It wasn’t.
I was fucking sad.
“Shan, let me up.”
“No,” he grunted, pressing a soft kiss to my temple. “We’re the only ones in the suite right now, so you’re mine.”
“I’m not. I’m still mad at you.”
“You have a right to be. Give me a chance to apologize. Let me hold you.”
Grumbling under my breath, I relaxed into the hold. He was warm, his body heat keeping me in a little cocoon of warmth. “We won’t have sex. I don’t want you to think we’re OK because we’re not, and we need to work through this before we’re intimate again. I’ll feed from Freya or Emmett for the foreseeable future.”
Shan’s grip tightened on me and he hitched his leg over my hip. His lips pressed more kisses along my skin, a tenderness I was more used to from Emmett than him. “I’d be celibate for the rest of my life if it would help make it up to you.”
My skin flushed, and fuck if I didn’t want him inside me after he said that. “You’re free to sleep with Freya or anyone else.”
If he slept with anyone else, I might cry myself to sleep for a week, but I couldn’t keep him bound to me when I was denying him. “I’ll help Freya through her heat, but she won’t need me after it. I’ll wait until we can fuck her together.”
He was really, really making me horny. Was this a good enough apology? It kind of felt like it, but also like it was nowhere near enough. “I don’t like how you got upset with me for not telling you. You know why I kept it to myself. I’m sensitive.”
“I know, love. I’m sorry. I’m a hypocrite in addition to being an asshole, because I kept something from you too.”
My ears perked, the pointed tips twitching. Shan wasn’t one to freely offer his secrets to me. “What?” I asked when his pause went on for too long.
“I have memories of my past lives.”
I blinked at him, trying to process. “And you never told Executive Director Batar?”
“No. The memories became important to me, and I didn’t want the AEA to take them away.”
His grip tightened on me, hugging me close like he was about to drop a bomb that would push me away. “Why were they important to you, Shan?” I asked, prying the secrets from him one question at a time, since he didn’t seem willing or able to offer details unprompted.
“I died trying to save my wife and kids from a raid on our Viking village,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to them after I was brought down with arrows and axes, but I was too weak to save them. This is the memory that kept coming back, over and over again, and a few weeks ago I realized why.”
“Why?”
“It’s like the universe was trying to prepare me for her. Freya was my wife in the Viking era. Her scent matches perfectly.”
Gasping, I moved until I was straddling him, hands placed on his shoulders. “You kept this from me and had the balls to get mad about my omissions?” I asked, watching him closely.
Was he at least regretful? As much as I loved him, we couldn’t be together if he thought he’d done the right thing in any of this. I wouldn’t say I was blameless — I should have told him about what happened when I killed people, if only because we spent time in the field together and it was important information. However, he’d been the one to fuck everything up at every stage of this mission.
“I’m sorry, Cas,” he said. He looked genuine, and I wanted to kiss the frown right off his lips. “This is no excuse, but I haven’t been doing that great since Freya appeared. She threw me off and my brain was mixing past and present. Since I lost my family in the past, I got way too protective of you two in the present. I ended up fucking us all over with my inability to regulate my emotions.”
Sometimes I hated that I loved this stupid, stupid man. Not that I was proving to be much smarter. Leaning down, I kissed him fiercely and he moaned against me, but stayed still otherwise. His hands didn’t run along my sides or grab me like I loved. He was serious about staying celibate until I was happy with him again.
I didn’t quite have his tolerance for holding back from sex, despite this being my stupid idea.
Grinding my hips down against him, I whimpered.
Shan grunted and put his hands on my hips, but only so he could stop me from moving. “Don’t do that,” he said, voice tight. “Are you trying to torture me?”
“Maybe I am.”
“Please stop.”
My heart skipped a beat. Shan didn’t say please. He told and he demanded; he didn’t ask.
