After they stared at each other for a pulsing moment, she threw up her hands and charged for the door. Someone, anyone needed to come back into this blasted suite. In fact, right now would be a good time.

“I love you too,” Graydon said aloud. His voice had gone hoarse. “For two hundred years, I’ve been waiting for you, hoping for you. Fighting for you any way I could. I never dared let myself hope you might feel the same way, or I couldn’t have walked away from you.”

He strode across the room toward her.

Before she fully realized what she was doing, she leaped at him and crashed into his chest.

He didn’t even stagger as he snatched her out of the air and crushed her to him. Blindly, hungrily, she wrapped her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist and held onto him with everything she had.

“Are you mating with me?” she whispered, burying her face in his hair.

“I’m beginning to, yes,” he said very low into her neck. “I haven’t gone too far. Not yet, so if you’re not sure about this in any way, there’s still time to back away.”

Back away from the warmth of that friendly blaze? From his kindness, constancy and faithfulness? Turn away from the smile in his beautiful gray eyes, or the way the proud gryphon seemed self-conscious whenever she praised or petted him? Stop flying?

Let go of this adorable, dangerous man?

Not on your life, she thought. Never again in his life, or in hers.

She went nose-to-nose with him. “That goes for you too,” she whispered. “Would you back away?”

“Never.” His response was immediate and adamant, and his gaze was as steady as bedrock. “Not unless you needed me to.”

Pressing her lips tightly together, she nodded, for a moment too overcome to speak. The whole conversation felt as necessary as breathing, yet it was also precipitous, immensely inconvenient.

Issues piled up in her head. Malphas, Ferion, and oh gods, if they both survived this coming confrontation, she was going to have to find some way to come to terms with that blasted dragon.

If they both survived.

Once her mind started thinking along that path, it couldn’t stop.

If Graydon went too far mating and something happened to her, neither one of them would survive. The realization sank some serious teeth into her and shook her harder than anything else had.

She had to let him go for now. She had to, until this whole nightmare was over, because she couldn’t do anything else. The thought of him mating with her, only to die if she did was unthinkable.

“We’ll have time,” she said. She hugged him again with all her strength. “Later – afterward. We’ll make time to figure this out. We’ll take all the time we need. We’ll have all the time in the world.”

He pressed his lips to her temple and told her, “Of course we will.”

Of all the conversations they’d had, that was the only thing she had ever heard him say to her that sounded like a lie.

Her legs loosened from around his hips. As he let her slide to her feet, she frowned up at him.

What the hell?

Something felt… incredibly off. She didn’t know what it could be. Everything was fraught with too much tension, driven by a lack of time and extremely limited privacy. Even though they had hardly begun to talk, they had to focus on other concerns.

If it was just a matter of pressing a pause button until they could talk at a later time, she could handle that. Her life had been filled with countless moments just like this one, where her personal concerns had to go on hold because of some other, more pressing matters.

What she didn’t think she could handle was the thought that everything she wanted, everything she had begun to dream about and hope for, might vanish again like an illusion.

“We will,” she insisted.

His expression hardened. “If I have anything to say about it, we will,” he promised. “We just need to fight hard enough, cleverly enough. There is a way to win though.”

Truth had come back into his voice. Relieved, she grabbed onto that thought and didn’t let go.

“I couldn’t have held on for so long if I didn’t believe that,” she said. She had to believe it. It was the only thing she had to hang on to.

He pressed his lips against her forehead. “Let’s call the others back in. We have a war to plan.”

She straightened her shoulders. Enough people in the group had such sensitive hearing that everything she and Graydon had said aloud to each other had been said virtually in public.

She wasn’t embarrassed, and she certainly wasn’t ashamed.

Still, as Graydon rapped his knuckles on the door of the suite and the others returned, she felt heat touch her cheeks.

It was hard to bare one’s soul to someone else. She had also just bared her soul to ten other people. The sense of exposure was unsettling to say the least.

Most avoided meeting her gaze, except for Constantine. He stared at her with the same mixture of curiosity and wistfulness that she had noticed before.

Her self-consciousness vaporized as Soren entered the room. He studied both her and Graydon with a piercing frown.

Soren said, “I have heard everything that the others had to say. Now I want to hear it from you.”

Biting her lip, she stared at the floor. Graydon said carefully, “If you’ve heard everything, you know there’s only so much we can say.”

“Not true,” replied Soren. “I can remove any connection you may have with another Djinn.”

Astonishment and hope flared. Her gaze flashed up and collided with Graydon’s.

She asked, “Can you do it without alerting the other Djinn?”

“I believe so. If you will allow me to do so, that is.” Soren raised his eyebrows pointedly at Graydon. “May I approach?”