Reciprocal
Catalina
Dominic crossed the chamber to us and took one slow breath before he spoke. “I will stand outside your door for the next twenty-four hours.”
My chest tightened. “Dominic—”
“You and Solberg will take the day,” he said, not letting me interrupt. “The bond will require it. It will not settle without attention.”
He did not look away, and the words were formal enough to survive the chamber.
He was giving us privacy. More than that, he was putting himself between our door and the rest of the world.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said quietly.
“I do.”
“Because of the bond?”
“Because of yours,” he said. “Because of mine.” His voice stayed level.
“And because the only way Martin Solberg’s order becomes irrelevant before the world wakes up is if every person who walks past your door at oh-six-fifteen sees an Ashenmere enforcer in the corridor, awake, armed, and refusing entry. ”
I looked at him, and for a moment I could not make my throat work around everything he had just given me. “Thank you,” I said.
Dominic nodded once, then looked past me. “Solberg.”
Rhain straightened. “Graves.”
The room held its breath around them.
“Take care of her.”
Rhain’s answer came without performance. “I will.”
Dominic accepted that with another nod, as if a contract had been offered and witnessed.
We walked the corridor back to my quarters with Dominic behind us and to my left, the placement deliberate. Rhain stayed at my other side, close enough that the new claim at the right of my throat seemed to ache toward him with every step.
The same impossible language as Dominic’s claim.
At my door, Dominic stopped. He turned his back to the corridor and took his post as if the stone beneath his feet had been waiting for him.
I went inside with Rhain, and the lock engaged behind us. For a second, neither of us moved.
The room was too quiet after the council chamber. Too private after all that formality. My throat pulsed beneath Rhain’s claim, and the bite I had left at the curve of his shoulder still bled faintly under the open collar of his shirt.
The new channel between us ran wide and bright, a fresh nerve learning the shape of air.
Rhain turned to me slowly. His eyes went to his claim on the right of my throat. To the thin red line at the edge of it. “You’re bleeding.”
“Yes, well.” My voice came out rougher than intended. “You bit me.”
His eyes lifted to mine. The corner of his mouth lifted in satisfaction. “I did.”
The possession in those two words put heat under my skin.
His thumb settled beneath my jaw and tipped my face higher. “Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“Good.” The word was soft and pleased as his gaze dropped back to the mark. “I like seeing it on you.”
My breath caught before I could stop it. “That seems to be happening to both of us.”
His hands settled at my waist. “We should go slow,” he said.
“Should we?”
His eyes dropped to my mouth, and the hunger in him sharpened, almost reverent.
“Yes.” His thumbs moved once against my waist, barely enough to count as touch. “I want to remember this.”
His mouth lowered slowly, lips brushing the skin beside the bite first, almost gentle enough to pretend it was only a test.
Then he found the mark.
The flat of his tongue dragged over the wound once, slow and deliberate, and the bond answered so violently I felt it everywhere at once. Heat rang down through me, bright and deep, turning my breath useless and my knees unreliable.
A sound left me that I had absolutely not approved for public release.
Rhain steadied me. One hand at the base of my spine, his other arm around my ribs, holding me up because I couldn’t.
His mouth stayed at my throat for one more heartbeat before he lifted his head, and when I saw his eyes, vertical and bright, the coil in my belly answered before I could pretend discipline was still involved.
“That,” he said, voice quiet with discovery, “is going to be a problem.”
“For whom?”
“Both of us,” he said with a smile.
The smile should have come with a warning label and a liability waiver. He had just discovered a tool, and every careful, court-trained inch of him intended to use it repeatedly and without remorse.
“Kjaere,” he murmured against the mark, and the word touched me almost as intimately as his mouth.
Beloved.
He kissed the bite once more, and I caught the front of his coat. “Take this off.”
His smile deepened. “As you wish.”
The coat came off without ceremony. His shirt followed, landing over the back of the chair while his hands were already moving lower, all that elegant control apparently having reached its limit.
“Rhain.”
He was working at his belt. “Yes?”
“You’re rushing.”
“Yes.”
The answer was immediate. Shameless, even. His mouth curved as he looked up at me, his eyes gone dragon.
“You said slow.”
