“Everything is going the way the healers have predicted with your health,” he answered vaguely, his black gaze slipping away from her.
She curled her fingers around his wrist. “What is it?”
He shrugged casually. Too casually. “There is a ritual between lifemates. It is necessary to bind us together. Until we are formally bound together, I am still a slight risk to others. There is nothing to be done about it, Corinne, until your health is better. It is just uncomfortable for me.” The beast was struggling for supremacy from within. He felt it growing stronger with each rising. He needed her more than ever to anchor him. He needed her soul bound to his, her heart to complete him, her body for a safe haven.
“What ritual?” she asked curiously. “And don’t shrug and put me off. If we’re a partnership, then you have to give me the trust you insist on having from me.”
He sighed. “You are getting tough on me, Corinne. Am I losing my charm?” He made an attempt to tease her, to make light of a dark situation.
“I don’t think you could ever do that,” she reassured him with an answering smile. “But I want us to be very certain we’re together on this. It’s important to me, Dayan. I don’t want to do the wrong thing and take a chance of hurting you. This has happened very fast. I’m someone who has to think things through thoroughly before I make decisions. And you are asking me to take a lot of things on faith.”
“We might come from two different worlds, Corinne, but you know we belong together.”
“Maybe,” she agreed noncommittally. “So tell me the ritual.”
He circled her waist with his arm and leaned down to kiss her again. This time he lingered over the simple pleasure, savoring the moment. “When a Carpathian male recognizes his lifemate, he recites ritual words to bind her. The words are imprinted on him before birth. It is much like a human marriage but more permanent. Once said, the words bind the two, heart and soul and mind. She cannot escape him. They cannot be apart after that. They must touch one another often, using mind touch or they become…” He hesitated, searching for the right word. “I don’t know – they need to be with one another or they can be very uncomfortable.”
“He just says a few words and she belongs to him?” She pushed at his chest with her small hand, glaring. “That doesn’t sound very fair to me.”
“Now, Corinne” – his voice was as soft as velvet and just as sensuous – “I was not the one who created the ritual. It is thousands of years old. I can do no other than what my heart and soul demand.”
“You said the words to me?”
He shook his head, his thick blue-black hair falling around his face. “I cannot while you are so ill. I do not know if your heart would be able to stand a separation from me during the hours I must sleep.”
“And it’s hard for you because you haven’t bound us together?” Her small white teeth bit at her lower lip as she struggled to understand what he was telling her. Words like risings and rituals belonged in someone else’s world, not hers. She was very practical. When he began to laugh, she frowned at him, trying to look severe. “You were reading my mind again, weren’t you?”
He shrugged, that intriguing ripple of muscles beneath his immaculate shirt. “Naturally. I am your lifemate.”
“How do you keep your clothes so perfect? And your hair. Why don’t you have morning breath?” Selfconsciously she put her hand over her own mouth. How did he look so perfectly sexy and inviting, when she was disheveled and looking pretty much like a beached whale?
Dayan really laughed then, he couldn’t help it. Her image of herself was so far from the real thing that it was ludicrous. He couldn’t imagine Corinne’s soft, curvy body looking remotely like a whale. He lay back on the bed with her beside him, real, alive, her heart still beating, and he laughed out loud. It was a perfect moment in time.