His Reluctant Luna

Eliana Voss does not want to be chosen.

She is a carpenter's daughter out of a small mountain pack, she has read enough about royal mating arrangements to know exactly how they end for girls like her, and when the notice comes up her road she packs a bag in twenty minutes and tells herself the same sentence the whole way up the mountain. Four weeks. Feel nothing. Go home.

Then she stands in a corridor at Ashveil Castle and the pull goes through her like a hand closing on her ribs, and the man on the other end of it is the one she has already read about in a library at home. The second son. The cold one. The one who never keeps anybody.

Damon Ashveil is not cold. He is careful, which is worse, and he has been careful for five years on purpose, ever since a false start at sixteen taught him that wanting something does not make it real. He has a system. Honest arrangements, no promises, nobody left standing in a courtyard. It has never failed him once.

Neither of them touches the bond.

What they do instead is meet on a stone bench in the garden before it is light, one cup of coffee each, an argument about pack systems, a book left on a chair. Twenty-seven mornings of two very guarded people finding out, slowly and against their own better judgment, that the frightening thing is not the pull. The frightening thing is being looked at properly by somebody who is not going anywhere.

And then a door in a corridor is left open on purpose, and she hears nine words in his voice that fit the shape she built for him before she ever met him.

There is money behind that door. There is an older brother who thinks he is protecting his family. There is a woman at court who wants a different match made. And there is Petra, who has been Eliana's friend since they were three years old, and who has been asked a question and has answered it.

Eliana packs the bag at two in the morning. Then she sits on the floor in the dark and writes two columns on a clean page, because she is the kind of person who does not trust a feeling until she has made a list of it, and because one column is nine seconds and the other column is a month.

She does not unpack it because of the pull.

She unpacks it because she is not finished gathering evidence.