by Gail Dayton
He looked at her then. Came out from whatever memories haunted him, and looked at her. And he smiled. “That’s right. You are.”
Amanusa slid from the bed to pull off his half-boots. “And this afternoon, when you kissed me—” She felt the stupid blush rising, but ignored it. They had to at least be honest with each other. Honest with the important things, anyway. He’d admitted to his fear, so she could admit her own truth.
“I liked it. I liked how you kissed me. I liked that you weren’t quite in control, and I wanted… You made me… I…” She stumbled to a halt, staring at his long narrow feet inside their black stockings.
“What did you want, Amanusa?” Jax pulled his feet up and reclined on an elbow to look at her. He held his hand out and she took it, let him draw her back onto the bed beside him.
The blasted blush would not actually burn her head into nothing but smoking ash. much as it might feel that way. And if she didn’t tell him what she felt, what she wanted—how would he know?
“More,” she said. “I wanted more. I felt—My-my breasts were anxious. I know that sounds silly, because breasts can’t actually have emotions on their own, and what a silly thing for them to feel, if they did have them, and why should a bosom—”
Jax stopped her babble with his mouth. With a kiss.
A ravening wolf of a kiss like the one this afternoon. He tumbled her back on the bed and tucked her half beneath his chest as he kissed her, devoured her whole. But she was not so consumed by the kiss that she did not notice his hand slide up and over her ribs to wrap gently around her breast. She whimpered.
“Is this what they were anxious to have?” His quiet words in her ear were muffled, for he’d closed his teeth gently on her earlobe as he spoke.
“Or was it this?” He slid his thumb over the hardened tip of her breast, and Amanusa jerked with the pleasure of it. That was exactly what she wanted, without knowing it. She could feel his smile against her cheek.
“Like that, do you?” he murmured with a lick of his tongue beneath her ear. That made her quiver too.
He lifted himself, looking down her body for the tie to her dressing gown. Amanusa collected enough of her sense and her strength to go after the buttons on his waistcoat. He unknotted her sash and returned to the kiss as if he never left it, but he held his body up as if giving her permission to continue unbuttoning his clothing. So when she finished with the waistcoat, she started in on his shirt.
Jax flipped her ruffles to either side and laid his hand on her breast, only the thin linen of her gown between his skin and hers. Her whole body shook, and she popped two buttons off his shirt to bound across the floor when her hand jerked along with the rest of her. “Ohhhhh—” breathed out of her in a moany sigh.
She didn’t know one could smile and kiss at the same time, but Jax was. He seemed far too pleased with himself, but since she was rather pleased with him too, she couldn’t object. She loved the heat of his hand soaking into her through the thin, soft fabric. He didn’t pinch or grab, just held her. Felt her, squeezing, but gently. Not as if he’d like to squeeze and twist it right off her chest.
Jax sat up, lifting her along with him. “Let’s get this off, shall we?”
Chapter 24
He removed her dressing gown. She took the chance to push his waistcoat off his shoulders. While he shrugged out of it, she unbuttoned the last few buttons of his shirt and, in a quick nerve-wracking decision, dragged it off him as well. He’d been more unclothed than this on the train.
Jax caught hold of his shirt before she could toss it to the floor and looked at her warily. Amanusa met his gaze, smiling a little. “Your skin doesn’t frighten me.”
She laid a hand on his naked chest to prove it. She slid her hand over the firm muscle to press her finger over his nipple. It made a hard little bump pushing back against her. “This afternoon,” she whispered, “when you bled my wrist, when you licked it closed—” Could she say it out loud? Without her head poofing to smoke from the dratted blush?
“Tell me, Amanusa.” Jax lifted her wrist to his mouth, the same one as before, and he did it again. His tongue licked over the tender flesh, the blue veins just beneath the skin, and throbbed against it in rhythm with her pulse.
She reacted in the same way. “I wanted—my breasts wanted—”
His eyes darkened. They were the same green-blue, but darker somehow. Or maybe it was the way he looked at her with them.
