Chapter 124: The Bear Finally Had His Answer

Morning came without an emergency to choose for her. That mattered enough that Dove lay still for a few minutes, listening to Edrik move near the office door while Thorne’s arm rested around her waist.

"You still want this?" her husband asked quietly.

She turned toward him. "Yes. Are you okay?"

"I want time with you. I want you to tell me things. I don’t need you to pretend you haven’t been choosing him for weeks."

Dove touched his cheek. She loved that he could be possessive over a stranger staring at her and still make room for a decision that belonged to her. It didn’t mean he would never feel jealous. It meant he trusted her enough to say what he needed instead of turning that feeling into a rule.

After her Day Sixty-Three pool wash, she dressed and joined both men for breakfast. Eggs, potatoes, thick toast, and leftover meat filled their plates. Nobody had to make a life-changing decision on an empty stomach just because Sprout found the timing exciting.

Edrik waited until she sat. He had shaved the roughest edge of his stubble but left enough that she wanted to touch his jaw. His white hair was still damp, his shirt clean, and his expression steadier than her own stomach felt.

"I remember what I said," she told him. "You don’t have to look like you’re waiting for me to forget."

"I was waiting for you to finish your coffee."

"Keep doing that. It’s an excellent quality in a husband."

His smile changed, slowly enough that she could see the word reach him. Dove put down her cup before her hands made a liar of all her confidence.

They talked about the bond plainly. It was a lasting choice, not another way to settle tonight’s sleeping arrangements. Thorne remained her husband. Edrik wouldn’t become entitled to answer for her, and Dove wouldn’t expect him to become harmless just because she loved the parts of him that were gentle with her.

"I’ll tell you when you’re frightening me," she said. "You have to hear it even when you think you’re helping."

"I heard you at the fence."

"I know. That’s why we’re having this conversation."

He looked at her for a long moment, then took the hand she offered. "I want your answer more than I want to win an argument with you."

Dove laughed shakily. "That’s very romantic. Keep it somewhere you can find when I’m being awful."

Dove looks up at him, and there’s something in her eyes that makes his chest feel too small for everything happening inside it.

He’s heard her and Thorne together more times than he can count through walls, through floors, through the thin membrane of pretending he wasn’t listening—and every single time he’d told himself he didn’t mind, that he was fine being the one who watched the door, who kept them safe, who loved from the careful distance of a man who didn’t think he got to want things like this.

"Edrik." She says his name like it means something. Like it’s not just a collection of sounds his mother gave him before she stopped being able to give him anything at all.

"You don’t have to," he says, even now, even with her hand already sliding up his forearm, over the ink that marks him as something he used to be and is trying not to be anymore. "I don’t need—"

"I know you don’t need." Her fingers trace the line of a faded chrysanthemum tattoo, the old brotherhood ink that used to mean loyalty to men who never deserved his. "I’m asking what you want."

He wants everything. He wants to tell her that he’s wanted this since the first night he heard her gasp Thorne’s name through the wall and had to bite down on his own fist to keep from making a sound, from giving away that he was awake, that he was listening, that he was aching in a way he had no right to ache. He wants to tell her that he loves her so much it frightens him, the way a man who has only ever known violence is frightened by softness, certain it will break in his hands.

Instead he just says, "You. I want you."

It comes out rougher than he means it to, scraped raw at the edges, and something shifts in her face—softens and sharpens at the same time—and then she’s pulling him down by the collar of his shirt and kissing him like she’s been waiting just as long as he has.

He’s careful at first. He’s always careful, a big man’s constant apology for the space he takes up in the world, but Dove makes a small needy sound against his mouth and fists both hands in his shirt and he feels something in him come loose, some latch he didn’t know he’d kept shut.

He picks her up without breaking the kiss. She weighs nothing to him, nothing at all, and she wraps her legs around his waist like she trusts him completely, like his size has never once been something to fear, and he carries her to the bed thinking this, this is real, this is happening, over and over like a prayer he doesn’t have the words for.

He lays her down like she’s something precious. Which she is. Which she has always been, from the first moment he saw her and felt the ground shift under a life he thought was already decided.

"Edrik." She laughs, breathless, when he just kneels there over her, staring. "You’re allowed to touch me."

"I know." He doesn’t move yet. He wants to look at her first—the spill of her hair across the pillow, the flush already climbing her throat, the softness of her mouth kissed pink. "I just. I want to remember this part too."

Her expression does something complicated, something that makes his throat tight, and then she reaches up and pulls him down by the back of his neck and he lets himself go.

Edrik kisses her throat first, long slow drags of his mouth that make her arch under him, and he can’t stop his hands from moving—over her ribs, her waist, the curve of her hip, like he’s trying to touch every part of her at once, like he’s afraid that if he stops touching her even for a second this will turn out to be something his mind invented in the dark, lying awake, listening.

"You’re so soft," he murmurs against her collarbone, and he means it as worship, not observation. "Everywhere. You’re soft everywhere and I don’t—" He bites gently at her shoulder, can’t help himself, wants to taste her. "I don’t know how to be gentle enough for this."

"Maybe I don’t want gentle the whole time," she says, and the way she says it, low and sure, sends something hot straight through him.

He pulls her shirt over her head like it’s something sacred being unwrapped, and when she’s bare beneath him he just looks at her for a long moment, drinking her in, cataloguing her like he intends to spend years committing every inch to memory. He kisses down her sternum, between her breasts, taking his time there—sucking a mark into the curve of one breast that makes her gasp his name, and he feels a possessive thrill go through him at the sound, at being the one to put that sound in her mouth.

"Mine," he says against her skin, barely a whisper, more admission than claim. "God, Dove, I’ve wanted you to be mine for so long."

"I am." She threads her fingers through his hair, tugging just slightly when his mouth closes around her nipple, and the small sting of it only makes him want more. "I have been. You just had to let yourself have it."