“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” he said, squeezing me. “But if I may make a suggestion? I would stop calling our engagement an agreement or understanding. That sounds entirely too business-like. As if we’re discussing the trade of milk cows.”
“But isn’t that what this is?”
“I would say that what we have is a very intimate agreement. So, no.”
“What we have is simply an impersonal agreement and nothing more.”
“Impersonal? Is that so?” His hand drifted lower, over the flap of buttons on my pants.
My breath hitched. “Yes.”
“Truly?”
“Yes,” I hissed.
“Interesting. It didn’t seem impersonal last night,” he murmured, and then caught the lobe of my ear between his teeth. I gasped, my eyes wide as the little nip set fire to my blood. Slowly freeing the sensitive flesh, he chuckled as his lips touched the space behind my ear, and then I felt the indecent thrill of his sharp teeth dragging over the skin of my throat.
For a moment, all thoughts scattered. My boiling blood roared in my ears, through my body, tightening my breasts and settling between my legs, where his fingers ventured dangerously close. They made those tiny circles that tugged at the seam of my pants, rubbing it against my very center. My back arched without thought, and a hidden, reckless part of me wished I could will those fingers lower—
“And now?” he repeated. “Sure doesn’t feel impersonal.”
I reacted without thought, slamming my elbow into his stomach. Casteel grunted out a curse.
“Please don’t fight atop the horse,” Delano called out from somewhere behind us. “None of us wish to watch Setti trample either of you.”
“Speak for yourself,” came Kieran’s droll voice.
Casteel straightened behind me. “Don’t worry. Neither of us will fall. It was just a love tap.”
“That did not look like a love tap,” Naill commented.
“That’s because it was a very passionate one,” Casteel replied.
“You’re about to get a love tap to your face,” I muttered under my breath.
Casteel curled his arm more firmly around my waist as he laughed. “There’s the vicious little creature. I missed her.”
“Whatever,” I grumbled.
He leaned into me, lowering his voice once more. “Back to the original subject at hand, our engagement is far more believable when you’re hitting me than when you’re standing by quietly.”
My brows snapped together. “That sounds like a very dysfunctional…engagement.”
“You can’t spell dysfunctional without fun, now can you?”
“That…I don’t even know what to say to that.”
“My point is that you just need to be yourself, Princess. Couples argue. They fight. Most don’t go around stabbing or punching the other—”
“Most don’t start off being lied to or kidnapped,” I interrupted.
“True, which has led to the stabbing and punching, but people who are in love enough to marry—the ones that people know are together before they even realize it—never consist of just one person, one personality, or one will. They fight. They argue. They disagree. They make up. They talk. They agree. The one thing they never are is perfect.”
“Are you telling me that the key is for us to fight and make up?” I asked, because there was no way anyone could look at us, see the way we behaved toward each other, and think we were madly in love. They probably thought we were insane.
“What I’m telling you is that there is no one way anyone behaves in a relationship. There isn’t a textbook of things to do or how to behave with the exception of the stabbing. I take back my fun in dysfunctional statement.”
“Thank the gods.”
“I just want to make sure you understand that, so when you’re free and if you decide to leave—”
“If? You mean when I leave?”
“Yes. My apologies,” he demurred. “When you leave and go out into the world and find yourself a mate who has never lied—”
“Or kidnapped me?”
“Or kidnapped you, there should be no stabbing or punching. Only kisses and promises upheld until dying breaths and beyond,” he said. “That is what you deserve from who you choose to love.”
I didn’t know what to make of that—of him speaking of me…me loving someone else—loving someone for real. Acid pooled in my stomach.