home to Me.”
He darted me a surprised look. “You just called Calanthe my home.”
“Oh, Con.” I lifted a hand to his cheek, but he seized it in both of his, pressing his lips to my palm, the blood smearing there like the mark of a vow. “Of course Calanthe is your home, if you want it to be. I’m sorry I said otherwise. It was cruel of Me. I was trying to…”
“Drive me away,” he murmured, lips moving over my palm. “It nearly worked, too.”
“I can be savage, too,” I whispered.
“Very sharp thorns,” he agreed, tongue stroking over my palm and making me gasp. Then he lifted his head, gazing at me, stark emotion in his face. “Do you really love me, Lia?”
“I do,” I admitted it with resignation, like a confession. “I love you with everything in Me. I’m not sure I could survive losing you.” There. I’d given him my bleeding heart on a platter. May he feast on it.
“Love isn’t a weakness, my flower,” he said, drawing my hand behind his neck and tucking a strand of escaping hair behind my ear.
“You’ve called it a vulnerability,” I insisted. “Anure uses what we love against us. It’s a chink in the armor, the thin skin over our hearts easily penetrated by the slightest of arrows.”
He frowned. “Maybe both things are true. Love can be a strength, too, instead of a wound.”
I wanted that to be true. I was afraid it wasn’t. “If it’s not a wound, then why does it hurt so much?” I tried to smile and failed.
“Maybe because we haven’t been doing it right,” he said ruefully. “It hurts me, too. We seem to have a knack for screwing things up together. That’s probably some math, right? Add the two of us and we get something even bigger than the sum of the parts.”
I actually giggled, maybe from the emotional release. It hadn’t been easy to keep from telling him how much I loved him, and now that I had, it felt as if a dam had burst, allowing the waters to flow again. “Some kind of math, anyway.”
“I have a confession to make,” he whispered.
“Oh?” I braced for it.
“I don’t have a better plan,” he said. “I really wasn’t trying to lone-wolf it so much, but that was the best plan I could come up with. Everyone is counting on me to come up with some kind of strategy and I … just don’t know. Ambrose pointed out that my plan to rescue you was terrible—that only luck and his intervention saved it from disaster. Lia, what if I can’t do this?”
“Oh, my Con.” I breathed out the tension, then cupped his face in my hands. “That’s why you have other people. That’s one of the first rules of being in charge: You don’t have to do everything yourself, you only need to gather good minds together. You have an eye for choosing people. Use them.”
He made a sound, a kind of disparaging laugh. “I don’t know. Doesn’t sound very brutish and iconoclastic. I found out what it meant, by the way.”
I smiled at that. “Who did you ask?”
“Sondra. It’s not such a bad thing.”
“It’s not, and you could’ve asked Me.”
“You could avoid using words I don’t know.”
“What’s the fun in that?” I kissed him—and he seized the opportunity, deepening the kiss with dizzying speed. My head spun with the swift sexual hunger, the fire blazing between us as if fed by the brutal argument.
“You are a cruel woman,” Con said when he broke the kiss for us both to draw in gasping breaths. He pushed me back on the bed, slid a hand up my thigh under the silk petals of my skirts. “And I love you for it, Sawehl help me.”
“I love you, too, Con,” I said, still feeling the rawness of that exposure. “I didn’t want to, didn’t imagine it could happen—but it’s done now and there’s no going back.”
He stroked my thigh, sliding his rough fingers ever higher. “Done?” he asked with a smile.
“Done,” I breathed on a gasp as his hand brushed my sex, my hips lifting in the pure wanting and fiery love that had taken my mind so long to catch up to.
“You’re so wet, Lia,” he murmured, sliding his callused finger into my tender folds. “Do you want me still, even after everything?”
“I always want you. I can’t seem to help Myself.” I slid my hand to his cock, pressing hard against his leather pants. “The same