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"Are any of them alive now? Your mother? Her mother?"
"No." When she couldn't bring herself to say anything further, even at his questioning look, he bent and placed his lips on her neck, just below her ear. His nose brushed the outer curve, breath tickling the flesh there. At the wet heat of his mouth, her head tilted back, her nerves shimmering deliciously. "Ah, Goddess. You're evil."
His lips pulled in a smile against her, but it couldn't dislodge the heaviness in her chest, even under that sensation of response. "Tell me."
She'd just say it, and be done with it. He wanted to know, she'd tell him and they'd go on. Still, the words clogged in her throat. "We all die before we turn twenty-one, my lord."
Jonah stopped, lifted his head, all amusement fading out of his expression. Her gaze shifted to the ocean outside the window. "How old are you, little one?"
She gave a half chuckle, and knew it was a bleak sound. "A fine time to decide I'm too young for you, my lord."
She wasn't surprised when he gripped her shoulders, lifted her to a sitting position. Her fingers had to curl into his thighs, though, to give her the courage to look into his face. "How old, Anna?" he repeated.
"I just turned twenty. So if I'm going to carry on the legend, I guess I better get pregnant soon."
"Don't." He made it a command. "What happened to your mother?"
When she shook her head, he eased her back to the bed and moved over her body, his knee pressing between hers. She opened to him. His eyes somehow got darker as Anna found herself submitting to his will so desperately, so easily. She could deny him nothing, even the words that had gotten trapped in her throat. He came down upon her, his chest pressed against her bare flesh, the denim and the length of him trapped beneath it rubbing against her aroused flesh. Anna drew in a breath, arched against him. Taking her wrists, he stretched both their arms out far to either side. With his arms being longer, he was able to lift his upper body to bend and kiss her sternum, just a brush of lips.
He made her feel vulnerable, holding her this way, and yet it made her want to strip her soul bare for him. She didn't understand why putting her in this open pose unlocked something inside her that a more protective posture would have kept closed, but it did, and she finally found her voice, a tremulous whisper in the darkness, feathering against the hair on his brow.
"She cut her throat right after I was born, with the knife that severed the cord between us. She asked my forgiveness, Mina told me." Anna stared blankly at that fall of hair over his forehead. "My mother said she couldn't bear to see her daughter suffer, but she didn't have the courage to end my life with hers."
"Holy Mother." When Jonah rested his brow on hers, Anna closed her eyes, feeling the heat of him, his strong features. His body pressed down on her further and she couldn't help herself. She raised her legs, coiled them around his thighs, her toes sliding down the inseam above his knees. "My lord . . ." Please, take away the thoughts. I am going to keep talking until I shatter into pieces.
But he didn't move, and she found herself speaking aloud again, the words pouring out of the locked memory chest that weighted her heart. "You asked about Mina. When that happened, Mina was young, no more than a child. While they were distracted, she . . . They said she captured my mother's blood, and made me swallow it, along with some of her own. Because it made me violently ill, Neptune had her thrown into the Abyss, weighted with chains. But then they discovered I lacked the type of destructive powers the other daughters had had. The midwife and healer who attended me said Mina had somehow discovered that being nursed on my mother's blood and that of the seawitch's line would give me some kind of protection. So Neptune had her fished out of the Abyss." She swallowed. "No one expected her to be alive. I was told her body was badly maimed by scavengers. I didn't see her again until I was older and sought her out, made her tolerate my company."
A faint smile touched her lips and now she was able to bring her gaze back to his penetrating one. "So you see, my lord, Mina risked her life to give me the life I have. I know she struggles with her darkness. But even if she doesn't think of it that way, she needs me to believe in her goodness. Because I'm the only one who does."
He remained silent, studying her as if she was the most fascinating thing he'd ever seen. After a few moments under that intent gaze, she couldn't bear it anymore. She began to strain against his hold. He stayed motionless, and that increased the need within her, released some of the pain and replaced it with the hard, needy anticipation of arousal. Something in his face told her he was waiting . . . wanting . . . She lifted her hips against the pressure of his, strained further, arched her throat, pressing her breasts against his chest. Offering. Begging with her movements.
His wings were at that half fold still, but they sheltered her from the remaining day's light, shading her, taking her into twilight as he bent at last, seizing her behind her nape and bringing her up against his mouth. No tenderness, startling in the way his mouth clashed with hers. But she just opened as far as she could for him, let him plunder, making urgent whimpers in the back of her throat. Her legs clamped over his hips, the muscular curves of buttocks. Her aggressive movement earned a warning growl. Her answer was to arch further, make small motions against his hard length, daring him to restrain her movements further.