His mouth found the edge of my jaw. “I said we should try.”
“And?”
“We tried. Briefly. It was lovely.”
I caught his face in my hands and made him look at me. Whatever lived beneath the diplomat was already in the room.
“That isn’t how language works.”
“No,” he said. “It is how diplomacy works.”
I stared at him for half a second. He kissed me before I could decide whether to argue or reward him, open-mouthed and warm, his smile still there, pressed into mine as if he intended to make the argument unwinnable by every available method.
My hand found him through the fabric. He made a rough sound in his throat, older than diplomacy, older than any language a treaty had ever been written in, and his hands closed around my wrists.
He took one breath, then another, his eyes closing for the smallest fraction of a second as if he were setting the moment in place inside himself before it could move too quickly to keep.
“We are not wasting this,” he said.
“That sounds threatening.”
His eyes opened. “It is a promise.”
He took my pants off as if patience had become a form of worship, going down to one knee to do it. When the fabric slid down my legs, his mouth followed, pressing a kiss to the inside of one thigh and then the other with enough care to send heat curling up beneath my skin.
I had to put a hand against the wall to stay upright.
Rhain looked up at me. The expression on his face had no business existing below me while he knelt. His control was still there, harnessed to a different task.
He rose slowly, and I leaned into him, my mouth moving over his shoulder, along the line of his collarbone, until I found the bite I had left on him in the chamber.
His skin was hot beneath my lips. The wound had tightened, swollen at the edges, marked in a way no formal witness could improve upon. Mine. The bond pulled taut when my tongue dragged over it.
Rhain’s breath broke against my hair. “Faen,” he said softly.
A rough laugh slipped out of me, and I did it again, slower this time, just to feel the court-trained man above me come apart slowly, joint by joint. His pleasure came back through the bond and folded into mine, his and then mine and then his again, until the difference stopped meaning anything.
“Do you know how many times I had to leave a room instead of touching you?”
His eyes opened, dark and slitted. “I was about to ask you the same thing, kjaere.”
The bond drew taut between us, throat to shoulder, claim to claim, until the space between our bodies felt less like distance than a gap about to close.
I again pressed my mouth to the bite I had given him. “Mine,” I said.
His breath caught, then left him unevenly. “Yes.”
The word had barely reached me before his body answered it. His thigh slid between mine, his hands finding the back of my head as he drew me closer.
His mouth returned to my throat with more care this time, lips first, then the edge of his teeth, each touch measured enough to tell me he knew exactly what he was doing now.
He knew what the mark did and he was learning how to ration it.
The heat broke under my skin slowly, no longer a strike but a banked fire spreading outward, gathering strength everywhere he refused to hurry.
He lifted his head before another sound could escape me, his breath warm against the bite, his eyes bright with the satisfaction of discovering a language my body spoke fluently.
He guided me back onto the bed, still careful in a way that had stopped feeling merciful. His mouth moved down my throat to the hollow above my collarbone, then lower, and when he drew my nipple into his mouth, whatever remained of my consonants deserted me.
He worked slowly, with an attention that made patience feel indecent. His tongue pressed flat, then circled, and when his teeth grazed with precision, my whole body answered in hot shivers.
Then his hand slid between my thighs. He touched me like he already knew what he would find and still wanted the pleasure of proving it, his fingers moving through the slick heat of me before pressing inside with the same devastating care he had used everywhere else.
Slow and certain. Enough to pull everything tight beneath both marks and turn my breath useless.
“Faen,” Rhain breathed against my breast. “Already.”
Heat pooled under my ribs. “Rhain.”
“Mm.”
“In me.”
His mouth lifted from my breast, but not quickly. He kissed the damp, aching peak he had left behind, then the skin beneath it, then lower, each touch pulling a new thread of heat through the bond while his hand stayed between my thighs.
“I am taking my time,” he said.
His thumb brushed my clit, light enough to make the point and not nearly enough to solve the problem.
“You are owed attention.”
The words moved over my skin as he did, his mouth traveling down the center of me with infuriating care. Breastbone. Ribs. The soft place below. Lower still, until his hands opened my thighs and his mouth settled over me.
I had thought I knew what slow meant.
Wrong.
Rhain’s patience was delighted.