Worship #2
The silence was somehow worse than the words, because the bond kept speaking where he had stopped. Heat. The discipline he was holding with both hands. Every unsaid thing he hadn’t put between us.
I hated that I could feel them. I hated more that some reckless part of me wanted to ask to hear them out loud.
Dominic looked at me across the room, silent now because I had told him to be, and still somehow everywhere.
“You should leave,” he said.
“I know.”
The bond pulled hot. He didn’t move.
“Now.”
“I know that too.”
Then more of him came through, and his restraint slipped by one dangerous notch. I felt the dragon under the man, the wanting under the manners, the hunger contained so tightly it had become pain.
My body understood it. My brain objected. My body noted the objection and proceeded anyway.
I crossed half the room before I realized I had decided to move.
Dominic didn’t come toward me. He also didn’t move away. The distance between us closed by four feet, and the bond answered like someone had opened a furnace door.
“You can stand there and want me all you like,” I said. “Apparently we’re all suffering through that together. But you don’t get to edit my life to make room for yourself.”
For a moment, he was very still. Then his shoulders shifted. “I am not editing your life,” he said.
“No?”
“No.” His voice stayed quiet. “I am telling you what the bond already did.”
The room seemed to tilt by one degree.
“That isn’t an argument you want to make to me.”
“It is not an argument. It is fact.”
“Convenient.”
His eyes sharpened. “No. It is inconvenient in almost every possible direction.”
Heat crawled up the back of my neck.
“You can decide what happens next,” he said. “You can decide how fast. How slow. Whether I touch you. Whether I come near you. Whether I stand outside your door until the council grows old from waiting.”
My pulse gave a thud.
“But your ex-boyfriend is not part of this anymore.”
Anger flashed. It cleared my head. “You don’t get to decide that.”
“No,” he said. “You do.”
“That’s not what you just said.”
“It is exactly what I said.” His voice roughened. “You decide when you let go. You decide what you grieve. You decide what you owe him, if anything. But there is no path from this room back to the life you had before the claim. Not for you. Not for me. Not for him.”
I stared at him. He held my gaze, stubborn and territorial and entirely too certain.
“The bond is not courtship, Catalina. It is not an invitation. It is not a man asking politely for space in your life.” His throat moved. “It is fate.”
“I hate that word. People use it when they want to stop being responsible.”
“Yes,” he said. “And I am responsible. For the claim. For the bite. For every consequence that follows. But I will not pretend this can be undone because there was a man in your life before me.”
Behind my sternum, the burn held steady.
“You are mine,” he said, and before I could move, before I could spit the obvious answer, he continued. “Not to command. Not to use. Not to take. But mine to guard. Mine to answer to. Mine to wait for.”
My hand curled at my side.
Heat moved through my hips, sudden and traitorous, as if the bond had reached down and turned a key I hadn’t given it permission to hold. My thighs pressed together on their own.
Dominic went very still. His breath changed. He had scented exactly what my body had done. His eyes darkened, and I hated the hot, embarrassed twist of satisfaction that took me when I realized he knew.
“And I am yours,” he said, voice rougher now. “Whether you want that today, or in ten years, or never.”
The last word hit strangely.
Never.
It should’ve sounded like freedom. Instead, it sounded like distance. The need to close the distance between us pulled hard. I set my teeth against it.
“You don’t get to erase my life,” I said.
“No,” he said. “But I will not make room for a man who cannot stand inside this bond with you.”
“That’s territorial.”
“I have never been confused about what I am.”
No. Apparently not.
Everything his voice hadn’t said arrived anyway. Want. Desire. The stubborn, impossible certainty of him. My body answered in a way I couldn’t blame on confusion, adrenaline, or poor lighting, and the muscle in Dominic’s jaw jumped as he felt it too.
For one breath, neither of us moved.
Then he said, “Go back to your room.”
Want crossed the space between us, and the heat climbed my sternum. I could smell cedar on him.
Cedar had become the smell of the corridor outside my door. The blanket that appeared folded on my sofa every evening. The coffee at the correct temperature. The formal, infuriating discipline of his week spent trying to be of use without asking my forgiveness.
He had taken too much from me.
He had also spent eight days proving he could stop taking.
I moved forward. Four feet became two. Two became one.
