Chapter 19: The Mark

By midnight the black was gone from his veins, and Rhona said he would live.

I carried him upstairs anyway, with Jory on his other side, to the room in Greyfell's lodge that had been my father's.

I had not slept in it since the night the Concord took him, when I was seventeen.

Nobody had touched it.

Jory shut the door behind us, and for the first time in ten years I was alone in that room with a man I wanted.

Ronan sat on the edge of the bed, bare to the waist, with a clean bandage across his ribs.

The bite on his shoulder was swollen and dark, a perfect crescent of my teeth.

"No bonding mark," he said.

"I know what I said."

"You said it was the rule."

"The rule broke," I said. "I'm not taking it back."

"Come here."

I crossed the room and stood between his knees.

He put his forehead against my stomach, and I felt it in both of us.

It was the strangest thing.

I could feel his hands on my hips, and I could feel my own hips under his hands, both at once.

"Ronan," I said, and heard it come back from inside him.

He looked up.

"I can feel you," he said. "All of it."

"It's too much," I said, laughing.

"It's not enough."

I laughed, and the laugh went through both of us.

I pulled my tunic over my head and his breath caught in my own chest.

He ran his palms up my ribs, slowly, and the touch lit me from the inside and from the outside.

"Lie back," I said.

"I'm supposed to be the invalid."

"You're supposed to do what I say."

He lay back, and I climbed over him carefully, avoiding the bandage.

I kissed his mouth first.

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