He cursed beneath his breath and looked up at the ceiling as though summoning restraint from it. “Now, Nina,” he muttered slowly, closing his eyes. “Don’t do that.”
“Why?” I asked, my voice too loud and too urgent.
He was tortured now. Praying. “I’ve told you why.”
“Because you’re afraid?” I asked. “Of falling in love with me again.”
He laughed, exasperated.“Again,”he murmured as though he were tasting the word. Inspecting it. “Nina, it’s lookin’ like all the men who love you once are cursed with it for the rest of their lives.”
I went slowly to him and took his jaw in my hand, pulled his gaze down from that ceiling and back to me. “Is that so?” I asked.
The cerulean of his eyes whirled and whirled. “Aye.”
I swallowed. “Then you might as well surrender now—”
“Nina.”
“—because I’m cursed, too. I love you, Patrick Colson.”
He seemed to quake, that shield of his cracking. “You’re drunk.”
“Then I’m drunk, and I love you.”
His chest deflated beneath my hand—a yielding. I was somewhere in the deepest blue of his eyes, already under. He said nothing, just stood with my hand running over the rasp of his stubble, the last of his restraint twitching in his jaw.
My fingers went unbidden to my own shirt, unbuttoning the front, my fingers sliding down to my belly.
The tendons in his neck tensed, but he didn’t stop me.
I pulled my arms free of the sleeves and let the blouse fall between us. Then, I tugged the strings of my bra loose, and with deliberate slowness, I pulled the material down over the hills of my breasts, inhaling as it caught on my pebbled nipples. It was a disciplined thing. Measured. I wanted to see the shadows descend over his eyes when he saw me baring myself to him. I wanted to see the familiarity in his eyes, the memories of my body imprinted in his irises, in his hands when they clenched. And as that hunger washed over him, something in my chest exulted.
He stepped forward, perhaps without meaning to; it was difficult to tell which part of him ruled the rest. I felt the door against my back once more, but still, he didn’t touch me. He only watched, warring with himself.
I didn’t take my eyes off his. I wouldn’t be the one to break.
I pulled at the ugly trousers, let them bundle at my ankles. I stepped out of them in the little room I had, my knee sliding between his legs. I revealed that I had no underwear beneath.
His tongue ran over his bottom lip, the muscles of his shoulders contracted. I was melting into the door behind me, my body sinking into it. Candlelight flickered along the edge of his cheekbone, the rim of his ear, the column of his neck.
And I was losing whatever battle we were trapped in. Unraveling. Something thrashed in my core and bid my fingers to slip over my pelvis, to touch the space at the apex of my thighs, to cup the ache. I rubbed the pads of two fingers over that tight bundle of nerves and still, I didn’t look away. I was awash in him. A moan escaped me.
He watched, hypnotized it seemed. Tormented and enraptured all at once. His hands flattened to the door either side of my face, and he watched my fingers slide in and out and over, slowly at first, then faster. It was too much—the expression he wore, the reverence in it. The pleasure and pain coalescing. My hand moved of its own accord, quite apart from my mind.
I whimpered, and he watched the sound leave my lips.“Patrick,”I whispered desperately.
He exhaled, and it was more a growl than a breath. “Fuck it.”
He took my mouth, and he was not gentle.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHTPATRICK
She met him with teeth and nails. His tongue swept over the points of her canines and she groaned, dug her fingers into him, tried desperately, desperately to find purchase on something.
And his own hands? They were finally free of shackles. He set them loose, and they fled from him, sprinting over the land of her, starved. He let his thumbs weigh the underside of her breasts, let his fingertips trace ribs, felt the breath collecting in her sternum, the heat of her thighs, the swell of her hips. All of this, he mapped again, as though recounting favored haunts, relieved to have arrived. Relieved to languish there, a weary traveler. He collected her gasps and stored them away in his lungs, and he thought,This is what greed is, what hunger is. He felt as though he could drink those sounds of hers until they drowned him. Only when he could no longer bear it did he let his hands venture down her body, over the soft planes of her stomach, the breath filling there, and expending, and finally, finally, into the valleys of her, the slick, hot center of her sex. He made sure his mouth had closed over hers, so that he drank that whimper, too.
Her spine arched under the persuasion of his hand curved into her lower back. Their foreheads jammed together, and her hands pulled at his clothes, wrestling buttons away as though disconnected from thought.
“You’d better tell me to stop.” He thought he might die if she did.
