Page 67 of Ravished By the Revenant

“I love you. There’s a difference.”

His thumb presses in ever tighter circles, and I’m no longer thinking about differences. I ride him faster as the ancient bed frame creaks, and the whole room pulses blue in time with his heartbeat, faster and faster. He’s chanting a mixture of my name and old German, and the coil of pleasure in my belly winds tight, tighter. And then I look down at the crystallized heart, and I want to…

I want to hold it.

It’s completely insane, but I can’t deny it. My hand slides up his sternum, over scar and ink, to the edge of the parted ribs.

Aldric’s brows come together. “Clara?”

“Can I?” I’m barely breathing. His thumb has stopped. Everything has stopped except the light, hammering against my palm through the gap in the bone. “I want to hold your heart while I come.”

His growl is absolutely feral. It does things to me. Aldric’s hand comes up and covers mine, and he guides my fingers past the ivory cage, into the cool hollow of his chest, and my fingertips touch the crystal. The second I do, I feel something awaken inside me—a power I’ll dwell on when I’m not impaled on my revenant.

The crystal is smooth. It’s cold. A blue heart frozen into stone. I close my fingers around it, careful, cradling him in my fist like I’m cradling him with my pussy, and I start moving again. I’m riding him with his heart in my hand, and his thumb finds my clit, and I just… detonate.

“Aldric!”

I come with my fingers wrapped around his actual heart, crying out his name, clenching around him in waves, and I feel the crystal stutter and blaze against my palm as he loses the last threads of his control.

Aldric roars.

His hips slam up, and he pours himself into me in hard, endless pulses. There’s so much, always so impossibly much, filling me past capacity while I’m still shuddering through my own aftershocks. It has nowhere to go. It squeezes out around him with every kick of his cock, hot and obscene, sliding down his shaft, over his balls, onto the sheets. Aldric groans through his orgasm with his hand pressed over mine, keeping my fingers on his heart like he’ll die a second death if I let go.

I collapse onto his chest, my hand still resting inside him, his cum cooling on my thighs, both of us wrecked.

“Clara.” His voice is gravelly. “No one has ever… You touched it.”

“Well.” I press a kiss to the rib beside my own knuckles. “It’s mine now. I checked the deed.”

His laugh rumbles up through me, shaking us both, and beneath my palm his heart beats steadily, keeping time in a castle that is finally, entirely, our home.

EPILOGUE

The raspberries are at their best this week, and I know it, and Clara knows it, because she’s a woman who pays attention to fruit.

I spot her coming across the square before she reaches my stall. You can’t miss her. Hair like fresh snow, loose down her back, and those two little ones orbiting her.

“Frau Bittner!” little Liesl calls, already running. “Are the raspberries good today?”

“The raspberries are perfect today,” I tell her, and she skids to a stop in front of the crates, then studies them with her hands clasped behind her back, just like her mother taught her. She’s a serious little thing. Six, maybe seven, and looking at my fruit like a jeweler with a loupe. She has her mother’s hair, white as milk, and purple eyes that catch you off guard every time.

The boy arrives second because he stopped to look at Herr Vogel’s ridiculous cuckoo clocks, as he does every single week. He’s darker than his sister and mother, with hair black as a rook’s wing, stubbornly sticking up in the back, and eyes a deep blue. He plants both hands on the edge of my table and grins up at me with a gap where a tooth used to be.

“We need the best ones,” Konrad announces. “It’s important.”

“Is it, now?” I ask.

“Papa’s making a Sunday cake,” Liesl says. “He says if the raspberries aren’t perfect, the cake is a—” she squints, retrieving the word carefully, “—travesty.”

“He talks like that.” The boy nods solemnly. “All the time.”

I wonder if their daddy also says the word travesty with an adorable lisp. Probably not.

Clara catches up, a basket on her arm, laughing before she even reaches us, and I could swear the woman hasn’t aged a day in over ten years. “Sorry. We got waylaid by clocks. Good morning, Frau Bittner.”

“Good morning, dear. I hear there’s a cake at stake.”

“There’s always a cake at stake. He’s very intense about baking. He’s very intense about everything.” She surveys the crates and taps the fullest one. “Go on, you two. Pick the best ones for your daddy. Every single berry gets inspected. You know the standard.”