He reached between them, figured out the workings of the pants, stood with sudden impatience to strip them off, then came back down upon her before she had more than a moment to miss his heat, the weight and hardness of him.
But she needed him to fill her, to be inside of her. Her heart and soul were suffocating; couldn't he see it?
"Jonah . . . my lord. Please don't let me feel this way."
His gaze flickered up to her. "Do you need the pain, little one?"
She nodded. "Make me not remember, my lord." Make me forget I belong nowhere, not to the mermaids or to the humans, not to anyone.
She knew those like Mina might scoff at the debasing idea of belonging to another. But when a soul was starved for touch, for connection, it would willingly enslave itself to the offering of love from another, even if only for a few moments. She would be his, as long as he would have her, and she would nourish herself on that brief time if she could. How many of us have had the opportunity to be with an angel, after all?
She'd been strong and independent the whole of her short life. There'd been no real choice in that, but she'd been bolstered by the example of Mina, by the wasted life of her mother. She'd never realized the danger of being held in the arms of a strong male who wanted to protect, to care. It was far more dangerous to her than anything else about Jonah. But like most things in her life, she made the conscious choice to embrace it as long as it was offered. She had too little time to waste it being afraid.
Rearing up against his touch, she bit him just above the circle of his nipple, tightening her legs on him. In response, he slid an arm around her waist and sheathed himself in her, hard, deep and fast, making her suck in a breath, utter a sharp cry of pleasure.
He pushed her back down and began to stroke inside her, his eyes fierce, almost like the glinting red of a Dark One in the darkness of her cottage. "I will make you scream, little one."
Jonah knew he'd kept her talking about the painful memories past the time he should have. She'd inherited a legacy of unfulfilled hopes, and he was likely to be yet another one of them. He hadn't even thanked her for saving his life. But he couldn't bring himself to do so until he knew that it had been worth saving or that it didn't bring more sorrow to her. However, he had not been alive as long as he had without learning to be resourceful, and there were things he could give her now other than his gratitude.
The flowers with which she surrounded herself were part of the key to her. Delicate, temporal, living with fierce, perfect and altogether fragile beauty in the moment. So he would give her that moment.
Sliding from her body despite her mewl of protest and his own aching hardness, he picked up one of the dandelions f
rom the vase on the side table. Trailing it over her stomach, he watched some of the seeds dislodge, tickle her further. Then he bent, kissed the underside of her breast where the crease of its weight rested it over her rib cage. Lingered, tasted as she moved restlessly beneath him, tangled her fingers in his hair.
Lifting up, he stopped her so he could return the favor, combing out her hair with his fingers, loosening the tie that held it so he could spread it over the bed. It surprised her, he could tell, when he threaded her hands through it, tangling them, tying the strands over her wrists to keep her like that, open and trembling. Then he lifted one of her legs, supporting the calf in his hand, and guided it under his arm, resting her heel on his hip as he dragged the dandelion down, down . . .
Anna bit her lip at the feathery contact, and then a guttural cry came from her lips as he bent and replaced its touch with his own mouth.
"What are--"
"Taking you as high as you can go, little one."
When he put his mouth fully over her hot, slick flesh, all the painful memories fled back into the darkness. Anna tugged on the quilt, working her hips against his face. His urging, rhythmic squeezes made her feel like she could bear no more, though she also wanted to ride his mouth forever. She rocked, cried out. When she looked up the slope of her body, his lashes fanned his cheeks as he watched the aroused state of her soaked sex with avid intent. It made her writhe even more insistently.
For his part, Jonah's noble intentions had fled and now he simply needed to take. As she lay so open below him, he was reminded of how she'd offered him everything on that first night, and he realized in himself the trait of a conqueror, taking as his due that which he might not deserve.
Whatever he gave her could not measure up to what her full submission gave to him. That thought gave him pause, and he studied it briefly from several angles before he pushed it away, lifted both her legs to his shoulders. Feeling her calves slide past the arches of his wings, he raised her light form, holding her for the deeper penetration of his mouth.
He'd forgotten the sweet, musky taste of a woman's cleft, the slick honey of it, the way she would respond to it if done well, as if she were being tossed on a stormy sea, her body moving as sinuously as the frothy waves.
One of the human legends of Ariel's demise had been her turning to seafoam, the supposed natural death for a mermaid, where the soul forever became a part of the sea. Now, as Anna undulated as she might if she were moving through the water, Jonah knew her heart was in the ocean, her soul deep in the sea. But it was a world that often didn't want her there. So she lived here, caught on the boundary of land and water, symbolic, like everything in this cottage. For all its quiet tranquility, he found he didn't like her being here, where all its traditions might make her believe this was the best she could hope for.
