was hot enough to hurt. I welcomed it.
I lowered myself in across from her, close enough that her knees touched mine, far enough that I could see her face, and reached under the water and took her hand, and held it.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
The bath was big. It was the one thing in the room that hadn't been issued, the one upgrade I'd negotiated when I took the assignment, because somewhere in the back of my head I'd wanted a tub two people could sit in without having to choose between being close and being able to breathe.
The water rose almost to her shoulders. Steam curled up around her face.
Her hair was beginning to float at the ends.
Her eyes had gone half-lidded with the heat and the steam and the relief, and she was watching me from under her lashes, and she was so beautiful it was a physical sensation in my chest.
"Tess."
"Mm."
"I'm not going to be able to look away from you. Just so you know going in."
She huffed a tiny laugh. The sound landed in the warm air between us and made the room briefly feel like a room two people lived in instead of a room one of them was trying not to die in.
"That's okay," she said.
"Good."
I shifted in the water. Not closer, not yet, just adjusting, my thumb moving once across the back of her hand. She watched me do it. Her eyes followed the motion and stayed on my face when I looked back up.
"I felt you reaching too," I said. "When you went down."
"I know."
"I couldn't get to you."
"I know."
"I want you to know I tried."
"Draven." Her voice was very soft. "I never thought you didn't."
I watched her settle back against the porcelain.
She wasn't done—I could feel it. Her gaze went slightly inward.
Her lips parted and then closed again. She was turning something over in her mind, testing the weight of it before she decided whether to hand it to me.
Her thumb moved absently against my knuckles.
She didn't seem to notice she was doing it.
I waited. Gave her the silence to find it in.
She was quiet for a second. Then, "You listen to me like what I say matters."
I looked at her.
"It does."
"I know. I mean—I know now. But no one's ever—" She stopped. Started again. "You make me feel like I'm not too much. Like I'm exactly enough."
"You are," I said. Rough. "You're—"
I didn't have words for what she was. I had been an operative. A soldier. I had spent my entire adult life learning how to name things precisely, and I had nothing.
She smiled. Small. Tired. Like she knew.
The water moved around us. Her foot brushed my calf under the surface, accidental, maybe, or maybe not, and she didn't pull it back.
I turned her hand over in mine and traced the line of her palm with my thumb.
She let me. Her eyes drifted shut for a second at the touch and then opened again, dark and present, and she was watching my thumb move across her palm like it was a small private thing she was choosing to witness.
After a moment she reached for the cloth I'd left on the rim of the tub and wet it again in the bath water, and very gently she started to wash my shoulder.
I went still.
She kept going. The cloth moved across my collarbone, down the slope of my chest, slow and deliberate. She wasn't in a hurry. Her eyes were on her own hand, watching what she was doing, and the small steady pull of her attention on me had warmed by another degree.
I let her work.
I let her wash me the way I'd washed her, and the symmetry of it was the most intimate thing that had ever happened to me in two hundred years of living.
When her hand stopped on my chest, not finished, just stopped, palm flat over my heart, I felt the moment shift.
The exhaustion in her was still there. I could feel it through the bond that wasn't supposed to be a bond yet, the one that had been there for weeks.
But under the exhaustion, threaded up through it like a slow warm current, was the pull of her toward me, and it was stronger than it had been when I stepped into the water.
Stronger than it had been when she'd invited me in.
She wasn't pretending the tiredness wasn't there. She was just letting the wanting be there too. Both. At the same time.
The way Tess always did everything.
I covered her hand on my chest with mine.
"You see this, right?" she said quietly.
"Yes."
"You've seen it for a while."
"Yes," I repeated.
"I have too."
"I know."
She looked up at me. Her eyes were very dark in the warm light. The mate-tattoo on her shoulder, Mason's, the one she'd carried since the forest, was visible just at the edge of the water, and I saw it and felt it the way an incubus feels a bond.
There was no part of me that wanted to compete with it.
I am not the replacement, I thought. I am the next layer. The bond does not subtract.
"Draven."
"Mm."
"I'm yours, aren't I."
The water in the tub was very still.
I'd been waiting for this. I'd been waiting for it since the morning I woke up in my shower and realized she'd walked into my dream. I'd been waiting through every training session, every meal in the dining hall, every time she'd looked at me across a room. I had not asked. I had not pushed.
I'd decided, a long time ago, that if she was my mate she was going to come to me on her own or not at all. Because the one thing I was never going to do, the one thing my father's son was never going to do, was take.
She had come to me on her own.
She had walked through the door herself.
The thing I'd been holding for months, for years, maybe, longer than I knew, set itself down in my chest.
"Yes," I said. "You are."
"And you're—"
"Yours." My voice was rough. "Yes."
She nodded slowly. Like she was confirming something she had already known but needed to hear out loud. The corner of her mouth lifted, small and tired and real, and her eyes went very bright for one second before she blinked it away.
Then she reached up with her wet hand, and she put it on the side of my face, and she kissed me.
It built slow.
Her mouth was warm and tired and certain. I let her set the pace because she had set the pace for everything tonight, the okay in the corridor, the get in with me, the I'm yours, aren't I, and I was not going to be the one who took the pen from her now.
Her free hand slid up to the back of my neck.
I made a sound I didn't recognize.
She smiled against my mouth.
The kiss deepened. My hand found her waist under the water and stayed there, open palm against her skin, not pulling her in, just feeling the shape of her where she was.
She was so warm. The water was warm and her skin was warm and her breath against my face was warm, and the whole room had narrowed to the place where her mouth met mine.
When she pulled back she was breathing harder.
So was I.
"Bed," I said. Rough. Quiet.
"Yes."
I stood. Water sluiced off me and steamed in the cool air. I reached down and lifted her out of the bath into my arms in one motion, and she made a small startled sound and I felt it land in my chest like a stone I would carry for the rest of my life.
I grabbed the bath sheet from the rack and wrapped her in it as I carried her. Patted her dry against my chest as I walked. Her hair dripped down my arm and I didn't care.
The bedroom was darker than the bathroom. The same low amber light from the sconces. The bed was wide and made up with the deep red linens I always used, and I had never been more glad of any decision I had made about my own room than I was in that moment.
I set her down on it.
She looked up at me from the pillows. Wet hair fanning out, the bath sheet already slipping. Eyes dark and steady and here.
I climbed onto the bed over her.