Her breath caught.
"You're lying."
"When have I ever lied to you about this."
She searched my face. The bond told her the truth before my words did. Whatever she found there broke something loose in her, and she kissed me again, and this time it wasn't fierce. It was soft. Devastating. The kind of kiss that ended arguments and started wars and meant more than any promise I'd broken or kept.
She came first.
I felt it build through the bond before her body showed it, the pressure gathering, the frost racing out from the Ring in a spreading wave that coated the window and the desk and the terrarium where Bartholomew continued his indifferent lap. Her thighs locked around me. Her back arched. And when it hit, the room went white with cold, ice spiking up from every surface, the lightbulb in the dead lamp shattering in its socket, and she screamed my name into the meat of my shoulder to muffle it and failed completely.
