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Churning water. A river reaching a stone circle. The bridge.
She was in the human lands. She’d made it.
She inhaled sharply and looked to the sky. The blanket of stars was no longer visible as they had been when she’d first fled, but even through the thin clouds, she was able to note their positions in relation to the waning moon.
She’d been gone an hour or two at most.
And then it all came back to her. The howls chasing her, the slide down the embankment, the horrid crash into the frigid water. The rock meeting her temple and the darkness that consumed her after.
Clara whipped toward the human male, who still hadn’t moved from his position near her, nor had he lowered his hands. He merely stared at her with a worried sort of wonder, as if she were a skittish creature who would either bite him or bay at the moon for help.
She did neither. Instead, she called on the inner strength of her wolf and used what little they both could muster to throw herself at the male. Once she had her nails firmly embedded into the meat of his biceps, she hung on, forcing all her desperation into her weight, and cast pleading eyes up at him.
“Compete for me.”
He tried to hold her upright, while still keeping her at arm’s length. The shock of both her strength and her words quickly twisted the male’s face with additional alarm. “I’m sorry, what?”
“My hand,” she hurried out. “Compete for me. It will be yours, for surely, you can win.” She squeezed the toned muscles of his upper arms tighter in a harried attempt to convey her point. Though most of him was cold and damp like her, his body did not shiver against the elements. There was a quiet fortification to his powerful frame. Slight, yet unsuspecting.
Yes, he could be her champion. The others would overlook him, dismiss him, but she alone would know?—
“Win what? Lady, your head . . . you’ve been through a heck of a?—”
“You have no idea what I have been through, human,” she gritted out, her voice elevating to levels she’d never dared to use against other males. “But it will be nothing should you refuse to compete for my hand in marriage.”
They both stilled as the word landed at their feet with the weight of a fallen oak.
“Marriage?” he asked in disbelief as he tried to steady her, seemingly no longer realizing that she had already stopped moving. Then a drawbridge of concern slammed over his stern brow. “Are you in trouble?”
There it was. The very question she had prepared herself to answer, the one whose response she’d rehearsed a thousand times on her journey from the stronghold. The calculated message, the specific words, the exchanges, the agreements.
But when the time finally came, to her great horror, what came out instead was the truth. Simple words to a simple question that revealed more shame than salvation, but she couldn’t bring herself to care anymore.
She was cold, and she was here. She’d found him, and that had to be enough for now.
“Yes,” she breathed with a relief so strong it lightened more than her lungs. “We all are.” And then she did the one thing she’d promised herself she’d never do again.
She begged.
“Please.”
Chapter 4
There weren’t many words in any of the myriad of languages Bronze knew that had the power to knock him on his ass, but marriage was certainly one of them. Add to that the fact that it was spoken by a beautiful—and formerly unconscious—woman he’d just pulled out of the river and he would have thought the prime mages had it out for him, worse than they no doubt already did.
Marriage?
“Look, I know my gender tends to encompass the majority of mouth breathers on this rock who have so not earned the right to say this, but please, calm down.”
Aaand, as expected, the panicked pools of brown staring back at him flattened under the hazy annoyance of every female creature who had reluctantly been pushed back into a box by someone who had no business doing the pushing.
Shit.
“Let’s start over. Please, you’re bleeding and inching closer toward hypothermia the longer we don’t get you dry and warm.” Which was definitely the largest of his concerns at the moment. Given her sodden clothing, head wound, and the odd state of her mind upon coming out of her little river respite, Bronze had to do a little triage. The bleeding had largely slowed, and there’d be time to parse out whatever she was talking about, but in his experience, body temperature didn’t exactly wait around for all parties involved to get their acts together before it decided to crash.
Given that she had grabbed onto him, he figured there was some measure of safety in continuing that physical connection if he could escort her to the flat rock beneath the large spruce that was a safer distance away from the water. But fuck, the charmers! Those things could be as prevalent as alley piss. And now that he had as much proof as he was going to get that they were lurking in this area, safety was not guaranteed.
Once Bronze settled the woman onto the rock, it was blatantly obvious that time was not on her side either. That ashen tinge to her lips had yet to fade, nor had the shadowed creases beneath her eyes. Fucking hell, how was she even upright and talking, let alone coming at him like a pass rusher in overtime?
