"Sascha!" Lucas called out from the Circle. "Stop flirting with Clay and come dance with your mate." His grin was a bright slash.
Sascha turned, her face softening even in profile. "I've said what I had to say. The rest is up to you." Then she walked toward the Circle and into Lucas's arms. Talin was dancing with Nico right next to the alpha pair and Clay saw her look up at Lucas as he said something and smiled down at his mate.
Even from this distance, he could read the look on her face: hunger.
Not sexual. Deeper, needier - as if she was witnessing something she thought she would never have. It cut him far deeper than anything Sascha had said.
Pushing off the tree, he strode toward her. Nico saw him over Talin's head and his eyes widened. Clay never danced. The juvenile said something to Talin and released her, backing off to find another partner. She turned, her own eyes huge. "Clay?" He wrapped his arms around her waist.
She seemed not to know where to put her hands. After a few hesitant seconds, she slid them around his waist but kept enough distance between them that she could look up into his face. "What's the matter?"
"Nothing." He tried to pull her closer, but she resisted.
"Nothing wouldn't make you look like you want to bite someone's head off."
"Dance with me."
"Clay - "
"I'll tell you after the dance." He'd show her. She damn well wasn't going to keep hurting the way she was right now.
"Promise?"
His low growl made one of the nearby juveniles give him a wary look. Talin smiled and snuggled close enough to press her cheek against his heartbeat.
He looked down, bemused. He figured a hundred years later, he still wouldn't understand her completely. The cat in him was pleased by the thought of such an intriguing mate.
Mate.
Of course she was meant to be his mate. Something settled in him at the conscious recognition of a truth he had always known. The second she accepted the mating bond, she was going to belong to him in the most indisputable of ways. Mates were forever. No leopard mated twice.
Even if their mate died.
His arms tightened reflexively around her.
"Hey," she complained.
"Sorry."
"It's okay." She squeezed her own arms around him as they swayed in opposition to the lively music. "I like dancing with you."
"Yeah."
Talin didn't know what was wrong with Clay, but the emotion in that single word was so raw, so powerful, her heart about stopped. She wanted to ask him so many questions, but for now, she held on to him and they danced. It was a perfect moment, a dance with this man she adored beyond all others.
The clock had barely ticked past ten when they returned home. "I had fun. And now I feel bad." Taking off her earrings, she put them carefully by the comm panel, then collapsed onto one of those huge cushions Clay used as sofas. "It seems so wrong to have gone dancing while I could have been doing something."
"What?" Closing the door, he came to loom over her. "What could you have been doing?"
"Well, I could've looked at the files again."
"And seen nothing you haven't seen ten times already." Shaking his head, he sat down in a quintessentially masculine sprawl opposite her. "We've set things in motion. Now we wait - sometimes the best way to hunt is to let the prey think you've given way."
She gave a reluctant nod, knowing he was right. There was nothing else she personally could do. It was time to have faith in Clay and his pack. "Thank you for helping me. For asking your pack to help me."
She could almost see it, almost touch it - the slow rising of the same heat that had been in his eyes most of the night. And she was its sole focus. Her body tightened.
"I would've done it for their women."
Implication wasn't enough, not with this heavy warmth threatening to hijack her body. "Am I your woman, Clay?"
It seemed as if even the forest hushed as she waited to hear his answer. Those green eyes, so bright, so beautiful, skated over her face, down her throat, over the rise and fall of her br**sts, the curve of her waist, and the legs she had curled under herself. She sucked in an unsteady breath and his body went predator-still.
"Come here, Tally." It was a command, sensual, rich, erotic.
Heartbeat in her throat, she uncurled her legs, a visceral awareness sweeping across every inch of her skin. What he'd said, the way he'd said it. He wanted her to accept this thing between them, accept it in a way that left no room for argument, a way that reversed her girlhood decision to cut him out of her life.
She was moving before she knew it - she had already made her decision. To love him enough. When she stopped, it was to find herself kneeling on his cushion, trapped by the muscular strength of his legs on either side. Placing her hands on his raised knees, she said, "I'm here."
He ran a finger down the row of buttons that closed her shirt. "I want to peel apart this shirt and see your br**sts."
It was getting difficult to breathe. "O-okay." Her hands clenched on him.
"This isn't friendship." A blunt statement, underscoring the dividing line they were about to cross.
"No. It's okay," she repeated when he just watched her.
"Is it?" A finger nudging aside cloth to stroke the dip of her breastbone.
"What do you want?" she asked, desperate to give it to him.
"Is this punishment, Tally?" Cat-green eyes clashing with her own. "Are you giving in to me because you want to hurt yourself? Am I another faceless f**k you plan to forget?"
"What?" Her hands fisted against the roughness of denim. "No!" She couldn't believe she had ever worried about not feeling with Clay during sex. It was impossible to be anything but fully engaged - his leopard demanded it and so did her own fierce hunger. "I'm not giving in. I'm choosing this because you make me crazy with need, you arrogant cat. I want to mark you, make sure the world knows you belong to me."