Chapter 61: Kisses Were Apparently a Food Group

"Tell me you did that," Dove whispered, staring at the finished metal tail. "I am not sharing a room with haunted desk supplies."

Thorne lifted his hand from the blanket. He had reached toward the stand while thinking about its unfinished curl, but he hadn’t touched it. The little fox sat a full arm’s length beyond their sleeping pad, farther than his power had reached before. He told her he had felt it move without the usual effort.

Sprout sounded delighted inside her head. "Improved range observed after mate intimacy. A promising result for future development."

"We also ate, slept, and used the pool water. Put your pants back on and stop writing conclusions." Dove repeated the useful part to Thorne, who laughed against her hair. They would check the change after breakfast. Right now, she wanted his arm back where it had been.

Day Twenty-Six brought wind hard enough to push cold through the window shutter. Dove washed with her daily pool water behind their locked door, then put on her warmest layers. Her skin handled the chill better than before, but being tougher did not mean she wanted to spend the morning proving it.

Sprout offered three pairs of soft lounge trousers, with ten normal coins for selling two. Five fresh Favor would unlock an eighteen-coin wash bowl. She accepted the stock, looked at the ice along the window frame, and made a decision that would have horrified every manager she had ever known.

"We’re closed today. Twenty-two normal coins can sit there while I discover the exciting world of not working."

Thorne looked up from the pad. "Come here, then. I’ve been trying to make that offer sound reasonable since you got up."

She stored a newly traded packet of crackers from yesterday, completing the settled-day storage task, then sent the keeper a message through the door when he brought breakfast. He promised to pass on the closure, then handed over enough food for their meals. They had drinking water, the attached washroom across the quiet passage, and no reason to open her counter. Dove put the sales card facedown and climbed back into Thorne’s arms.

He held her against his chest while she ate a warm roll. His shirt had slipped at the collar, showing the edge of her bond mark over his heart. She brushed it with her thumb and felt him draw a slower breath.

"What did you do before all this?" she asked. "Besides looking unfairly good while carrying things."

"Finance. I was second in command at a hedge fund, one promotion away from running it." He sounded almost embarrassed, which made her lift her head. "We managed other people’s investments. Mostly I spent my day arguing about risk."

Dove looked from his scarred hands to his face. "You had meetings. Actual meetings, with a suit and a desk and somebody saying the quarter looked promising?"

His smile widened at her impression of a meeting. "Several people said that, usually right before explaining why the quarter wasn’t looking promising at all."

She groaned into his shirt. "I would have loved to see you in a suit. That’s deeply unfair information to give a woman trapped in a break-room office."

When he offered to wear a suit again if they found one, she gripped his shirt. "Don’t threaten me with a good time when I’m trapped in your lap."

His laugh moved beneath her cheek. She could picture him at a desk, silver hair badly behaved above a neat collar, looking at someone over a report. For a moment he had a whole life beyond being the man who carried her through snow, and she wanted to know more of it.

"You never had a mate before me?" she asked. "I know men bond once, but I keep expecting someone to tell me I missed something enormous."

He admitted he had never found a female who wanted him before her. Dove sat up. "What do you mean, you? Have you seen you? Back home you would’ve been some ridiculously famous actor, and I would’ve been complaining that men like that don’t exist in real life."

He looked at her as if she had put something precious into his hands. "Women were that different where you lived?"

"Apparently they had eyes." She touched his cheek before he could look away. "I’m not saying it to be nice, Thorne."

He pulled her closer, smiling against her hair, and she let herself settle there. She had said back home, nothing about dying or waking in someone else’s body. That secret still sat between the things she could tell him.

"Women were rare even before the freeze," he said after a while. "Most had several mates, and some males never even got a chance to court one. Wanting you doesn’t mean I expected you to want me back."

Dove listened while he explained what happened when cubs grew older. Cubs began in full beast form and stayed that way until five, when they gained their human shape. Males could shift afterward. Females could never return to their beast form.

"Of course the boys kept the useful feature," she muttered. "I get hair care, and you get to become heated transport."

A hand rattled their door handle. Someone outside said he only wanted to show her a blanket and pulled again, harder, despite the CLOSED card hanging at eye level.

Thorne’s roar shook the cup beside their pad. The hand vanished, followed by hurried footsteps and the keeper’s angry voice farther down the passage. Dove pressed her face into Thorne’s shoulder, laughing despite herself.

"Very scary, honey. Now come back here before I get cold," she told him. He checked she was comfortable before settling back around her, which somehow pleased her more than the roar.

Later, they tried his power with two matching metal scraps, stopping after small movements. Food and rest helped him recover; a kiss gave a smaller, quick lift. His reach was better, but affection did not remove his limits. Dove wrote that down before Sprout could claim her mouth had replaced lunch.

Thorne’s amusement completed the five-Favor target. With the daily mate extra, she had one thousand seventy-five Favor. She paid twelve to keep all three unsold trousers, leaving one thousand sixty-three. No sales reward came in. A day off had cost something, and she still did not regret it.

By evening she had almost stopped listening for footsteps. Then the keeper knocked, twice and carefully, and said a courier needed to speak to her. Dove pulled her blanket closer as a folded notice slid beneath the door.

Garran’s name sat under an order to hold the white fox woman and the panther traveling with her until someone came to take them back.