Kinked (Elder Races, #6)

The thought that he was about to initiate a “we have to talk about our feelings” moment was laughable. But there was his internal whip again, driving him forward. With a sigh, he shut and bolted the double doors, and walked over to sit on the edge of the sumptuous bed. He started to strip off his armor.

“I think I might be getting close to mating with you,” he said flatly into the sun-drenched silence. He bent over to work off the leg pieces. “Believe me, I’m very aware of how that sounds. Feel free to laugh if you like.”

He sensed when she turned away from the window, but he didn’t look up. He started working on the other leg.

Still in that flat, matter-of-fact tone of voice, he said, “You’re nothing like anything I would have said I wanted, yet I think you might be everything I need. It’s too early to tell for sure. We’ve spent a week together. One week. Yeah, it’s been one week filled with high stress and intense exposure to each other, and I know this kind of thing can happen fast, but sunshine, we haven’t even really made love yet. All we’ve done is fool around a little. I’m sure you can understand the depth of my perplexity at finding myself in this situation.”

“Are you somehow going to make today all about you again?”

He tilted his head at her. The sun was behind her, rendering her expression unreadable. He said, “Of course.”

He bent back to his task. Elven armor was as light as it possibly could be while still being effective. Still, wearing it over jeans on a scorcher like today was a miserably hot experience, and it was a relief to strip the pieces off. After he took a bath, he was going to raid the wardrobe for something lighter to wear underneath.

She walked over and sat on the bed beside him. He thought he heard her mutter, “So that’s what the crowd in my head has been yelling about.”

He had been in the middle of pulling the breastplate over his head, so he couldn’t have heard her right. “Excuse me?”

“Never mind.” After looking undecided for a moment, she began stripping off her own armor. With her head bent to her task, she asked quietly, “If it’s too soon, why are you bringing this up now?”

Finally he was back down to his filthy jeans and boots. He took off the boots, then turned to kneel in front of her and began to work at the fastenings of her leg pieces. “You know how it goes. ‘Honey, I’m going to war, and I’ve got something I need to tell you.’ ” He leaned his elbows on her knees and looked up at her.

She stopped what she was doing and watched him with a wary, vulnerable look. He almost smiled. She handled her own vulnerability like someone else might handle dynamite, her eyes wide as if something were about to explode in her face.

He said quietly, “I want to know that you’ve got your head on straight when we go to the island tonight. I know you’re struggling with a huge amount of fear. You’ve been doing a good job, but I’ve watched it swallow you up a couple of times, and I’m concerned.”

“I won’t do anything that will get you killed,” she snapped. She yanked at the fastenings of her own breastplate and dragged it over her head.

“That’s not the point,” he said. He reached up to take her face in both hands and insisted that she look at him. “I don’t want you to do anything that will get you killed. You know as well as I do that a fighter who is struggling with despair is a danger to herself. I don’t want you to go into tonight without having considered everything—everything—there is to consider, and yes, that does include me.”

Her expression broke, and the anguish came out. She gripped his wrists. “I’m so scared.”

“I know you are,” he said. “I can’t imagine facing the kind of uncertainty you’re facing. That’s why I’m going to ask you to think outside of the box.”

She looked at him with such surprise he had to laugh. He rose up to kiss her. She put her arms around his neck to hug him with such ferocity, he wrapped her up in his arms too. They held each other tightly.

“Some people,” she said, “would say that I already think outside the box.”

“I don’t mean any regular old box,” he told her. “I want you to think outside of your box.”

She pulled back to stare at him. “I don’t understand.”

“You need to remember all the reasons you have to live, because if someone goes into a life-or-death fight without having those reasons firmly fixed in their mind, often they don’t make it out the other side alive. The fact of the matter is, you are not facing an either/or situation, where you either fly or die.” He held up a finger. “Here’s the first thing to remember. You may be healed.”

Her face clouded over. “I don’t see how. I—the bone crushed, Quentin. I felt it go.”

He flicked her nose, and he wasn’t gentle about it, so that she jerked her head back and blinked. “You are not a healer. You can’t diagnose yourself, and you don’t know what might happen. Say it.”