He pinpointed the moment she recognized him through eyes made opaque by whatever awful force held her in thrall. Breathing as if she’d run a league at full tilt, she dropped the sharp garden instrument and bent over, resting her palms on her knees.
Gabriel went to her, discarding his pistol on the orderly workbench behind her. “What’s wrong. What happened?”
“I can’t breathe. I can’t… I’m…” She shuddered and sank to her knees, trembling and sweating and gulping for air.
Catching her by the shoulders, he followed her down, supporting her weight. “Did you take something? Eat something? Are you ill?”
“No,” she gasped. “No. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I— I’m broken. Please leave me. It will pass.”
It will pass. She’d said that in the gardens.
His heart rate slowed several degrees as he realized she didn’t fight a seizure, an injury, or a toxin.
Only her own demons.
She’d told him she had episodes of terror, but he’d never imagined they could be so powerful as this.
She surged against him, burrowing into his chest like a kitten seeking warmth, and he could do nothing but curl his body around her, creating a shelter.
“You are safe. I have you.” He cupped her head to his chest with one hand, the other spanning her trembling spine. “Slow your breath.”
“I can’t,” she gasped. “My skin is on fire and my limbs are so cold. My throat will close, I feel it. Oh, God.”
“I won’t let that happen,” he soothed, watching the pulse jump in her neck like a caged hummingbird. “Just breathe with me.” He deliberately expanded his ribs, then contracted them, urging her to do the same.
At first, her inhales were wobbly. Hitching and much too fast, but she did as he bade her to do. She focused. And after several silent minutes, her breaths matched the rhythm of his with only a few hiccups.
The tremors in her limbs gentled and she melted against him in a boneless drape of exhaustion.
“There now,” he said. “Do you want to tell me what frightened you? Was it a nightmare?”
“I don’t think so. Sometimes I— I wake like this. I can’t stop it. It’s like a wave that drags me under and drowns me in dread.”
“Why did you come out here?”
Why didn’t you come to me?
“If I stay in the dark, it often won’t relent, or it will plague me well into the morning. Sometimes I can distract myself out here until it goes away. The chill of the air, the busy garden chores, splashing my hands and face with cold water, burying my nose in lavender. I can focus my mind on other things, and eventually it passes. But… this time it felt impossible.” Her head lifted from his chest, and the night chill kissed his skin.
Skin. He’d not buttoned his shirt.
“You’re better now?” he ventured. “Can you stand?”
Nodding, she allowed him to help her up, but when he would have pulled back, she stepped forward, keeping their bodies pressed together.
“Wait.” She laid her cheek back against his heart, finding the rhythm with her ear. One arm slid around his torso to rest on the column of muscle next to his spine, and the other traced the blue tattoo of a sneering skull right below his clavicle. “I didn’t know you looked like this.” Her fingertips charted a course over his pectoral, finding other images in the sparse smattering of hair on his chest.
She’d be too kind to say it if she found him hideous to look at.
His body was an unsightly map of fearsome beasts, weathered ships, weapons, icons, and symbols of death. She shouldn’t look, but damned if he didn’t want her to discover every inch.
“What are you doing?” This time, it was his voice that trembled.
“I cannot say. I just… like the way you feel.” The hand on his back tested the dips and swells of his muscle there, fanning across his expanse of smooth skin. “The way you look.” Her slight fingers skipped over the sensitive protrusion of his nipple with a featherlight caress, leaving trails of fire in their wake. “The way you hold me.”
“Felicity,” he growled as she bumped her way down a few ribs, finding the bandage on his healing wound and tracing the outside.
“I hate that you were hurt because of me.”
He hated that she might be in danger because of him. Hated himself for lying to her, and for the truths that would cause her pain.
Hated that there was a decent voice somewhere beneath his thundering desire— so faint and low— that told him to pull back. To button his shirt and take her to bed.
To her bed.
Alone.
Gooseflesh rose over his entire body as she angled back to look up at him, drawing her hand around his torso until both palms splayed against his chest.
His breath locked behind his ribs as he discovered things about himself he never knew before. Things he imagined other people did know by his age.
Because they’d been touched by other human beings.
The feel of her nails brushing his skin was possibly the sweetest sensation he’d yet experienced. He wanted more of it. He wanted to lean into a scratch like a needy hound. The place where his ribs winged into his back was ticklish. And the graze of his nipple could be felt as a jolt of pleasure in his cock.
Pleasant lessons were these. Blissful discoveries.
“Close your eyes,” she whispered.
Now that was a particularly terrible idea. When she looked like a perfect angel, a halo of gold cast over her hair by the lone lamp. Her unblemished skin glowing in the dark like a beacon. Eyes bruised with smudges of exhaustion beneath, but glittering with something both dark and dazzling.
He didn’t want to close his eyes, not when it would hide this vision from him.
“Please close your eyes?” she beseeched him. “I can’t do this if you’re looking, I’m not brave enough.”
He shut his eyes, unable to deny her anything.
Trusting she wouldn’t hurt him.
Fingers slid up his chest to the muscles beneath his neck and then around to feather through his hair and draw his head low.
