“Exactly. Very dangerous.”
She laughed as she knew he meant her to.
His thumb pressed against the arch of her foot and it felt wonderful. Enough so that her shoulder muscles started to relax, and she sank a little deeper into the couch.
“I realized something,” he said after ten minutes of massaging her foot. “Switch feet.”
She extended her other foot without bothering to pull the first one back until she sat with her legs, stretched out along the couch. This casual, quiet intimacy was like taking her first deep breath in months. She hadn't realized she was oxygen starved, touch, starved, until now.
“I realized that when I think about you, I always end up with flying metaphors.”
“You think in metaphors,” she teased.
“Yes, I do. Symptom of being a bookworm.”
She grinned because it was true that, between the two of them, he was the reader. It both had and hadn't surprised her when, after they started dating, she saw a solid wall of bookshelves in his condo. It surprised her because he never talked about books or made literary references. It didn't surprise her because she'd been around BDSM long enough to know that the Venn diagram of geeky, bookish men and Doms was practically a circle.
“Do you remember when we first started dating and if I couldn't fall asleep, I'd call you?”
“I maintain it would have been better if you’d let me come over and fuck you until you passed out.”
She shook her head but smiled. “They weren’t booty calls. You'd start telling me about whatever book you were reading and it would help me go to sleep.”
“A little rude don't you think to tell me that I'm boring?”
“It wasn’t boring. It was comforting. You’d get so into explaining the magic systems and the backstory of various characters. I was always too tired to really follow along with whatever you were saying, but the sound of your voice…”
His hand tightened on her foot, and she looked up, worried. She hadn’t meant to upset him, but she could see how hearing that might make him feel a way she hadn’t intended.
“I’m sorry?—”
“No, Cessie. Don’t be sorry.” He set his wine glass on his side table and held out his hand for hers, setting it aside too. “Hearing that confirms that I’m a genius and my plan is perfect.”
She chuckled, smiling. “Is it time for me to find out your super-secret plan that required flying all the way to Montana?”
Leon’s hand slipped from her foot to her ankle, gripping with a firm hold. “Do you know how they train falcons?”
CHAPTER 8
Cessie blinked, clearly caught off guard by his question. She shook her head slowly. “How they train falcons… you mean for hunting?”
“Yes. Falconry.”
“Like how knights used to have a steed, a hound, and a hunting bird?”
He smiled, just a little. “I don’t know if that’s factually accurate, but yes. It’s called falconry, but it wasn’t just falcons. Hawks, eagles—birds of prey. It’s an old art, older than written history. Some say it started in Mesopotamia.”
“Humans bred them to be working animals, like we bred dogs for tasks,” she guessed, her eyes alight with intelligence.
Leon leaned forward slightly, elbows resting on his knees. His gaze never left her face. “There’s no such thing as a domesticated bird of prey. Thousands of years, and we couldn’t domesticate them. Not like dogs or horses. A falcon will never forget it’s a predator. It will never become a pet. It stays wild, always. You don’t break that wildness—you work with it.”
Cessie tilted her head, her eyes taking on that far-away look that meant she was thinking. If he didn’t hurry up, she might guess where he was going with this.
“To train a falcon, you start by earning their trust,” Leon continued. “You gentle them—get them familiar with you. You keep them from flying away, but you can’t force them. You have to offer your hand, again and again, until they choose to step onto it.”
He let the words hang for a moment, watching her process them.
“How long does that take?” she asked.