He didn’t look very long before bearing her down to the bed again with yet another kiss, the heat of his naked chest searing through her flimsy gown. This kiss didn’t stay at her mouth for long. He kissed her cheek, her jaw, then nibbled a moist trail of kisses down her neck.
He paused there, kissing—making love to her neck—as his fingers found the little buttons at the neck of her nightdress. She could see lights in the mirror over the dresser. Streetlights? Or maybe lights from the building across the way.
“Amanusa,” Jax whispered.
It took her a moment to realize he waited for a reply. “What?”
“Are you here? Are you with me?”
That was a silly question. “Where else would I be?”
He smiled. He wasn’t angry. He tapped her temple with a finger. “Gone away inside here. If this is going to work, love, you have to stay with me. You can’t leave your body behind.”
“I—” She had. She’d been lying there, motionless, thinking about the lights in the mirror. “I didn’t mean to.”
“I know. Sometimes it’s the only way you can endure. But I don’t want you merely to endure this. It’s not making love if it’s something you have to endure.” Jax stroked his hand up her side. “You were doing all right for a while. What changed it?”
Frustration stormed through her and she threw herself upright, arms and legs flailing in a useless battle against herself. “I hate this! I hate it. I think we’re getting somewhere, that we’ve moved past my past, past yours—and then something else pops up to throw a spoke in the wheels and we’re slinging around in the mud again.”
Jax was sitting up too, wrapping his arms around her, chuckling through his shushing attempts to calm her. “If it’s not a performance, love, neither is it a race. No one is timing us. There’s no hurry. We’ve all the time in the world.”
He was behind her, a warm, solid, comforting presence. He pressed a kiss to the angle where her shoulder rose into her neck and she shivered. He opened his mouth on her skin, sucked lightly, and licked his tongue over it, like what he’d done to her wrist this afternoon. She shook harder.
“Better?” His lips brushed her ear.
She nodded. She was better, but not “fine.” Not even quite all the way to “all right.”
“Mihai didn’t like me to move,” she said, before she knew the words were there. “He liked to undress me and look at me before he—you know. And he didn’t like me to move. Mihai was second to Szabo before Teo. He took me, after the—the first… He—I—if I was with him, the others didn’t bother me.” She shrugged. “He was all right. He didn’t hit unless he was drunk, and he didn’t get drunk very often. And he was old.”
She didn’t try to keep the bitterness from her bark of laughter. “Probably not any older than you. Than you appear. Mid-thirties, maybe. But I was fourteen. He seemed ancient to me.” She rubbed her cheek along Jax’s where he leaned over her, wrapped around her, and she pulled his arms tighter. His warmth helped chase away the cold inside her.
“How long were you with him?” Jax asked when the silence stretched so long it made even her uncomfortable.
“Three years. Almost four. I was—I didn’t grow much bosom until I was almost eighteen.” She laughed again, a breath of sound this time. “Still don’t have much. But I wasn’t young-enough looking for Mihai anymore. He protected me though, sometimes, after that. Wouldn’t let anyone beat me too hard, that sort of thing.”
“What happened to him?”
“Bullet from an Imperial soldier’
s rifle. They brought Ilinca up to try to save him, but he was gut-shot, like Costel, and Ilinca didn’t have much wizardry. I cried when the bastard died. Can you believe it?”
“He showed you a little kindness in a place where no one else showed any at all.” Jax kissed her temple. He smoothed her hair out of the way and kissed her cheek.
“Szabo let me go back with Ilinca to learn herb lore and healing. That was a kindness, though his intention was to acquire a resident healer for his camp.” Amanusa turned sideways in his—it wasn’t his lap, for she sat between his legs rather than atop them. She turned so she could put her arms around him in return. There was as much comfort in holding him as in being held, and she needed the double dose.
“I did go back for a while, after I learned what Ilinca could teach me. But when she died—that was when I put the purgative in the soup and made everyone sick, and worked my bargain with Szabo.”
She leaned against his broad, strong shoulder, his skin warm beneath her cheek. “Was it justice, Jax?” she asked in a small voice. “That they all died? Or was it bloody vengeance?” She hadn’t realized it bothered her until this moment.
