Page 33 of Elven Throne

“Never mind,” she hastily replied. “But you don’t have to wonder what to think now. I’m right here. Somehow, we’reallstill here.”

“I…” Hissing, he spun away from her and stepped back. Apparently, that was only so he could look at her again with wide eyes. To take in all of her from a distance as his fists clenched his sides.

“I realize thisnow,” he growled, “but what I felt? It wasn’t…”

His voice broke, and he turned away from her again.

“It wasn’t what you thought it was,” she finished for him, fighting the urge to gasp beneath the overpowering weight of his churning emotions. His relief battling with an acute fear of losing again what he’d already thought he’d lost. All of it tinged with an underlying fury that he’d been forced to endure such a fear in the first place. “That’s what matters.”

Rebecca caught her breath, trying not to sag against the wall at her back beneath the intensity of so much feeling inside the shifter. Far more feeling than she would ever have given him credit for if she weren’t experiencing it all for herself, in real time.

“I didn’t mean for you to feel any of it,” she murmured. “I knew what I was doing. And if I distracted you with what you felt and whatever you thought you—”

He lunged at her with a snarl, as if she had any intention of running from him. As if there was even anywhere for her to go. “I feltallof it, Rebecca. The heat. The energy. That…power. And then…”

Then he stepped even closer, again. Far too close for any type of comfort. Tempting the need and longing against which they both struggled.

Rebecca instantly realized she was now struggling against it completely on her own.

Maxwell didn’t stop.

He pressed himself viciously against her, pinning her to the crumbling brick wall at her back, as if convinced only this would save him.

“And then I didn’t feel you at all,” he whispered.

Every racing beat of his heart thundered through his chest and into her, crashing through her mind, filling her with a wave after trembling wave of its desperate, urgent rhythm.

She tried to breathe, somehow missed the mark, and tried it again, nearly incapacitated. Unable to do anything but stand there and let herself fall endlessly into the shifter’s silver eyes.

Maybe she didn’t fight off the need of their connection as fiercely as she once had, or as fiercely as she probably should have right now. But enough of her awareness remained to not let herself give into it entirely.

Maxwell, however, had clearly already crossed that bridge.

His chest heaved against her as he studied every inch of her, the heat from his bare chest radiating against her face.

Or maybe that was the heat of this damn connection. Or of another flush in her cheeks Rebecca was just as helpless to prevent as the last time. And the time before that.

Did it even fucking matter anymore?

This time, when he lifted a hand toward her face, he didn’t withdraw it but brushed loose hair away from her cheek, his touch as gentle as the breath of a sleeping kitten. Then his other hand rose toward her as well.

The sudden jolt of electrifying energy racing between them when he cupped when he cupped her cheeks in both handsdidmake her gasp.

Was this new tightness in her chest really hers? Or was it or his?

Maxwell’s silver gaze flickered back and forth between her eyes. “How?”

By the Blood, he was making this impossible.

If it hadn’t been for the pressure of all their immediate safety bearing down on her so forcefully after this last battle, she probably would have submitted to everything.

But several very real dangers loomed over all of them, still, and it was just a matter of time before another threat rose to thwart them.

Rebecca was somehow far more capable of keeping her head in this moment. Of denying for a little while longer the complete surrender their connection demanded of them, even while Maxwell had clearly lost all sense of trying to do the same.

Because she still didn’t know the truth. Maxwell’s truth.

Whether she could trust him with anything else beyond what she’d already risked.

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