My pulse moved into my throat. “Dominic.”
“Say it for me.” An aggressive plea.
I had just ended a four-year relationship. I should’ve asked for space. Tea. One uninterrupted hour to feel like a decent person.
Instead, I looked at the dragon in his eyes and handed him the sentence he was asking for. “He’s past tense.”
Dominic’s eyes closed. When he opened them he asked, “And I am?”
Everything else fell back as I looked at him. At the control in his hands and the dragon in his eyes.
“You’re here,” I said.
His nostrils flared once. “No.”
“No?” I said.
He crossed the room in three steps and stopped six inches from me. Not touching me but I felt his heat anyway.
“Yours,” he said.
“Dominic—”
“I am yours, Catalina. The bond does not work the way the dining hall made it look. You are not mine because I said it in a room in front of witnesses. I am yours because I put myself in your hands and cannot take myself back.” His voice dropped.
My breath left me.
His hand came to my jaw, hot and steady. He kissed me first on the mouth. Lightly. Reverently.
Then he tilted my head, and my pulse jumped because I thought he meant to kiss the bite mark at the left of my throat.
He didn’t kiss it.
His mouth stopped just over the mark, and his tongue touched it instead.
The wave broke from there. The same heat that had taken me in the dining hall, but changed by the room, the closed door, the bed at the backs of my knees. No council. No cameras. No hundred and twenty witnesses.
Just him. Just me. Just the bond opening under my skin like it had been waiting for permission.
Pleasure rose so fast my breath caught on the way out. His hand moved to my stomach, palm flat and heavy, fingers spread wide. I felt the size of him. I didn’t feel trapped.
He was steadying me, holding me there, not holding me down.
I came hard, my hands finding purchase in his hair as a sound climbed my throat and broke before I could stop it. My thighs locked, my back came off the bed, and the bond rang through me: a long, bright note that wasn’t only mine, striking the inside of my ribs and rolling outward, finally finding its shape.
For a moment, there was only breath. Mine, uneven. His, controlled.
Then he lifted his head. I saw his mouth, his vertical eyes, and the satisfaction he hadn’t quite managed to hide.
He knew exactly what he had done to me.
“Dominic.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be smug.”
“I am not smug.”