“First off,” Jax said firmly. “You don’t know that they all died. You don’t know how many died, or if any of them did. All you have is what that hellhound Kazaryk said, and I doubt he’d know the truth if it bit him on the arse.”
Amanusa acknowledged Jax’s logic with a sort of nod. It was hard to nod properly whilst leaning on a shoulder.
“And second, it was justice. If anyone died, it was because he needed to. You can’t tell me Teo didn’t deserve it. Blood magic—even wild, out-of-control magic—doesn’t execute anyone who doesn’t deserve it. Especially when you call for justice, which you did. All right?”
“All right.”
“Now.” Jax lifted her head enough to kiss her forehead, then lifted it more to look her in the eye. “Have we dealt with that nonsense well enough that we can go back and deal with the things that aren’t nonsense?”
Amanusa gave him a puzzled look. “Isn’t it all nonsense?”
“Absolutely not. What those men did to you was a crime. They injured you, Amanusa. Physically and—” He tapped her temple. “In here. They taught you bad habits. They used you for their pleasure and you’ve no idea how to find your own. You’ve been taught that you have no right to it, to what might please you. You didn’t know it was possible for you to find pleasure in sex. I’m not sure you believe it yet. Do you?”
She shrugged. “For other people, maybe. I think… I must be made wrong. Or they broke something inside me that made me wrong. I’m barren, you know. I’ve never been pregnant. I can’t give you sons. They broke that. I’m sure it wasn’t the only thing they broke.”
“I don’t need any more sons. I’ve got descendants by the trainload—Carteret, for one, and all his relations. I am certain that you are neither made wrong nor broken. Not physically—at least not other than the barrenness. That can happen when a child is abused as you were. But that has nothing to do with this.” Jax slid from the bed, taking Amanusa with him.
He led her to the mirror and stood behind her. “Did this Mihai undress you, or did he have you undress yourself?”
“He did it.” Amanusa watched Jax in the mirror, watched his eyes as he watched her. His hands, crushing the fullness of her nightdress where they rested at her waist, were brown against the white linen, but his body was fair, his skin almost as pale as Amanusa’s. “Mihai didn’t like me to move at all. Sometimes I think he wanted a doll, rather than a girl.”
“I want you. Amanusa Whitcomb Greyson. My wife.” The heat in his eyes made her shiver, brought that wildness inside her back out from hiding again.
He brushed his hands along her arms and returned them to her waist. “In that case, I think you should unbutton your gown. I think it may have been when I undid that first button that you left me.” He paused. “You truly do not mind me being without my shirt? It doesn’t remind you of bad—”
Amanusa shook her head. “It reminds me of you and me together on the train through the vacuum zone. They were all hairy as bears, and mostly, they just unfastened their trousers and—” She flipped her hand to indicate what she still couldn’t make herself say.
“Then I’ll keep my trousers safely on, all right?” His eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled. With his wide, full mouth, even a small smile stretched a long way, especially when it reached his eyes enough to crinkle them. He was a dear, darling man. And he was hers.
Buttons. She had buttons to deal with if she wanted… this. Wanted to work sex magic. If she wanted to get over what those horrible men did to her. Wanted to be whole. Wanted—wanted to make love to her husband and have a real, normal, ordinary life.
Or as ordinary a life as a woman could have who worked blood magic and had a three-hundred-seventy-something-year-old blood-bound familiar for a husband.
She did want it. With an urgency that surprised her. She was tired of being broken. She wanted to be fixed, or as fixed as she and Jax between them could manage. And if that meant unbuttoning her nightgown and baring her angular, unfeminine body to view for the first time in six or seven years, she would do it. Whatever it took.
She thrust buttons out of buttonholes with brisk, efficient, determined motions, staring at her flying fingers as she did.
“Look at me, Amanusa.” Jax eased a fraction closer to her, hands somehow heavier on her waist. “You don’t have to look at your buttons to undo them. I want you to look at me. I want you to be absolutely certain that it’s Jax Grey son here with you, not Mihai or Teo or some other bloody dead bastard. It’s me.”
