Chapter 9: Two Hundred Wolves

His bedroom was at the top of the east stairs, and neither of us said a word on the way up.

He shut the door and leaned his back against it.

"Third term," he said, and his voice was rough. "No hand on you where anyone can see."

"Nobody can see."

"Then I'm free to touch you."

"You're free."

He did not move.

I stood in the middle of his floor in the green dress, shaking.

"There's something I have to say first," I said. "Or it will sit in the room with us."

"Say it."

"In the hall, when Dane's people were laughing at me, you sat at the back and let it go on."

His face went very still.

"For a full minute," I said.

"I stood there with two hundred wolves laughing at my face, and you didn't say a word."

"I know."

"Why?"

"Because I had a choice," he said, slowly, "between speaking and getting the law right."

"If I took you before you chose, the Council would call it a seizure," he said. "I had to wait for you to walk toward me."

"That was a long minute."

"It was the worst minute of my life."

My shoulders came down.

It was an answer, and it was not nothing.

"Don't do it again," I said.

"Never."

He crossed the room and put both hands on my face.

He kissed me slowly this time, with the hunger still there underneath.

I pulled at his jacket.

He shrugged out of it, and I got his shirt open.

My palms found the heat of his chest and the hard line of his stomach.

He made a sound against my mouth.

"Turn around," he said.

I turned.

He found the zip at the back of the green dress and drew it down in one long pull.

The silk slid off my hips and pooled on the floor.

I stood in my underwear and his hot breath on my shoulder.

His mouth went to the side of my throat, exactly as he had promised.

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