AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She caught up with him at the bottom of the stairs that led to the landing overlooking the garden. He didn’t slow down and she struggled to keep up, taking two steps at a time and silently cursing the sheer number of them.
‘I should have told someone which way I was going,’ she said when they reached the landing.
‘You should have taken a guide,’ he said in a tone made all the more menacing by its mildness.
‘I wasn’t thinking.’ Too distracted by all the changes in her world to note the change of weather coming in, never mind that she’d been warned. She hadn’t known what that warning meant. It hadn’t meant to her what it meant to the people who lived here. ‘I’m sorry for all the concern I caused. I know better now. It won’t happen again.’
‘You’re right; it won’t. Your chances of going anywhere ever again without a full security detail on your tail are non-existent.’
‘That seems a little…extreme.’ There was contrition and then there was total loss of privacy.
‘You think so? I don’t think so,’ he said.
He looked to be heading to the library, so she followed him and watched as he poured a drink from the decanter on the sideboard. The liquid glowed amber in the soft lamplight and he knocked it back hard and poured another. That went the same way as the first and his hand trembled.
‘It won’t happen again,’ she said. ‘No need to put people on me twenty-four hours a day. That won’t be necessary. I’ll be more mindful. Cas—’
‘This would go so much better,’ he said, ‘if you didn’t talk.’
She waited, but he didn’t fill the silence. For a very long time she stood there while he paced and glowered and looked anywhere but at her.
‘This would go so much better if you did talk,’ she said finally. ‘Casimir, I’m still here. I’m right here. And I’m listening.’
* * *
He didn’t know where to begin. He couldn’t find a way to cut through the immobilising fear of losing her and speak to the heart of things. Anger ruled his movements, stiff and fierce, and he couldn’t look at her for fear of losing his way.
‘I brought you into this,’ he began. ‘I know I shouldn’t have but I did it anyway and if you die because of me, because of dangers I haven’t made clear or because some political outsiders want revenge on me, that’s on me.’
‘How can you say you brought me—?’
‘Damned if I brought you here to die. Don’t you chase that road. Don’t you do that to me!’
There it lay. His fear of losing everyone he loved, bright and shiny and finally spoken. Time to walk away now, before anger and fear got him saying all sorts of things he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t make himself move.
‘Don’t you leave me.’
He tried to turn away but she was right there beside him, raising her hand to his cheek and not to strike him but to cup it, and he closed his eyes at the sweetness.
‘This fear isn’t real,’ she murmured fiercely. ‘It’s one of your shadows. Casimir, look at me.’
He couldn’t. He couldn’t do this love thing. ‘I need you to be more careful,’ he managed.
‘I can be. That’s what I’m telling you.’ She kissed him, soothed him.
He didn’t want to love this hard. He hated it. That was the biggest difference between them. She wanted to love wholeheartedly.
He took her lips more roughly than she’d taken his; he let passion and fear mix and burn white. When she twined her arms around his neck, he backed her against the wall and tried not to let his hunger get the better of him. He pushed her hair to one side and buried his face in her neck, tasting, trailing, finding her pulse-point with his tongue and letting its rapid beat chase away the lingering flavour of death. Not this time. Not dead.
Take a man who’d lost everyone he’d ever cared about and give him a family and then threaten to take it away and see how he fared.
‘I’m right here,’ she said quietly. ‘I believe in what you’re doing. What you’re fighting for. I’m right here beside you, and I am not afraid to be.’ She fisted her hand in his hair, licked his lips open and cut off his breath. They were both breathing hard when she released him. ‘Can we have make-up sex now?’
