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“Hypocrite,” she said, bitterness burning her lungs. “When you see blood instead of wet earth between my toes, do you think it didn’t define who you are now?” He threaded his hands through her hair, which he’d taken down with his fingers when they sat with the others having after-dinner drinks. Teasing, flirting, gentle romance that seemed diametrically opposite to this moment of pain.
“You can honor what your past has made you without enshrining it, worshipping at its feet, dedicating yourself to it for life like a monastic taking vows to serve a cruel god. What do you want, Marguerite?”
He asked it in a voice that sounded to her as relentless as time and power. Not the power of man, but the power of the wind, the sun’s heat, the determination of flowers to push up through the earth every year and prove that beauty could rise from the rich earth of the grave. The power of water, cycling through tide after tide, like the power rising in her now. For dinner she’d changed into a strapless top that hugged her hips and a soft gauze skirt that floated around her calves. His hands moved to her shoulders, her neck, his warm strength touching her bare skin.
“What do you want?” She tossed it back at him. “Children, I’m sure. I can’t give you those. I can’t give you anything, be anything remotely close to normal for you. ”
“What do you want, Marguerite?” He tipped her chin up.
“Don’t touch me. I don’t want to be touched right now. ” That was no more true than for a figurine of porcelain, too thin to be handled. She did want to be touched, she was just deeply terrified, deep in a part of her that knew only fear, that his touch would break her into pieces, an explosion of shards small and thin as confetti, lost to the wind as if she’d never been.
“Tell me what you want. ” His mouth whispered it, those lips close to hers. Her own parted, letting out a breath that was a near sob.
“I want to be whole. Feel it just once more. ” She raised her palms before her face. “I remember lying there with David beneath me, feeling his heart stop beating. I tried to cup his head in my hands and it was wet…so soft. Softer than a baby’s skull.
“And there were these people around. Staring at us. But I felt so alone, because David was gone. His heart was no longer my heart, his voice in my head was gone. And they didn’t know me, didn’t know us. And I wondered, ‘Will anyone ever share my soul again? Get inside me and know my thoughts?’ No. Surely not. And yet, I didn’t die. That’s the most intolerable cruelty, that you can realize that truth and not die. It seems a revelation like that should simply pluck your soul right out of you, cast it into the earth. And I think it did. I am a vampire. Sitting in the shadows, sucking in everyone else’s light and life to feed my own, but it’s false, because there’s only darkness within me. ”
When Tyler took her hands from her face, he was alarmed to feel her cold skin had gotten even colder.
“I don’t believe that. Sshhh…” He soothed her, touching his lips to the juncture of her neck with her shoulder.
His hair brushed her jawline and she tilted her head despite the scream of resistance in her head. Easing one arm around her back, he brought her a step closer.
Turned her to face him. “Let me in,” he said softly. “And I’ll light a candle. ” He didn’t threaten a roaring blaze, as if he knew a being that had lived in darkness as long as her soul would be agonized by bright light. She raised her hands to touch his back, closed her fingers into handfuls of his shirt.
Keeping his eyes on hers the whole time, Tyler leaned in and pressed his mouth over hers. Over her bottom lip only. A brush of that fullness, tasting the flavor of a moist lip gloss, finding the source of the scent of raspberry he’d occasionally caught when she spoke tonight at dinner.
He moved his kiss to the upper lip, nibbled there, nuzzled her cheek with his nose.
Sliding both arms around her shoulders, he wrapped them across her back so she was folded in toward him, her elbows bending to maintain her grip on his back. He took her into a deeper kiss, one where both of her soft lips were covered by his mouth.
Caressed her tongue with his own. When she made a curious noise, somewhere beyond a whimper into the realm of a sigh, he kept exploring her mouth with his own, cognizant that her body was rigid against his, but he realized it wasn’t conscious resistance. She had a death grip on his shirt. She was simply, totally petrified, rendered to catatonia by something as simple as a kiss.
Following instincts that had been honed from nearly twenty years of enjoying, mentoring and training submissives and Dominants alike, awakening them to their natures and how to accept and exercise their desires to bring them and their partners pleasure, Tyler increased the power of the kiss, the demand level to it. Gave her heat.
“Do whatever you want, dear heart,” he murmured. “But I won’t go away. I’m all yours. I’ll be your Master, if you surrender to me. ”
He didn’t know if the compulsion was intuition or the poor judgment of a man too much in love to exercise good timing or sense but he shifted one hand from her, dipped in his pocket to retrieve the object he’d been carrying most of the night and drew her left hand from around his waist.
Marguerite’s eyes flitted down and shock captured her features as he slid a ring over her finger, fitting it snugly past the knuckle. “And I’ll be your husband. I’ll do my best to keep you whole. To catch you when you fall. You’re the only woman I want.
And I knew it the first time I saw you. ”
The ring was a platinum band with a marquise diamond framed by metal work.
There were Japanese characters etched in the band on either side of the gem. They looked like elegant decorative scroll, if the person wearing the ring hadn’t known what the characters meant.
“Trust. Faith. ” She murmured the words.
“On the inside of the band right beneath the diamond is one more. Love. ” Simple concepts and the most precious in life. Marguerite closed her fingers over the metal.
“You’ve lost your mind. ”
“I’ll say. Do you know there’s at least three ways to write Japanese and some words have ten different characters, depending on how you mean to say them?”
“No, that’s not what I… Tyler, I can’t…”
“You can think about it. That’s all I want you to do for now, angel. Wear it and think about it. ” He brought her around the bench, turned her so she was watching Mac and Violet again. “Put your hands on the bench. Obey me. ” She did, her emotions scrambled. Her already stimulated body was suddenly more so as it became obvious what he was intending to do. He did it without ceremony.
