Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 216

Chapter 216

Taxon

I marked Skye. I’ve been turning this over since the moment it happened-lying here in the dark, Skye asleep between us, the specific gravity of having done the thing I refused to do three years ago settling into my bones.

Then, it felt like a trap. Like if I marked her if I pressed my mouth to her shoulder and said mine in the oldest, most permanent way wolves have-I would lose something. Control, maybe. The distance that kept me safe from what she was to me. The armor of a man who doesn’t let things matter too much because things that matter can

be taken.

I know now what that was.

Fear. I was afraid of choosing. Of the irrevocability of it.

What I understand, lying here with her mark on my shoulder and mine on hers, is that irrevocability is not a trap! It’s the point.

The marking-I let my mind replay it again. Not just the bite. The whole of it.

Her hands on my face first, steadying me or steadying herself, I’m not sure which. Her scent in the heat-which I’ve been around before, but nothing like this.

Skye’s heats during our marriage were perfunctory, a task to complete. The attempt to conceive an heir because that was expected of me. But I never let myself admit the truth of it, that those were moments to be cherished.

“I’ve been wanting to ask for weeks,” she’d said. “It wasn’t the heat.”

“I know,” I told her. And when she asked me how I knew, I told her: “Because you look at me differently than you did six months ago.” I held her face in both hands. “And six months ago you already looked at me like-“I stopped to collect myself, fighting back the tears in my eyes. “Like I might be worth it.”

“You are,” she said. And fuck if that didn’t mean everything to me.

How was it that I fought this connection all those years, only to realize now that it’s all I’ve ever needed? The one thing I needed all along.

“I’m trying to be.” I told her truthfully. “I’ll spend the rest of my life trying.”

“Jaxon.” Her voice, saying my name with the patience of someone who has decided to stop waiting for me to believe what she already knows. “You are.”

I pressed my mouth to her shoulder. I said mine against her skin and meant it the way it was always supposed to be meant.

Not you’re mine to control. Not you’re mine to manage and withhold from and punish for wanting things I was too afraid to give. You’re mine to protect. To choose. To keep choosing every morning for the rest of my life.

The bond did something at the bite-deepened, settled, grew roots that I could feel going down into the actual floor of who I am. And then she made a sound. That sound. The one that belongs to the moment something that’s been incomplete finally, conclusively completes.

I pulled back and looked at her and her eyes were wet and she was boking at me like-I don’t have a word for it yet. But I’ll have time to find one. Now I’ll have forever.

After, when the heat was at its peak and she was pulling me back to her- “Jaxon, please, I need-“-“I know,” I

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said, “I’ve got you”-she reached for Nicolai at the same time, her hands finding both of us simultaneously, and instead of the jealousy I might have expected I felt something I didn’t anticipate at all.

I felt complete. Like the equation finally balanced.

“You okay?” I asked her at one point, pressing my lips to her temple while she caught her breath.

“Ask me that again and I’ll bite you,” she teased.

“You already did that.” I reminded her.

She laughed. The full-body one. “Fair.”

“Worth noting,” I said, “that I’m not complaining.”

She looked up at me with heat-dark eyes. “Good. Don’t.”

It was a moment of levity in the midst of one of the best moments of my life.

I have absolutely no idea what time it is as I lie here awake, reveling in my memories. Nicolai’s asleep, which I’ve rarely seen-he’s always the first one up, the one with calls to make and things to manage. Even during Skye’s heat, he’s rarely slept, choosing to stay awake and watch over her. Asleep he looks like a person rather than an institution, which I mean as a compliment rather than a criticism.

I’ve been this man’s antagonist. His reluctant guest. His uneasy co-parent. His even more uneasy operational partner. I’ve watched him love Skye in ways that made me understand, for the first time, what loving her correctly looks like.

I’ve been jealous of it. Educated by it. Humbled by it, on the rare days when I was honest enough to be humbled.

The moment earlier-when Skye was between us and my eyes found his-I know what that was. He let me see it. I let him see mine. Two men in a room that neither of us could have predicted being in together, acknowledging without words:

We did this. It cost what it cost. But It was worth it. For her.

We might not exactly be friends. Not yet anyway. But it’s the beginning of something. Maybe something that doesn’t have a word yet. The way Consort Alpha didn’t have a word until Nicolai looked through historical records and found one.

We’ll find the word.

We have time.

Cara Anderson

Author

Thank you for reading!

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