Page 32 of Stealing the Troll’s Heart

“Some, but not all trollkin, mate for life,” it had said. “The mating process is beyond simply electing to marry and unite households. It is a deep bonding between individuals—an imprinting of one mate on the other—that cannot be brokenby time or space. It becomes a condition, and the well-being of one mate depends on the other.”

I run my hand up and down Raz’jin’s tusk, wishing more than anything that I could reach out and touch him. I swallow hard.

“But you...” I begin. “You are my mate.” I say the word that I now understand means everything. All of this joy and bewilderment and heartache between us, because of this one word. “I’m sorry.”

Now that I grasp the truth, the worst thing in the world would be if he turned me down. I’ve survived without him long enough to know that it’s taken years off my life. Being near him now is the first time I’ve felt like myself since that night in Eyra Cove, and I don’t want to keep doing this without him.

Raz’jin’s eyes are unreadable and hard. I can see the same shadows of battle and death and fire reflected in them that I’ve seen. I realize now that he’s only here because of me.

If he turns me away, I might as well walk into that trollkin camp with him and let the orcs finish the job they started. Now that I’ve found him and felt how it feels to be near him again, I have no reason to continue on alone.

“I’m sorry,” I say, crumpling forward, the weight of everything finally pushing me to the ground. “But I know it now.”

There’s a full silence, and off in the distance, I can hear shouting, swords and shields clashing, people dying. It all feels so far away, like a whole different world from ours.

A heavy hand lands on my shoulder. Only Raz’jin runs that hot.

“Telise.” His voice is thick and even more guttural than I’m used to. I raise my head and find him staring down at me with a sharpness, an intensity in his eyes I’ve never seen before. “You said, ‘No.’ Why?”

“I was scared.”

He looks hurt by this. “Scared? Of me?”

“No. Of me.” I didn’t understand what was happening between us, what I was feeling or why. I press my hand to my chest. “It was new. Frightening. I wanted to be free and did not think you would let me.”

Raz’jin’s hard features, now decorated with even more scars than the last time I saw him, soften as he regards me. His hand travels up from my shoulder to my cheek, where he lets it rest. I lean against him, and relief washes over me just from feeling his skin against mine again.

“I understand now,” he says, running his fingers up and into my hair, where he immediately starts to work out a tangle. “I’m sorry, too.”

I take his other hand in both of mine and squeeze it as hard as I can. What I feel for this creature in front of me is so beyond love that it would feel idiotic to say it. I don’t know how to in Trollkin—or if it’s a word they even have. I wish I could say, “We both handled it badly,” but that’s beyond me. I turn his hand over to the twin scars now running down the inside and run my finger along them.

Raz’jin’s other hand stops, then cups the back of my head and pulls me towards him. Soon we’re chest to chest, our mouths less than an inch apart.

“You’re mine,” he says.

“You’re mine, too,” I answer. Then my lips meet his and everything feels like maybe it could be right again. Raz’jin grunts a little as his injured leg shifts under him, but then he kisses me even harder, his hands running down my neck, my arms, my hips, as if he might forget. They return to my chest, where he drags his fingers over my breasts through my armor. He stops at the side where my chest plate is strapped around me and unbuckles it without even looking.

He breaks away from the kiss and his eyes are ablaze, thestreak of red down the middle glowing like a flame. He pulls the chest plate up and over my head, and I know what he’s going to do.

“But your leg,” I say, and he silences me with another kiss, this one fiercer than the last one. He yanks my jerkin up and over my head, revealing my bare breasts to the entire forest. His lips find their way to one nipple, where he runs it between his teeth. It feels like diamonds having his mouth on me again. He sucks, hard, while his hands find their way to the buckles holding his pants up.

He can’t be serious.

But Raz’jin is very serious. When he breaks away from me, he pulls his pants down, grunting with pain when they end up around his knees. Underneath, his cock is already big and ready for me, a trickle of liquid dribbling down the front.

I know what he wants, and I’m already wet for it.

I unbuckle my pants, and once they’re off, I press my knees into the rocky forest floor to either side of him, getting pine needles and pebbles lodged in my skin. Raz’jin takes my jaw roughly in his hand and lifts my head, so I’m looking right into his eyes as he reaches beneath me and, with the utmost care, guides himself inside me.

Raz’jin

My Telise. My mate. I don’t care how injured I am, she’s mine and I’m going to claim her now.

But I’m hers, too. I understand now why she fought what I knew was true, and why it frightened her. She has a fire inside her and has won her own hard-fought battles. She belongs to me as much as I belong to her.

My human is staring at me with all of the ferocity in her small body as she lowers herself onto me. I watch in awe as her tiny, pink cunt swallows me up, one inch at a time. She’s tight—so damn tight—and I grip her ass in my hands as she slowly rises back up again. My leg is burning, and the wound she fixed up has probably already opened, but I couldn’t care any less. My cock has been aching for her for so long, and now that I have her, I’m going to do what I’ve been dying to do since the night I left Eyra Cove.

I reach down and rub her tiny clit, because I want to make sure she has the ride of her life even when I couldn’t spend an hour preparing her for me. She cries out and then drops low onto me, letting me fill her up as full as her body will allow. I can already feel her growing tighter and tighter, sucking me inside and refusing to let me out.

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