The car rolled through the palace gates in a smooth, whisper-silent glide of engineered dignity Chris desperately wished Dax possessed right now.
No such luck.
The moment the intercom clicked off and Rowan’s exhausted breathing vanished from the speakers, Chris felt Dax turn his head toward him with the single-minded focus of a predator who had been temporarily leashed and was now planning his jailbreak.
Chris straightened his shirt again, even though it didn’t need straightening, and tried to look composed. "When this door opens," he said quietly, "you will remember you are a king."
Dax tilted his head. "I remember."
"Good."
"I remember," Dax continued, leaning closer, "that kings take what is theirs."
Chris slapped a hand over Dax’s mouth before those words could hit their target, shoving him back into the seat. "Absolutely not. No poetic feral nonsense before we’re even out of the vehicle."
Dax went still beneath Chris’s palm, a predator who had just been handed something sacred and intoxicating, something he had never expected to receive yet had been starving for all the same.
Chris felt the exhale against his skin and realized, with mounting horror, that touching Dax’s mouth had not stopped anything.
It had only made everything worse.
Dax’s eyes were half-lidded with a focus so intense it felt like gravity shifted in the back seat; he lifted one hand, broad palm sliding over Chris’s wrist with the reverence of a man touching a holy relic, and instead of pushing Chris’s hand away, he guided it back until his thumb pressed Chris’s palm flush against his lips, like Chris had just offered his pulse and Dax fully intended to memorize the taste of it.
Chris’s entire spine snapped straight. "Don’t... don’t do that..."
Dax didn’t listen. He kissed the center of Chris’s palm, slow enough that Chris felt every impossible second of it, every brush of heat, intention and shameless hunger, as if Dax were branding the place he intended to kiss later with far less restraint and far more teeth.
Chris yanked his hand back violently, practically flinging it into the air. "WHAT was that?!"
Dax leaned in with a softness that felt like the prelude to ruin, his voice a deep, molten thread that wrapped around Chris’s nerves and pulled.
"A blessing," he murmured, shameless and satisfied. "You gave me a blessing."
"That was not a blessing," Chris hissed, mortified by how warm his face felt. "That was you being... being unhinged."
Dax tilted his head, unreadable in the shadow of the tinted windows, though his eyes burned like he was seeing straight through the pretense Chris was clinging to.
"Chris," he said softly, "you forget I have already had you. I have tasted you. I have marked you. Do you really expect me to behave as if restraint still means anything now?"
Chris’s breath stuttered so sharply he nearly choked on it. "Dax... don’t say things like that in the car..."
"Why?" Dax asked, and the worst part was the sincerity in his tone, as though he truly didn’t understand why the truth should be held behind closed doors.
"I’ve been abstaining for three months. I stopped everything the moment I realized I wanted you, truly wanted you, and not just your scent or your body or the crown’s demand for a mate. I stopped because if I touched anyone else while wanting you, I would’ve torn them apart."
Chris made a small, strangled noise, one that came from someone who had absolutely not processed that information and absolutely did not want to.
Dax kept going, because shame no longer existed for him, not after Chris let him inside, not after Chris’s scent had settled into his lungs like a permanent addiction, and definitely not after the bond branded into both of them.
"I used to sleep with someone every forty-eight hours," Dax said, as if reciting a historical fact rather than confessing to something that made Chris want to crawl out the window.
"At least. Sometimes more often. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. And then... you walked into my life."
Chris shook his head fast. "We are not having this conversation..."
"Now you put your hand on my mouth," Dax continued, voice dropping lower, richer, unbearably intimate, "and you acted as if you didn’t know what that means to an alpha who has been starving for one person and one person only."
"I didn’t... I wasn’t... it was a reflex!"
"It was permission."
"It was not permission!"
"It felt like permission," Dax murmured, shamelessly brutal in his honesty. "And now I am going to think about it every time I want to touch you."
Chris nearly died right there in the motorcade.
Before he could recover, Dax caught his wrist again and guided it to his cheek, pressing Chris’s trembling fingers against his skin with slow, reverent hunger that made it absolutely clear this was torture, yes, but it was also devotion, obsession, and the bond humming between their bodies like a wire pulled tight enough to sing.
Chris jerked his hand away again like it burned him. "Dax, get out of the car. You have a meeting."
"I have you," Dax corrected, completely shameless, "and the meeting is very, very unfortunate timing."
Chris scrambled out of the vehicle the moment the door opened, walking faster than he had ever walked in his life. He couldn’t handle the security and Rowan assisting him and the king having sex in the car like horny college students.
Behind him, Dax rose from the car with the unhurried, fluid confidence of a man who knew exactly how much he affected the person fleeing him and who had absolutely no intention of reducing the intensity.
He murmured, soft enough that only Chris could hear:
"You put your hand on my mouth, Chris. And I am going to spend the rest of the day thinking about what else you’ll put there."
Chris nearly tripped over the palace steps.
"I’m not going to kiss you ever again." He muttered, trying to look dignified.
Dax laughed, quietly, richly, with warmth that slid under the skin and pooled low in the spine, because Chris’s dignity, admirable as it was, had the structural integrity of wet paper when confronted with a dominant alpha whose self-control had already been burned to ash.
"You will," Dax said, following him up the steps with a slow gait that somehow made him look even larger, even more impossible to avoid. "You will kiss me again, and again, and again, and each time you’ll pretend you regret it, and each time you’ll pull me in closer before I can even think."
"I won’t."
Chris did not sound convincing.
Chris sounded like a man bargaining with fate.
Dax let the distance between them shrink, close enough that Chris could feel the brush of heat from his body like the ghost of a hand at the small of his back. The palace staff were definitely watching; the guards were pretending not to; Rowan was walking slightly ahead of them with the defeated posture of a man who had accepted his gods hated him personally.
"You kissed me publicly," Dax murmured, voice dipping low enough that Chris felt it more than heard it. "In front of half the city. With tongue."
Chris’s ears burned. "There was no tongue."
"There was tongue."
"There was not."
"I tasted you," Dax said simply, as if this was the most logical conclusion in the world. "I tasted you, and you tasted like someone who wanted to be kissed longer."
Chris picked up his pace, nearly power-walking across marble that absolutely did not deserve this indignity. "You’re delusional."
"And bonded," Dax reminded him, tapping the side of his neck with one long finger as he walked, "which makes me both legally and biologically entitled to certain delusions."
Chris almost choked. "That is not how law OR biology works!"
Dax hummed, unconcerned, stepping closer so their shoulders almost brushed. "It is how my biology works. And yours. And the bond doesn’t lie."