Page 83 of Warrior’s Mate

She touched his face.

"I want the bond," she said.

Kaiven did not move.

"Say it again."

"I want the bond. With you. By choice."

He covered her hand with his.

"Are you certain?"

"No."

His expression changed.

Maelis smiled gently. "I am certain about you. I am not certain about tomorrow, or the war, or what happens to Farseek. I think demanding certainty about everything before choosing anything would leave us with no life at all."

Kaiven exhaled.

"Then yes," she said. "I choose you."

He kissed her, and this time the restraint between them did not feel like caution so much as the last thin barrier before something they had both already chosen. His mouth was warm and deliberate against hers, one hand settling at her waist while the other cradled the back of her neck. Earlier kisses had been stolen between alarms, orders, and the possibility of separation. This one belonged to them, and Maelis felt that difference all the way to her bones.

She slid her arms around his shoulders and pulled him closer. Kaiven answered with a low sound that vibrated through his chest, but after several long kisses he made himself lift his head. His breathing was already rough. "One more thing," he said.

Maelis almost laughed. "If this is another speech about certainty, I am going to reconsider the entire military."

"The seed shield." His expression remained serious despite the heat between them. "If I use one, we can mate without sealing the biological bond. If I do not use one, and I release my seed inside you, the solmatu bond completes. That part is not symbolic. It is the biological threshold."

She held his gaze. This, at least, deserved the pause. Not because she doubted him, but because she wanted the decision to belong unmistakably to her. "No shield."

Every line of his body tightened. "Maelis."

"I know what I am saying." She touched his mouth with two fingers, then let them trace the hard line of his jaw. "I am not choosing sex and accidentally getting a bond with it. I am choosing you, and I am choosing the bond. No seed shield."

For one heartbeat Kaiven looked almost undone. Then his hand closed gently around the back of her neck and he kissed her again with none of the careful distance he had been holding between them. He still did not take; he answered. There was a difference, and Maelis felt it in the way he let her pull him closer, in the way his hands followed the invitations of her body instead of trying to direct them.

The borrowed office was an absurd place for anything sacred. The couch was too narrow, the emergency lights leaking beneath the door were too bright, and someone in the corridor was arguing about a missing medical manifest. Maelis did not care. She had spent the day watching ordinary life become impossible. She wanted one thing that belonged entirely to the two of them, even if it happened on terrible furniture while Farseek burned beyond the walls.

Kaiven unfastened her tunic slowly enough to let her stop him if she wanted, but he no longer asked permission for every inch of movement. Maelis had already told him what she wanted. She took his hands and put them where she wanted them, first at her waist, then higher, guiding his palms over her breasts through the thin fabric beneath her uniform. His breath caught when her nipples tightened under his touch. "There," she whispered. "You can stop treating me like I might shatter."

"I have seen you argue with armed officers, reroute an evacuation under fire, and crawl out of a collapsed tunnel with twenty-seven other people," he murmured against her mouth. "I have never believed you fragile." His thumbs brushed over her nipples, drawing a shiver through her. "I am afraid of being careless with something precious. Those are not the same thing."

The answer went through her more sharply than any rehearsed declaration could have. Maelis pulled his shirt open and pushed it from his shoulders. Kaiven was built like the Brigade officer he was: broad, heavily muscled, marked by old training scars and two fresh burns along his ribs. His blue-gray skin felt warmer than hers under her palms. She explored him without hurry, enjoying the way his discipline frayed when her fingers moved along the sensitive side of his neck.

"Still smug," he managed when she kissed that spot and felt the involuntary shudder that followed.

"More so now."

He laughed once, then turned the advantage against her. His mouth moved from her throat to the curve of her breast, lingering over the places that made her breathing change. By the time he drew one nipple into his mouth, Maelis had both hands buried in his hair and no interest in pretending patience was a virtue. Heat gathered low in her body, made sharper by every slow drag of his tongue and every firm stroke of his hand over her hip.

The narrow couch became an enemy exactly as Kaiven had predicted. When he tried to shift her without putting pressure on her injured knee, the furniture creaked ominously beneath them. Maelis broke into helpless laughter against his shoulder. "If we survive the invasion and die under an administrative couch, I will haunt you."

"I will file a complaint with Civil Defense."

"You are Civil Defense."