"To ask him to touch you, to kiss you without sharing the mating hormone, without making you his, is like asking the sun to not rise in the morning or set in the evening. You're asking him to destroy himself."
Rachel shook her head. "You said the hormone had to be shared to produce such reactions. That it was okay . . ."
"For you," Ely snapped. "You walk around him daily, sleep in his cabin, share his day and you don't suffer. Because he respects your desire to wait. Because he will not force this on you, no matter the pain he feels. You do this to him, and you don't even care about the effect on him."
Ely's face flushed with her anger.
"Ely, we haven't shared the mating hormone." Panic was beginning to set in, a fearful realization struggling to reveal itself inside her mind. Her heart.
"You haven't shared it with him," Ely snarled back at her. "You haven't tasted what drives him insane with need and pain because he can't have what nature is demanding he take, no matter how it must be taken. You don't suffer into the night, so aroused that it feels your flesh is peeling from your bones. You don't breathe and smell nothing but the scent of hunger and need that clings to the one who desires you, yet refuses you. You, Ms. Broen, aren't tortured with an agony that even the labs couldn't compare because there is no relief, there is no release."
"He has a hand," she shot back, furious. "Don't tell me he can't find relief. What am I asking for? A chance to love him rather than be tied to him without the benefit of a choice?"
"A hand?" Ely's tone was clipped, frosty with disgust. "In this, my dear, he has no 'hand,' as you so eloquently phrase it. No amount of masturbation will help; it will only make the agony greater. Each time he touches you, breathes in the scent of your desire, touches your flesh. Each time, the hunger is a thousand times worse than starvation. It's like having a limb ripped from his body. What you just did to him is greater disservice than those Council scientists could have ever done to him."
"All I wanted was a kiss," she whispered, horrified at what Ely was telling her. "I would never deliberately hurt him."
Ely glared back, refusing to soften. "You are to him something greater than even your child is to you. If you don't know now that you love him or that you could love him, then the best gift you could give him is to leave, completely. That, or stop being such a child and accept the gift he would give you." Censure glittered in her eyes. "If you're woman enough. Which at this point, I very much doubt you are."
CHAPTER 11
Rachel couldn't imagine the pain Ely had described to her. She couldn't imagine anyone enduring such pain, even Jonas. The man accused of being stone-cold ice inside.
After she returned to her desk, Jonas walked from his office, staring back at her, his expression perfectly calm and perfectly composed.
"I apologize for biting you so hard," he stated, his tone no longer tortured. "It was an accident, Rachel. One that won't be repeated."
She watched him now, trying to see beyond the calm expression to the torment Ely swore was a part of the mating heat.
She should have questioned him more, she thought. She should have taken the time, no matter the danger at first, and the business of their routine in the past week, to learn
more about what she was refusing.
"Do you love me, Jonas?" The question slipped past her lips, almost unbidden.
She had always dreamed of love, not mating heat. Commitment. Loyalty. Faithfulness.
His expression hardened, became more stony than before.
"I love you." As though the words were torn from him, ripped from the very center of his being.
"You so obviously didn't want to admit to that," she said painfully. "Why did you?"
His lips tightened, the muscles at his jaw clenched furiously. "You deserve the truth, whether I want to tell you or not," he stated.
"Why?" He was such an enigma sometimes, and at others, she felt as though she had known him forever.
"You're my mate," he growled. "The same as my wife, the other half of me. I won't lie to you, Rachel. You are what I never thought I would have in my life. I don't lie to myself; I won't lie to you."
Nothing could be so simple. So easy.
Shaking her head, she rose from her chair, desperate now to get away from him, to think without him staring back at her with that icy gaze.
"The world was simple to you once, wasn't it, Rachel?" he asked her as she headed for the door. "You had your parents, your sister, the little house in the country, a pet dog named Ruffy, a cat named Kitty."
She stopped, closed her eyes and fought not to remember those days. She didn't want to remember what had been, because it was so different from what it had become.
"Then it was taken from you."