I wish it would hurry up.
The trickling is beginning to drive me crazy. The not knowing and heading into all this blind is making me anxious.
“What if I don’t get my memory back?”
He shrugs. “Then we relearn everything. If I know anything about you, Rina, it’s that you’re resilient and determined. You won’t let a memory loss stop you. Now, come.”
I don’t push the mountain of fears and anxieties clawing up my chest, filling my throat. I know he’s right. No matter what, I will figure this out. I just hate that there is so much I need to know and I need my memories to make the right choices.
“Did I agree to let you in?” I blurt as we start up a series of flat rocks leading up the side of a hill. “You said you didn’t want to risk it, but did I want to do it?”
Vaelith glances over his shoulder. “I won’t tell you that.”
I blink. “Why not?”
“Because that isn’t for me to tell you. That is a decision you need to make on your own and if your answer has changed since the last time, that is your choice, too. My answer should have nothing to do with what you want.”
I’m annoyed that I respect that answer. That it only makes the weight in my chest just a pinch lighter because I know my answer. I know to the very pit of my stomach what I want and it has nothing to do with before. I don’t know what kind of person I was the first time I was here. I don’t know what kind of life we had. But that was almost a decade ago. I was eighteen ... nineteen years old. Barely legal. My view of him could have been tainted by rose-colored glasses. By a false idea of what I wanted versus what I needed.
But I am a twenty-seven-year-old woman with enough life experience and understanding to fully appreciate the scope of my choices.
I love him.
I love this beautiful creature holding my hand with such tenderness when I know he could crush a boulder just as easily. I love his humor. I love the way he looks at me like I created the universe. I love the way he cares for me, looks after me in the smallest ways.
Yes, he’s a monster. A killer. His kingdom is built on the bones of thousands of humans and that is a fact that I am not oblivious to. But I have seen his love and devotion to every blade of grass. Every stone. I have seen the beauty he has created. The life he’s breathed into every tree and plant, every animal and creature. He is their Father, and they are his children, and he had to watch them die in cold blood. I can’t even imagine that level of pain and loss.
We reach the top and I gasp.
Stone columns jut up to the dark heavens in ornate arches overrun with ivy and moss. They rise from a patchwork of stone surrounding a naturemade pond, the soft green of jade that extends up a frothing brook that ends with a roaring waterfall falling straight from the side of a grand mountain.
“Oh, this is beautiful,” I breathe, clutching a hand over my heart.
“I built this for you,” he murmurs, releasing my hand when I wander along the pond’s edge to where the stream meets the falls. “As a wedding present.”
I hear him, but the rush and roar of the water crashing over slabs of stone that brim and flow into the creek has collected in my ears. It sings with such a familiar harmony that I find myself moving even closer. Drawn.
My fingers fumble with the zipper on my dress, but he’s already there, fingers pinching the tongue and freeing me of the fabric. It flows down my form and creates a silver puddle at my ankles that I kick away.
It was night then, too, I think.
The night he took my hand and led me here, leaving behind the party going strong back at the castle. He’d taken my hand when no one was looking and we slipped away like teenagers. The entire way, he kissed me. His big hands tore away my beautiful dress until there was nothing between us but skin and vines.
I suck a breath still lingering with the scent of wildflowers, moss and honeysuckles. My throat muscles flex as I teeter between the memory and the reality. Every blink has me moving between the misty haze of that night when he’d carried me into the water with my legs around his hips and now as he scoops me up against his chest and steps into the stream.
“There were candles,” I whisper, their soft, orange light washing along the lines and grooves of his face.
I blink and the hundreds of wax pillars are gone and I’m being placed on the flat stone beneath the falls.
The water is warm pouring over me. I close my eyes and tip my head back into the spray. Even when my thighs are parted and his shoulders fill them, I keep my eyes closed and lean back.
“Feet up,” he instructs. “Flat. That’s a good girl.”
I let him arrange my feet into a squat on the rock with my knees up and my hands braced behind me. The position has my opening face level and, for the first time, I get to watch as he unfurls his tongue and finds my entrance.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
He tongues my opening.