A kiss, no more substantial than a cloud of mist, whispered against his lips.
He should stop this. Not here. Not now. Not when she was in such a vulnerable state and his entire body was just one raw nerve.
Begging to be touched. To be soothed. To be stroked and caressed and all of the things he’d never been before.
All of the things, he realized now, that a human needed to feel alive.
To feel… anything.
The revelation came in a flood of unwarranted emotion as she teased the curves of his mouth with little presses and plucks of her own. Nibbling at his top lip, licking the bottom one before retreating. Testing the scar at the corner with a dart of her tongue.
Growling, he ripped his mouth from hers and brushed her hands off his chest before he gave her his back and retreated toward the door.
The little pats of her bare feet on the flagstones told him she didn’t allow his withdrawal. “Gareth? Did I do something wrong?”
“All of this was wrong,” he remonstrated in a dark, guttural tone.
But nothing in this world ever felt so good.
His name was not Gareth, for one, and then the truths only became more destructive from there. “You should be the one with your eyes closed,” he snarled. “You shouldn’t go around kissing monsters.”
“Oh no.” She rushed around him, gripping his shoulders just as he’d done to hers before. “No, Gareth, you mustn’t think that. You are not a monster It’s the world that is monstrous.” Her palms lifted to his jaw, cupping it on both sides. “You are… a marvel. Your presence has been a miracle to me. I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t found me.”
It was the trust in her eyes that tied him in knots. The earnest glow on her features that laid him to absolute waste.
“Felicity, I am not— I’m nothing like you think. You haven’t witnessed who I am or what I am capable of. You
might imagine you have because you saw me end less than a handful of men in your defense, but I promise you. It’s so much worse than that.”
“How?” Her hold didn’t let up as she held his face captive in her velvet grip. “Tell me.”
“There is no point in confessing because there is no absolving me,” he warned, encircling her wrists and pulling her palms away from his skin, deciding to give her what truths he could tell. “I cut out all of the soft parts of myself when I was very young. I had to, so I could be steel and stone rather than flesh and blood. I did it so I could perform the ghastly deeds required of me, but only at first. After so long, I began to enjoy violence. And a few years later, I’d gone past caring at all. I became bored with it. Cold and impenetrable. Unfeeling. Ruthless. I’ve hurt those who didn’t deserve it. I’ve taken what didn’t belong to me. I’ve exacted revenge much more excruciating than the actual insult. You can’t begin to understand who I—”
“Look here.” She tucked chilly fingers into his and he couldn’t help but warm them. Using his acquiescence, she brought one of their joined hands to his chest, and spread his own fingers over his heart before covering it with her palm.
“You are not steel and stone. This is flesh and blood. Warmth and awareness. You are a man, not a machine. And though you are hard, I do not think you cut out your softness. Someone else tried to cut it out of you, but you did not let them. I think you buried it somewhere in there, where they could not find it. Perhaps where you cannot find it, and have convinced yourself it does not exist. But I believe you could uncover that softness and reclaim your good heart. Let it beat again.”
Gabriel had to swallow twice before he could form words. His limbs had become paralyzed, his pulse erratic and strange. His head swam with a miasma of thoughts, desires, fears, and fantasies. “I don’t know how…”
She brought his knuckles to her cheek and dragged the downy skin over them like an affectionate cat before pressing her lips to each scarred bone.
His chest pumped harder as he watched, a captive of her sincerity.
“I think you do.” She flicked a gaze at him from beneath her lashes. “You are gentle with me…”
“I don’t always want to be.”
A shy curl of her lip was her astonishing response. “Maybe someday, you won’t have to.”
He pulled his hand from her grip. “Don’t say things like that to me, woman.”
“Why not?” Her lashes fluttered in confusion.
“Because there isn’t a someday for us, you know that as well as I do.”
“But… if there were a way?” She lost a bit of the courage and composure she’d been using to seduce him, and uncertainty clouded her eyes. A tooth bit into her lower lip.
Gabriel could feel her curling into herself, searching him for any signs of substantiation. “If you’d no past, and I’d no future, would you want me? Do you want me? Or… have I fabricated this connection between us by some twist of romantic girlish illusion?”
It was the dawning of that horrible thought in her eyes that was his final undoing. The visible worry that she stood before him unwanted, that propelled him forward.
Shoving his fingers into her hair, he cupped the sides of her head only to claim her quivering mouth with a possessive kiss.
He’d meant to soothe her doubts with words. To tell her he’d never found a woman on this earth more desirable. That he burned for the barest liberty, and never allowed himself to hope for even something as miraculous as a kiss.
Reaching up, she threaded her own fingers into the hair at his nape, leaving him with no barrier against the press of her body.
This.
It was the only word he could conjure, and it encompassed everything.
This mouth. This kiss. This woman.
His every nerve sparked to life, hungry to catalogue every point of contact.
Gabriel had no frame of reference, but he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no sustenance, be it God- or man-made, rivaled Felicity Goode in taste or texture. No woman could even hope to compare.
She was too pure for this world. Too soft. Too open. She cared too much and trusted too easily. To kiss her was to glimpse what heaven might be like. To taste her was to sample ambrosia.
