“Mal...” The idea had come to her some time earlier, but it was a wild gamble, a terrible risk.
“I’ve been looking at shield spells,” he said, voice determined. “Something I could set beforehand and don’t have to feed with magic while I’m fighting. I’ve done hoard locks before, and they’re complicated, they require a lot of setup. We still have a few days, so I could probably work something out.”
If she was wrong about him... If she was only blinded by her attraction, fooled by his flattery...
“Mal,” she repeated more firmly.
“I could solidify the earth below your tree myself, I think, too,” Mal said, thumbing absently through the book in his hand. “Make a safe place that wouldn’t be damaged. But it would take months to do it so that I don’t have to hold it together while I fight, and we have days, not months.” He had clearly hoped that she would be able to hold the spell herself and Scarlet felt guilty that she couldn’t manage something so simple.
She closed the distance between them and put her hands on his broad back, letting her head lean between his shoulders. “You could bind me.”
Mal went rigid. “Scarlet...” He shrugged from her embrace and turned to face her, shaking his head.
“I know what I’m asking.”
“You have no idea what you’re asking.”
“I’m asking you to save me,” Scarlet reminded him. “I have a certain amount at stake here, too.”
Mal’s mouth worked silently a moment and he stalked away, to the end of his porch. The book was tossed carelessly to his table. “What Corbin and his acolytes did, that was unconscionable. I couldn’t do that.”
Scarlet followed him. “But if you had my power at your command, you could meet the wyrm in his own domain, battle and defeat him.”
“At what cost?” Mal asked the porch railing tightly. “You’d lose yourself.”
“It wouldn’t be like that,” Scarlet reminded him. “I would be willing.”
“You might go into it thinking you were,” Mal said, turning to face her. “But that spell, that spell was made to control, to sap will and drain humanity. It wasn’t designed to let you retain your own self-awareness.”
“I’m not a shifter,” Scarlet pointed out. “There’s no reason to think it would affect me the same way.”
“It’s not worth the risk,” Mal said ferociously.
“It’s my risk to take,” she answered just as fiercely.
Mal gazed at her stubbornly and she glared back.
The cautious part of her wanted to claim that what she felt for him was mere attraction, a simple physical reaction to a smart, sexy man who checked off all her feature requests and had hands that could make her body sing.
But it wasn’t her body that was singing, she was reluctant to admit.
It was her soul.
Deep within her own chest, she could feel the mate-bond, like a shy bird fluttering in the cage of her ribs.
Mal, for all of his arrogance and irritating confidence, for every one of his flaws, was a kindred spirit. He was lonely beneath his beautiful veneer, isolated by power and position, and his heart was filled with a yearning so familiar that Scarlet could barely tell where her desire ended and where his began.
“Scarlet...”
“You are my mate,” she said, savoring the words as she faced them at last. “And I am already bound to you.”
Saying it aloud unleashed every last reservation. Scarlet closed her eyes and brought her hand to his chest, letting her power flow into him.
Mal made a strangled noise. She found her center and pulled back. “Did I hurt you?” she asked anxiously, but she knew she hadn’t.
He stared at her in wonder.
“You are more than I ever imagined...” he breathed. “I cannot fail—”