Page 38 of Elven Throne

For Shade. For the roles they each played and the duties they still had to fulfill.

That hadn’t changed, either.

Rebecca had no idea when she’d settled her hand on his bare chest again, her fingers a hair’s breadth away from the edge of the elven rune once again lying in wait as a mark of black ink, with no other current indication it was anything else.

His skin beneath her palm and the strong, elevated pounding of his heart beneath sent a constant rush of electrified, tingling energy through her fingers and wrist, up her arm and shoulder, and into her own chest.

By the Blood, if they didn’t end this now, they never would. She understood that certainty clear as day.

That they still weren’t alone. Not really.

But before she could say anything about it, Maxwell cupped her cheek again, like she was some precious, priceless, insanely delicate and breakable thing he had to shelter and protect with his life.

That might have been exactly what he thought.

He certainly wouldn’t think that ever again once the truth was fully out in the open between them. Once she’d told him everything.

“Rebecca…” Another low growl rumbled out of him, as if drawn out by this connection urging them forward along a path they just didn’t have the space for right now. “If what you want is—”

“Later,” she blurted. Only one word, but the weight of them pulling her away from him in this moment still clenched painfully around the center of her chest. “Right now, there’s a task force of displaced magicals around the corner who need a place to lie low and lick their wounds before any of us can do anything else.”

His glowing silver eyes studied her in the darkness. He swallowed, nodded, then slowly back, releasing her. “Later, then.”

Rebecca forced herself to look away from him as she removed her hand from his chest. Then she tried to slip away from him along the wall. To get back to business and handle the larger, more crucial issues before—

Maxwell caught her wrist and pulled her back toward him—not overly rough, but he clearly didn’t intend to let her go. “AfterI clarify one last point with you. For now.”

Her breath caught in her throat, and despite everything they still had to do and the weight of so many new unknowns facing them, she couldn’t help but give in.

He wouldn’t let up until he’d said what he still had to say. Until he’d clarified…whatever this was.

The gentleness Maxwell had just displayed disappeared beneath a violently angry flash of silver in his eyes and another low, much louder growl. “If youeversend me away again, I will be forced to defy a direct order from my Roth-Da’al. I never have before, and doing so opposes everything I believe in value. But Iwilldo it.”

That sounded like a threat.

It was still hot and cold with him, wasn’t it?

Rebecca smirked at him anyway, holding his gaze as his grip on her arm tightened. “You know, I’ve found there’s always alittlewiggle room where beliefs and values are concerned…”

“Not with you.”

She might have tried to play that off as a joke, but he certainly didn’t.

His silver eyes blazed as he stepped toward her again instead of pulling her closer, towering over her. “I will follow you to the end of whatever comes next. As many times as it takes. Until death ends either one of us, or both. I will honor my vow to you for a debt I can never repay. I will obey every command…”

He sucked in a sharp breath and paused, his silver eyes boring into her, his jaw muscles working furiously again as he held her there with both the intensity of his gaze and his still tightening grip on her wrist. “But not that one.”

His voice wavered at the end before he stopped himself and instantly released her.

Rebecca didn’t know what to say.

He was serious about all of this. Whatever he was working himself up to say next, it had already choked him up.

She wouldn’t have thought that possible.

Then again, she’d just shed tears of relief in front of the shifter, and that had defied all the same expectations of herself.

“Ifeltyou out there,” Maxwell continued, his voice low and thickened by the effort of holding himself together. “Burning. I felt you…disappear. Two seconds, maybe three, before it all came back at once. But I wasn’t there with you. I couldn’t get to you—”

---