Page 73 of Elven Throne

Aching to do the exact opposite, Rebecca pulled gently away from him, finding no resistance from Maxwell’s hands on her hips, though he didn’t fully let her go.

They were both fighting this, and they would have to keep fighting it together until they understood more.

“Whatever it is,” she told him, “we can find those answers. I’ll help you. Iwantto help you. We’ll figure out exactly what happened and how it got there and what it means. At this point, I think we agree it’s not just a mark.”

The shifter’s gaze softened as a rumble of amusement reverberated in his chest. “Clearly.”

“That’s the first thing we’ll do,” she added. “AfterI get my hands on the Bloodshadow prophecy.”

“A fair trade.”

There it was. Their next plan settled.

But they still didn’t pull any farther away from each other, suspended between desire—that nearly irresistible force between them thrusting them together at every opportunity—and the recognition by their rational minds that going any further held far more potential dangers than they currently understood.

And how much longer would they manage to fight back one more than the other?

“Though, I do wonder…” Maxwell murmured.

Oh, boy…

“Wonder what?” Rebecca whispered, the growing desire burrowing through her chest and belly making her breathless and her throat dry.

“If knowing would make a difference.”

“What?” She could hardly think now, despite trying so hard to follow his train of thought.

“What the mark is,” he clarified, his eyes pulsing faster as his gaze roamed across her face. “What it is. What it means. Why it’s there. Would knowing make a difference to you?”

“I…” Blinking quickly, she pulled farther away from him, her effort to think again now overpowering how close she’d come to losing that ability altogether. “I don’t know…”

She hadn’t thought it through that far, honestly. The question hadn’t even occurred to her.

Maxwell’s frown deepened, and though he spoke gently, there was no doubting the seriousness in his voice or the brief flashes of new fear, still unrealized, flaring bit by bit through their connection. “Personally, if the answer changes the way I feel about you, I would rather not know. There is knowledge for its own sake and knowledge that rewrites all previous misconceptions. There is always a chance of the latter, and if a discovery like that were to fracture this? What we have, with or without this…connection between us?

“I do not know if I could handle it. Even to understand the truth. My desire for the truth does not outweigh this. With you.”

Well, that made two of them.

She hadn’t thought of it in that way, until now. When would she have had the time? But now that he’d brought it up…

She had to agree with him. The possibility of discovering exactly what that rune meant, and why it was there somehow tainting their connection—changing what they felt for and with each other because of their unavoidable ignorance—was a terrifying concept.

After everything they’d gone through together, with Shade andforShade, all the battles they’d fought, everything that existed between them as a result, explained and unexplained…

What if knowing did change at all? How were they supposed to go back to the way things werebefore,after something like that? Even back to the old status quo, before this connection had erupted between them seemingly out of nowhere.

Would that even be possible?

“I don’t know what it means or what might change,” she told him. “But I think it’s best to leave it undecided for now. Focus on the Bloodshadow prophecy. Make a decision about everything else once we get there.”

Maxwell swallowed, finally removed his hands from her hips, and took a devastatingly small step backward. As if that was the space necessary to break them both out of this tantalizing spell.

It wasn’t.

But it wasn’t like they hadn’t already gotten used to fighting it off at nearly every waking moment.

“Agreed,” he said. “We will decide together.”

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