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"I have no ring."

She blinked. "What?"

"No ring, and no land I can safely promise you, and no title I am at all certain I will still hold by Martinmas. I cannot promise you peace, because Edmund Fitzwalter is still alive and still powerful and still looking for your father's letter. I cannot promise the Crown will ever forgive what you are to me, and I cannot promise I will not be hanged for it." I tightened my hand around hers. "I have nothing to offer you that a kingdom cannot take away.

A deep breath pulled into my lungs then expelled itself. "But I have my word, and that has never once been taken from me by anyone."

I pressed her palm flat against my chest.

"If you'll have it, you have my heart, and you have had it considerably longer than either of us was prepared to admit. I will never use a bond to quiet you, or to steer you, or to win an argument. I will never stand above you. I intend to stand beside you and be outmaneuvered by you in front of my own soldiers for the rest of my life, and I have decided to enjoy it."

Her eyes had gone bright. "You're proposing to me."

"I am asking you to let me spend whatever I have left proving that choosing me was not a mistake."

A tear came down her cheek, and she let it. "You are a ridiculous man, Guy Bisbane."

"Is that a yes?"

She laughed through it, which is the single best sound I have ever heard in my life.

"Yes, you impossible Alpha."

By afternoon the heat had her properly.

It came up through her the way weather comes over a ridge. She went flushed and then her dark skin seemed ashen, and then flushed again. Her hands shook, and the scent in that cabin became something I couldn’t even attempt to describe except to say that every honest instinct I’ve ever had, was screaming at me. Slick poured from her in thick, shining trails. It soaked through the linen between her thighs and dripped down onto the straw. The air turned heavy and sweet with it, so strong my mouth watered and my dick throbbed hard against my thigh. I had never been more grateful for twenty years of learning to hold still.

I did the work. I brought the water in and set the pail where she could reach it without getting up. I built the fire so high the cabin went close and warm. I beat the dust out of the last blanket in the chest and gave it to her and watched her tuck it into the wall of that nest with the particular fierce concentration she brings to fletching arrows. I found her the last of the feverfew. I asked, perhaps nine times, whether there was anything else she wanted, and she told me to stop fussing on eight of those occasions and asked for the horse blanket on the ninth.

Then I sat on the edge of the bed and we settled the thing properly, because I was not going into it with anything unsaid.

"Tell me what you want and what you don't," I said.

"Guy."

"Robin, in an hour you are not going to want to discuss terms, and I am not going to be in a state to invent them carefully. So we do it now, while we are both able, and then neither of us has to wonder afterward."

She looked at me for a second, and then something in her face eased, because she understood that this was the whole of it. This was the difference between what I was offering and what the kingdom she grew up in would have given her.

"All right," she said. "Then here is mine. The bite goes where you stopped the other night."

"I know where it goes."

"I know you know." Her chin came up. "And I want to give you one back."

I went still. "Robin, the custom in this country is"

"I am aware of the custom in this country. The Alpha marks the Omega and the Omega is marked, and that is how every bonding in England is done, and the law writes her into his household like a horse." Her eyes had gone hard and bright. "I have spent six years being what this kingdom decided I was. I won’t take a bond I can’t return the favor. If I am going to wear your mark on my throat for the rest of my life, then you are going to wear mine, and anybody who looks at the two of us will know it went both ways."

There are moments when a man understands that he has been handed something considerably larger than he asked for.

"Yes," I said.

"You agree."

"Robin, I would’ve asked you for it if I had thought there was the smallest chance you'd say yes."

She pulled me down into that nest by a fistful of my shirt, and she kissed me, and we were finished talking about terms.