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My silence has her clutching her miniature warrior Bess tighter and her cheeks losing color, the freckles standing out against her pale skin. “Some kind of sacrifice, like you mentioned earlier?” she asks.
“What makes you assume that?”
“Lots of fantasy novels and horror movies.”
“No. Gods, no.” By my reluctance to share, she has jumped to even scarier conclusions. “World-sustaining powers are created how all life comes into existence.” I wait. She’s a smart woman, someone who can piece together what I can’t seem to say to her when my mind races with the ways I could take her—on the stone floor, against the wall, bent over this chair.
She bites her lip, her blunt little teeth flashing white against the pink, and I want to kiss what she nibbles. “Death?”
I can’t stop the growl that rolls from me, no matter how she stares or Oggie yowls and jumps off my lap. “No more talk of dying.” Cutting off the snarl, I focus on the lush curve of her hip, the magnificence of her rounded ass, so close to my arm that I could brush against her with the tiniest movement. “Sex magic. That’s how life begins and continues.”
“Oh.” Her mouth and eyes round to match the word before her gaze slips to my lap and my cock that’s quickly hardening with her scrutiny and the growing scent of her arousal. “Does it have to be you?”
“Yes.” I push the bitterness down, not wanting to think about who else she might want.
“Sex with anyone?” she asks, as though she didn’t bash my ego. “That sounds like a too-easy fix.”
“Sex with a fated mate. The only one a monster can be granted in a lifetime. Even a life as long as mine.”
“The sex contract,” she whispers.
“I made the deal with Theo to save my world.” There, the complete truth. Relief and worry war within me, making me lightheaded and heavy-hearted. My mouth goes dry, and anything else I could say to soften the sharp blade of my honesty sticks in my throat.
She sags against the back of the chair alongside me, her curves sinking sweetly into me. “No pressure.”
“No.” I force the word around the lump of awful in my throat. “I ask to court you, to swipe right as you say, with no expectation of a hookup. Nothing more. The burden of sustaining the realm is on me, as it always has been. You didn’t create this world, and no one expects you to keep it going.”
“I might not be your fated mate.” Her whisper goes heartbreaking. “Your true match could still be up there in my world.” She lifts her finger to point at the stone ceiling. I don’t explain dimensional travel because, in essence, she’s right about the labyrinth being beneath what she calls the haunted house that’s possessed by things so much worse than ghosts. “What if Theo got it wrong? Got us wrong?”
He didn’t, but that particular truth’s a trouble that can hold until we’ve both had a night’s sleep. “My kingdom, my problem. I’ll find another way to save it,” I lie.
She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t move away, either. With the fire’s warmth, my mate’s softness, and the exhaustion, I could close my eyes and stay like this for as long as she will allow.
“Sire.” Bess’s quick clacks have Meg jumping away from me, her curls catching on my armor and lavender petals falling on my chest. The cow shifter has the good grace to look away, although she didn’t catch us in the sexy entanglement she seems to hope she did. More’s the pity, as I’ve never craved a woman in the way I do my mate. “Sorry to interrupt. I shouldn’t have come.” Hooves scratch against stone as she backs away.
“What is it?” Meg asks. “What’s wrong?”
I stare at Bess, willing the woman to honor my mate and answer the question.
She tucks her tail. “It’s Belaya. Her nightmares are back. I think because of what happened with her and the candle and your burn. She’s asking for you.” With a glance at my healed palm, she stops talking. “I’ll give her a sleeping potion.”
“No,” I say, even when part of me wants to say yes. “We don’t know how she’ll react to one, given her state.”
“Her state?” Meg asks.
“Delusional, poor dear,” Bess answers. “Not entirely sane when she came here, and slipping more each day.”
“You should go to her,” my too-kind mate tells me. How can I do anything but agree when she makes the answer sound so simple?
“Bess, tell her I’ll be there in a moment.” When her hooves clack toward the tower, I stand and wish I could read my mate’s emotions, as the myths say some fated couples can do. “You’ve met Belaya?”
“Blue skin, dark purple hair, rocking the tall waif chic look?”
“She was the sole survivor of her realm’s magic drain. When I found her, she was half-starved, bruised and bloodied, and barely lucid. Most of my kingdom pities her.”
“And you? How do you feel about her?”
I don’t want to list the awful apathy that sneaks into my heart when I let myself dwell on some of the more misfortunate misfits I’ve collected. “She’s one of mine to look after. Just as Bess and everyone else here is.”
