Chapter 41 #3
Elara’s whole body had turned traitor. Her hands trembled in the water. Her pulse thumped wild and useless, no longer something she could command.
“Do not misunderstand me, Eilíara,” he said, the roughness in his voice impossible to miss.
“Bond or none, I would have you. In a single breath, I would have you.
Your mouth, your body, your trust. The right to keep choosing you, and to be chosen in return.
If you came to me freely, I would take that gift and hold it like the most sacred thing I had ever been given.
“There is no confusion in me,” he declared.
“None. There is no part of this I would wish dulled. If you asked it of me, I would do it—because I would rather have you in my life than lose you. But do not think that means this is anything less than what it is.” His gaze still did not falter.
“There are very few souls in this world who matter to me as you do. When I met you, I knew my life had already altered. I have never once looked back from that knowing.”
His words moved through flesh and breath and bone until there seemed to be nothing in her untouched by them.
Bond or none, I would have you.
Moisture blurred her sight. Her mouth trembled when she tried to answer.
She dragged a hand across her cheeks and only spread the evidence further, only proving how little command she had left over any of this.
He had come so near that the water between them scarcely seemed to count as space.
Beneath the surface, his hand brushed against the back of hers—a single, fleeting touch—and then was gone.
“Speak the word,” he said, “and I am yours. Wholly and without condition. Until then, I wait.”
Her breath would not come properly. By the time she found her voice, it was little more than a thread. “Reynnar—”
“We still have to decide how we go forward.” He was drawing back, she saw, from the edge he had walked her to, offering her a shore. “The wards will not allow a rift into Carnlasair. We’ll have to enter on foot.” His eyes held hers. “Which means you have two roads before you.”
She nodded once. It was all she could manage.
“The first,” he said, “is that I mark you.”
The barest glimpse of a fang touched his lip, gone almost before she could be sure she had seen it, and through the Cara there came a low, molten pulse of desire that moved down her core and settled there before he mastered it.
“As I said before, every Sídhe in Carnlasair will know what you are to me. But the marking would quiet that awareness. It would give them less to scent, less to read.”
“And the second?”
“The second is that we try to hide you.” He glanced briefly toward the bank, where Aoife’s discarded clothes lay in a small heap of linen and leather.
“We use Aoife’s scent as thoroughly as we can.
We trust the crowd to blur the rest. And we accept that some will notice anyway, and pray most of those choose silence. ”
Then he stepped back.
Only a pace. And yet the space that opened between them felt impossible.
“The choice is yours, ealaín,” he said. “As it always will be.”
With that, he turned and began to wade toward the far side of the spring, the water parting around him in soft silver ripples.
“Do it.”
He stopped.
For a moment, he did not move at all, his back to her, water lapping against him. Then, slowly, he looked back over his shoulder. Whatever had been in his face before was gone now, hidden too deep for her to follow.
“It does not have to mean anything,” he said.
“I know.” The words came quickly, though she believed neither herself nor him. Her throat tightened. “I still want it done.”
The spring seemed to hold itself still around them. Above, light drifted through the leaves in slow, wavering coins that broke upon the water and vanished.
Reynnar moved without haste, dappled sunlight tracing the planes of him as he approached her: over the broad line of his shoulders, the lean strength of his chest, the sculpted length of his torso disappearing beneath the water.
His face was all angles and grace made gentler by the light, the beauty of it almost too much to bear when paired with those eyes—clear and burning and fixed on her.
Somewhere in the branches above them, a thrush broke off its song and did not resume it, as though even the small, wild things understood that something was happening here that did not want interruption.
He stopped close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through the cool water, and for a brief, treacherous moment, she could think of nothing but how near he was.
How near she wanted him. Then his hand rose to the side of her neck—settled there lightly, his palm spanning the curve of her throat while his thumb came to rest just beneath her ear.
“Here,” he said softly. “This is where your scent rests strongest.”
She could scarcely draw air.
“If I lay enough of mine over this place—” his thumb moved, a slow graze beneath her ear, then lower to the delicate hollow of her throat before moving to the other side, “—and here, it will blur yours. No Sídhe nose will read you clearly.”
“Would that not…” Her voice warbled thinly. “Would that not simply make me smell of you?”
A single shiver moved through his arm. His hand at her neck tightened by the faintest degree before loosening.
“It will dull your scent,” he explained, his voice roughened. “Not replace it. Only make you difficult to read.”
“And they would not smell it on you as well?” she asked. “That you—that we—”
“No.” The word came close enough that she felt it brush her cheek. “It is an old and graceless bit of biology, I’m afraid. Once, males marked females to warn off rivals. To signal possession.” A pause. “The custom has fallen out of favor. It is thought…”
“Possessive,” she supplied.
Something like amusement passed over his face, softening it. “Very.” Then, more quietly still, he said, “Though you are welcome, ealaín, to mark me in return. Possess me as thoroughly as it pleases you.”
Elara rolled her eyes—not because she was unmoved, but because the alternative was to come apart where she stood. “Go on, then,” she said.