Her eyes met his in the mirror the instant he spoke. Blue eyes, but darker, greener than the blue-sky shade of her own. Not brown like Teo’s, or the muddled hazel of Mihai’s. Blue. A deep, dark forest lake to pull her in. Not to drown, but to float away without care.
“That’s my girl.” His voice was warm, but his eyes held heat. Though how a lake could burn, Amanusa didn’t know. Maybe it wasn’t heat, but wildness. A lake hidden deep in the forest couldn’t be tamed.
She’d run out of buttons, she realized, and stood motionless, gripping the bottom of the placket, staring at Jax while he stared at her. He wasn’t watching her eyes anymore. His gaze was fixed on the strip of skin visible between the unfastened sides of her nightgown. And on the shadowed peaks of her breasts that showed through the thin fabric.
Mihai had stared, but his stare never made her feel like this, all fuzzy and anxious. Mihai’s stare had frightened her. Until it just made her go numb. She didn’t want to go numb now.
The wildness inside her stirred. It came from that part of her that touched magic. The part of her untouched self that had never been broken, the part of her soul she’d hidden from the thieves who had invaded her body to steal all the bits of her they’d shattered. It was the part of her that had stood up to Szabo and made her bargain. And now it wanted Jax. It wanted to tangle in that wildness she saw in his eyes.
That part of her was strong—and yet so infinitely fragile. She wanted to wrap it up and hide it away again, safe.
But this was Jax. Jax, who watched her with untamed eyes, freed from his own brokenness, with depths she might never reach, but wanted, suddenly, to explore. This was Jax, who would never hurt her, whose hands trembled where they rested at her waist. Jax, who—though wounded himself in much the same way—fought to heal the damage those others had done to her.
He was watching her face again, his expression neutral, perhaps even cautious. Amanusa was sick to death of caution. “Look at me,” she said, and opened her unbuttoned nightgown. She shrugged it off her shoulders, peeled her arms from the sleeves.
Jax looked. His mouth opened and his tongue took a quick trip across his lush lower lip before he cleared his throat. “You’re beautiful.” His voice held a delicious roughness.
“I’m not.” The damned blush started at her waist, where the nightgown pooled
over Jax’s hands. Or did it go all the way down? Amanusa didn’t want to know.
“You are,” Jax insisted. “Is a lily any less beautiful because it isn’t a rose?”
“I’m too tall and broad-shouldered, and my breasts are too small.”
“Stop arguing with me.” Amusement danced in Jax’s voice, sparkled in his eyes. “You’re just the right size to match me. Any shorter, and we’d both get terrible cramps in our necks. And if you’re the proper height, then your shoulders cannot be any less broad or they wouldn’t match the rest of you.”
He moved closer, touching his chest to her bare back, matching himself to her. “I’m still taller. My shoulders are broader. And as for your breasts…”
Amanusa held her breath as he shook his hands free of her piled-up gown. It hung there at her hips as, with great care, he closed his big, long-fingered hands over her naked breasts.
“Look there,” he whispered in her ear. “A perfect fit.”
Breath sighed out of her as she stared at his hands so gently cradling her breasts. It made her whole body feel… anxious. As anxious as her breasts had felt before, as they still did. No—more anxious than they felt, because now Jax touched her breasts, eased some of their anxiety. But not all of it. She still wanted more.
Amanusa slid her hands over Jax’s, pressing them more firmly against her eager flesh. She leaned back into him, needing the support for her jelly knees. Jax caught his breath, then brushed aside her hair with his nose to open his mouth over the column of her neck and suck lightly. Amanusa cried out as sensation flashed lightning-fast from Jax’s mouth to her breasts to that place between her legs.
“Look,” he whispered. “See how beautiful you are. See how magnificent you are. See yourself with my eyes.”
Magic stirred, and suddenly—she didn’t look through his eyes, but she could sense Jax. She could tell how good her breasts felt to his hands, how her hair brushed his shoulders and caressed his stomach, how even her smell intoxicated him. She felt beautiful to Jax.
