Page 53 of Renegade Kingdom
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you.” He said it simply, the way he said most things. As if the words were obvious and he was merely pointing out what the rest of the world had somehow missed. “And I know that the woman who just talked a traumatised soldier out of his guilt spiral is not the woman who gets people killed. She’s the one who keeps them alive.”
The warmth of his words settled into me like sunlight into soil. I pushed off the door and crossed the room to where he sat, and when I reached him I didn’t sit beside him. I stood between his knees and put my hands on his shoulders, looking down into those brown eyes that had been watching me with steady, patient, unwavering attention since the moment I’d walked in.
His hands came to my hips automatically. His thumbs traced small circles through the fabric of my shirt and the touch sent sparks down my spine that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the man.
“I asked you something earlier,” I said.
His brow creased, then cleared. “Whether you were neglecting me?”
“The answer was no. But I’ve been thinking about it since, and I realised something.” I ran my fingers along the line of his jaw. The stubble there was rough against my fingertips. “I’ve been so busy trying to hold everything together that I forgot the most important part.”
“What part?”
“The part where I stop holding everything and just hold you.”
Something changed in his eyes. The steady patience was still there, the rock-solid foundation that had never once waveredsince the day I’d met him. But underneath it, rising like heat from sun-warmed stone, was something hungrier. Something that the bear usually kept banked and controlled but that I could see now, burning behind the calm.
He pulled me closer. Not roughly. Tank was never rough unless I asked him to be. But with a deliberateness that left no room for misunderstanding, his hands sliding from my hips to the small of my back, gathering me against him until I was practically in his lap and the heat of his body was seeping through every layer of clothing between us.
“You don’t have to hold me,” he said, his voice lower than it had been a moment ago. “But I wouldn’t object.”
I kissed him.
Not the gentle, reassuring kisses we’d been stealing between crises. This was the kind of kiss that had been building since the training ring, since the meeting, since the moment in the corridor when he’d looked at me with those steady eyes and I’d felt the bond between us pulse with something that demanded attention. His mouth opened under mine and I sank into it, into him, into everything that was the man I loved. He made a low sound against my lips that was half man and half bear, and it sent a shiver of anticipation down my spine.
His hands moved. Up my back, fingers spreading wide, pulling me impossibly closer. I shifted in his lap and felt the evidence of exactly how not-calm the bear was pressed against me, and the friction sent a bolt of heat through my core that made me gasp into his mouth.
“Door locked?” he murmured against my lips.
“I locked it when I came in.”
The sound he made was approval and desire rolled into one, and then he was standing, lifting me with him like I weighed nothing, and the world tilted as he turned and laid me on the bed with a care that contradicted the hunger I could feel building inevery line of his body. He held himself above me, arms braced on either side of my head. The look on his face was the one that undid me every time. Patient. Focused. Like I was the only thing in the world worth paying attention to, and he intended to pay very close attention indeed.
“We leave in the morning,” I said.
“I know.”
“This might be the last chance we have for a while.”
“Then we should make it count.” His thumb traced my cheekbone, a touch so light it barely registered, and the contrast between that gentleness and the weight of his body above mine made something tighten low in my stomach. “Tell me what you want.”
“You. Just you. No war, no courts, no decisions. Just this.”
He lowered his mouth to my throat and I stopped thinking about anything at all.
Tank kissed like he did everything else. Deliberately. Thoroughly. With the patience of a man who understood that the best things required time and attention and the willingness to linger in places that mattered. His lips found the hollow beneath my ear and I arched into him, my hands finding the hem of his shirt and pulling. He helped, sitting back just enough to drag the fabric over his head, and the sight of him in the fading afternoon light made my mouth go dry.
He was enormous. I knew that. I’d known it since the first day at the garage when he’d ducked through a doorway that was built for normal-sized humans. But knowing it and seeing it, here, now, with the golden light painting shadows across the planes of his chest and the Spring Court magic humming faintly beneath his skin, were different things entirely.
I sat up and pressed my mouth to his collarbone. Felt the rumble of the bear beneath his skin, a vibration that resonated through my lips. His hand cupped the back of my head, fingersthreading through my hair, and he held me there while I mapped the territory of his chest with my tongue. The taste of his skin was salt and warmth and something green, like crushed leaves, the Spring magic leaving its signature even here.
“Alyssa.” My name in his mouth was a prayer and a warning. The patience was fraying. I could feel it in the tension of his muscles, the quickening of his breath, the way his hand tightened in my hair when I found a spot that made his control slip.
I pulled back and looked up at him. “Stop being patient.”
His eyes darkened. The bear surfaced, not dangerously, not the berserker that lived in the deep places of his nature, but the simpler, more immediate beast that wanted what it wanted and was tired of waiting for permission.