His hands stayed at his sides. His breath didn’t. “Catalina.” My name sounded like warning and the last good decision left in the room.
I ignored it. “Don’t say no yet.”
“I have not said anything.”
“You’re about to.” I kissed him before he could.
The kiss landed differently this time because I chose it.
His mouth was hot. I had known it would be.
Knowing did nothing to prepare me for it.
The heat moved under my skin in a fast, bright line, down my throat, across my chest, lower, until I felt it between my thighs and I was wet through my underwear before he had kissed me deeper.
Every place he wasn’t touching became a place waiting to be touched.
For half a second, he didn’t move. Not away. Not closer.
He held himself still under my mouth. The discipline was violence turned inward.
Then his hand came up to my jaw, slow. I could’ve stepped back before it landed. His palm cupped my face. Fingers along my jaw. Thumb near the corner of my mouth. Holding. Nothing more. Letting me decide whether to stay.
I kissed him deeper.
The bond opened between us, all the way.
Heat. Want. The line he was holding. His and mine, tangled too tightly to label. My hands found his sweater, fingers curling into the soft black fabric over his chest, and the solid shape of him under my palms made everything below my ribs go liquid and furious and relieved all at once.
The sound he made against my mouth was small, rough and absolutely ruinous.
Then he kissed me back.
His mouth opened under mine. His tongue past the seam of my lips, slow and taking.
The heat of him hit me harder. Cedar and smoke and the dark taste of his mouth, the drag of stubble against my chin, his teeth catching my lower lip on the way past. His hand slid from my jaw into my hair, fingers threading through the strands at the back of my head, the same place he had touched me on the balcony, the same place my body remembered with humiliating precision.
A small moan got out of me. Embarrassed. Involuntary.
His other hand flexed at his side but didn’t touch me. One hand in my hair, one hand held back by sheer will. The man was rationing himself while I was standing there melting through my own spine.
Rude.
Noble.
I pushed closer, though not much. Just enough for my body to meet his from chest to thigh.
He was hard against my belly. The line of him through two layers of fabric was unmistakable, and the heat of it landed in me lower than my hipbones, and I clenched around nothing at all.
Dominic’s hand tightened in my hair. One brief, involuntary pressure. Possessive. Then he loosened it immediately, like the instinct had burned him too.
My mouth broke from his for a breath, and he followed half an inch before he stopped himself.
I kissed him again, harder. Because I could. Because he was letting me. Because for once, the choice had started in my body and moved outward, and I wanted to know what it felt like to take something for myself.
It lasted four seconds, maybe five.
The room vanished.
The desk, the monitors, the locked compound, the council, Nate, Davis, Rhain, Yuki, every file and every rule and every terrible choice waiting outside the door became less real than the heat of his mouth and the controlled tremor in the hand at my jaw.
Then I stopped. His breathing was too controlled to be calm. Mine wasn’t controlled at all.
His eyes had gone dragon. Fixed on me like I was the only thing in the building still worth looking at.
“Show me,” I said.
His breath paused. “Catalina.”
“The dream,” I said. “Show me.”
He didn’t ask twice.
His hand was still in my hair. The other came up off his side and found my hip.
He turned us once, walked me three steps backward without breaking the kiss, and then I was against the desk.
The edge of it landed at the back of my thighs.
He lifted me onto it. I didn’t have time to be embarrassed by the noise I made when my hips met the wood.
He pulled back half an inch.
“Tell me to stop and I stop.”
“Don’t stop.”
His mouth came back to mine. The hand at my hip slid to my thigh, up the outside of my leggings, found the waistband.
He waited there. One beat. Asking without asking.
I lifted my hips a fraction. He took my boots, then worked them down my hips and off, set everything on the floor beside the desk in a small ordered pile.
He went to his knees.
It happened that fast. One second he was leaning over me with his mouth at my jaw, the next his hands were under my knees and my legs were over his shoulders and the desk was cold against the back of my thighs and Dominic Graves was kneeling in a night-watch room looking up at me from between my legs.
His pupils were blown wide, the black of them wrong for the light. His mouth was wet from kissing me. His breath against the inside of my thigh was hot. My skin had been cold a minute ago and registered every degree.
He was hard against the front of his pants. I could see the line of him through the fabric.
“May I,” he said.
Not a question. A formality.
Dragons were going to undo me.
“Yes.”