And to have her hands roaming his bare skin?
He’d never been a religious man, but he’d found a new goddess to worship. Because someday, they’d all be nothing but dust and shadows, but his dust would have mingled with divinity for a moment.
For a kiss.
And that made him something more than any other man alive.
He made no decisions, had no plan of seduction or advancement, but suddenly he’d circled her waist with his hands and lifted her onto the closest workbench without breaking the fusion of their mouths.
Tongues glided together in a wet exploration of a mounting inferno charged with a powerful, intangible element. Something like captured lightning. Electric and wild and unruly.
Her knees parted, and he moved between them. Where he belonged.
Where he yearned to stay.
Charting the curve of her jaw with his mouth, he dragged a moist exploration down the swanlike column of her neck, only to bury his face in her fragrant hair. He inhaled deep as he laved and sucked and sampled the delicate flesh connecting her neck and shoulder.
Her raw, husky gasp of surprise rippled over his skin in a sensual abrasion of sound and submission.
The sound brought everything that made him both man and animal roaring to the surface.
It was only the curl of her fist in his shirt that kept him tethered to his humanity. Tenderness bloomed beneath the pulsating desire, tempering it. She trusted him. She wanted him.
She didn’t fear him. Didn’t think he was a monster.
That in itself was miraculous.
His hands fell to her nightdress with a moan of equal parts torment and titillation. He plotted a course he’d no map to, down the dramatic slope of her back into a narrow waist, and then flaring to hips widened by her posture, seated with open legs.
Christ, he’d yearned for so long.
A lifetime.
The scent of her, spices and sweetness, frayed what was left of his sanity.
And the feel of her nails scoring his scalp, then angling south to dip beneath the open collar of his shirt and nudge it down his shoulders, unraveled it completely.
His fingers fell upon the belt of her wrapper, releasing it so he could plunge his hands inside. Wishing his hands were steady, he smoothed them over the silk of her gown, down to the swell of her breasts. They each gasped as his knuckles grazed her nipples, pulling them impossibly tighter. He tested the insignificant weight of her breasts, marveling at the pliant abundance of flesh. Unwittingly, his lips followed the path his hands had forged, kissing over the fabric until his lips hovered above the twin protrusions.
He encircled the silk with his mouth, gently pressing the pebbled peak between his lips.
The resulting arch in her back, accompanied by her breathy sob, encouraged him onward. Both his languages deserted him as he felt the abrasion of the silk against the stubble on his jaw.
Fuck, but he wanted her naked. Exposed and open, draped in a bed of silks and satins and velvet and fur, rolling in every decadent sensation as their skin slid against one another.
As he slid inside of her.
Never had he been so hard. So out of his fucking mind with lust.
And yet, a reverence kept him from rending the gown from her body. Better she stay covered for now. That his first exploration should have boundaries.
Only when her legs opened wider, did he realize that his hands had fallen to her thighs. He’d been so focused on discovering her breasts… but now a different warmth beckoned.
Wanting to spare her the intensity of his visage, he couldn’t help but straighten to gaze down on her. To gauge her reluctance or her acceptance. To observe her reactions and assess her needs, as he had no knowledge or skill to draw
upon.
For once, he couldn’t find a single hint of fear anywhere on her beautiful features.
Thank God.
It was the only thing that could have stopped him.
Both of his hands resting on her thighs, he used his thumbs to caress the quivering muscle beneath the gown, searching for the seam of undergarments.
He went as high on her thigh as he could, finding none.
No discovery ever made by a man had been so erotic. Of this, he was certain.
Their eyes locked as his thumb ventured forward, discovering the little thatch of soft hair against the silk.
Her mouth opened, but no sound escaped. Only increasingly short breaths.
How anyone could breathe at a time like this was beyond him.
Emboldened, he found the seam to her sex and ventured forward, sliding through the folds. The silk beneath the pad of his thumb became instantly damp and slick, and the whimper she emitted froze him in place.
He whispered her name. A plea. A prayer. A request for permission.
Her eyes were wide behind her spectacles, but she rolled her hips forward, pressing the sweet outline of her sex against his finger as she lifted her face in search of a reassuring kiss.
Barely able to focus on what his lips and fingers were doing in tandem, he closed his eyes and gave in to pure instinct. Delving with his tongue. With his thumb.
Until she let out a little cry into his mouth.
When he would have pulled back, her hand went to his, imprisoning him there.
There.
“There,” she gasped. “Oh. Oh my.”
The wondrous pleasure in her voice elicited a surge of masculine elation. He’d found something. Something she wanted. Something she liked. A turgid little nub just below the peak of her soft mound.
He thrummed it over the wet silk with the pad of his thumb. Once. Twice. Eliciting hitches of breath from her each time.
“Yes.” She answered the question he didn’t ask. “Yes. Like that. It… it feels like… like…”
Words seemed to abandon her as he dared to press a little deeper, to stroke a little faster. Her thighs twitched beneath his hands, clenching and releasing in demanding little bursts. She clutched at his shoulders and tossed back her head, exposing the vulnerable skin of her throat.
Tempting Fate Page 14
