Reluctant (Heroes of the Highlands) (The MacKays #3) by Kerrigan Byrne Page A

hers.
    Soren wanted to thank them for that. He wanted to hate them for it, too. What would he ever be able to do to protect her? To show her what it was to be mated to a fierce Berserker. He could not feed her from his hunts or warm her with his fires. He could not give her sons. Kill her enemies. She didn’t need his long life as she had an endless one of her own.
    Without him.
    She’d moved on quickly from the subject of her death to that of her immortality. She expressed her fear of her sisters and their mates aging and dying, leaving her behind. She’d bonded with their children, but her sisters were her immediate family and she loved them dearly.
    It seemed her duties as a Faerie were important to her, though she mourned the last twenty years spent as one.
    “Everything is perfect in Faerie,” she’d complained. “How I hate it.”
    She’d flitted to a tangent some time ago and had lost him when one story or another had caused her to sit up and cross her legs. Though her lower half was covered by the furs at her waist, her breasts, only the size of ripe apples, bobbed and swayed with her animated gestures.
    A few errant words reached him, but it had been quite a while since he’d known just what the hell she was saying. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to require any kind of affirmation from him, just his eyes on her. He was happy to oblige. In fact, there was no chance of him looking away, not while she moved like that.
    He could worship those breasts. Build shrines to them. His greatest regret about his life ending was that he hadn’t spent a sufficient amount of time with them.
    With her . Because he— “I love you,” he interrupted her stream of chatter the moment the truth occurred to him.
    She paused, blinked, and opened her mouth. “I—I’m sorry… What?”
    “I fucking love you.” It felt better to say it again. He wanted to say it a million times, in all the languages he’d ever learned.
    “I think you meant to say that you love fucking me… to which I return the sentiment, of course.” She offered him a blush and an odd sort of solicitous smile.
    “I do not say one thing when I mean another thing.” Soren shook his head, still mesmerized by her breasts, but caught her dubious expression in his periphery.
    “Saying that… won’t save you,” she said haltingly.
    “I know.” He reached for her, but she deftly dodged his lazy grasp, rolling away to stand over him with her hands planted firmly on her hips.
    “Besides,” she continued, a note of frenzy creeping into her voice. “You don’t love me. You don’t even know me all that well. We don’t even agree on anything.”
    He rolled his eyes. Sometimes his woman made things too complicated. “I do not think love and agreement have much to do with each other.”
    “What does someone like you know about love?” Her face crumpled, which was not the reaction he’d anticipated, but it rarely was with her.
    The question insulted him and he sat up to glare at her in a way that had brought sages and seasoned warriors to their knees in fear. “I know more about it than you do, and I know that I love you.”
    “How could you?” She flung herself from the furs, whirling to accuse him with gigantic, watery green eyes. “It’s not as simple as all that!”
    “It is that simple to me.” Everything was. Something existed or it didn’t. A truth was or it wasn’t. Soren didn’t live in the in-betweens as some did. He didn’t bend truths to suit his pretenses or manipulate the cast of a word so it shone brighter in someone’s eyes and darker in others. There was no time for that. No need.
    “How could you even know what that word means?” she asked in a dramatic whisper. “You don’t just throw it around a tent in a war camp like—like—some kind of—”
    He stood, not appreciating the challenge in her voice. “I think the better question would be, do you even know what the word means?”
    Her eyes flared with that spark of