set his bundle of branding tools on the ground beside his feet, calmly walked over to me, took the knife from my nerveless fingers, pushed one big hand up the back of my head, deep into my hair, and kissed me.
Smack on the mouth.
In front of everybody.
Chapter Eleven
That kiss was bold. It was infuriating. It was…delicious. I didn’t want to be the woman who melted in the face of opposition. I wanted to be more like Dreama, tough and respected and living a meaningful life, and for a while there, it had seemed I had a shot at that through my reading and teaching. But right then, with Mattis’ mouth on mine, with my brain telling me this was the absolute wrong reaction in every way, I—oh all gods help me—I kissed him right back.
I didn’t do it by half, either. It was like I was out of my skin, a totally different person, wild and powerful and staking my own damn claim. I reached up between us, put my hands on either side of his face, and pulled him into the kiss, sealing him to me as if I were going to consume him. I licked the seam of his lips, forcing his mouth open, and poured all my fury and desire and fear and need and hopes—my voice—into him.
He took it. He accepted all of it willingly and never flinched or hesitated. His hand in my hair gentled, cupping my head as I tipped it back. And none of the others said a thing. Neither did they pull me off Mattis or mock us or laugh or anything. They just stood there, patiently, accepting.
See what I meant? Good men.
I swallowed as I stepped back. Okay. I had to get my head on straight. Somehow. I had to think. “Astor, you aren’t killing anyone. You’re a healer. Don’t concern yourself with what happened. Seems to me the problem is not you but Baron the Great. With the Reamers and whatever else coming after all of you, shouldn’t you be able to walk down your own territory unmolested?”
“I think so,” Nox responded. “I’ll get rid of him if you want me to, Torrin. I really don’t mind.”
“We can’t, or at least I can’t order you to do it.” Torrin sighed. “It’s complicated. I made a promise to my father not to kill him. Dad had a…soft spot for Baron. To do so—and I’m not saying there isn’t a threshold over which I could be pushed to do it—would be a betrayal of that promise. I won’t do it until I have to. And Astor is not hurt. He’s just…bothered.”
His brother pointed at him. “That’s why you told me to do it. You can’t. Dad didn’t make me promise.”
Torrin grinned. “True. Now who needs to eat? Bianca? Hungry?”
“Brother,” Dreama interrupted, stepping into the room. To a one, the men jumped like they’d been startled, but Dreama seemed to take the whole tableau in stride. These four had probably done enough wild things in their lives that she was immune to shock. “Perhaps I could take Bianca out to eat with me. You could all use a little time to settle in.”
“After she’s marked.” Torrin plopped down on a chair. “Mark her up, Mattis. Then she can go out with you, sister. By all means.”
Dreama rolled her eyes, but it seemed like all the men were looking elsewhere, and I was the only one who saw her. I smiled to myself. I could grow to like this woman.
Which was probably good, right? Since I was basically getting hitched to all of her male relatives, not to mention her friends. In my world, that wouldn’t alter our relationship much—kids tended to leave their birth families when they formed their own households, mostly because travel between planets consumed a lot of time and resources, and you couldn’t very well haul an extended family around. Plus, with enforced euthanasia at a certain age and health markers, we tended not to have a lot of living relatives. Only special cases stayed close with their siblings well into adulthood. Like me.
I’d never had a sister. What did you even do with a sister? Not that Brent and I did much together other than check in on each other. A lot. Dreama didn’t seem suffocating like that.
Mattis was unrolling his cloth-bound set of tools, and Torrin stoked a fire in the hearth. This room had a little fireplace at the base of one of its ventilation shafts, and