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How to be a man, vulnerable and useless. Or how to be a beast.
But he had the freedom to be that beast with her. And somehow, with that freedom he became both. Wholly a man and wholly an animal in her arms, and she seemed to accept him no matter what. She shouldn’t.
She should push him away. She always should have pushed him away.
But she had gone with him, from the beginning.
She had chosen to be with him.
And when he rose up and positioned himself between her thighs, when he thrust into her body, and when her beautiful eyes opened, connected with his, he felt a shudder of something crack through his entire body like a bolt of lightning.
She lifted her head, pressed her soft mouth to his, and he felt words vibrating against his lips. He couldn’t understand them. Couldn’t do anything but feel them, as the sweet, tight heat of her body closed around his.
She clung to his shoulders as he drove them both to the pinnacle of pleasure. And when she released, he went with her. Pleasure pounding through him like a relentless rain.
And then, he heard her speaking again, her lips moving against the side of his neck, and this time, the words crystallized in his mind.
The words that he had been trying, trying and failing, not to hear. Not to understand.
“I love you,” she whispered. Her lips moved against his skin, tattooing the words there, making it impossible for him not to feel them. He was branded with them.
“I love you. I love you.”
“No,” he said, the denial bursting forth from him.
He moved away from her, pushing his hands through his hair. Panic clawed at him and he couldn’t say why. He was not a man who panicked. Ever. He was not a man acquainted with fear. Because what did he care for his own life? The only thing he feared was the darkness in himself, and maybe that was the problem now. Maybe it called to the weakness that he had inside of his chest.
The desire to sink into her. To drop to his knees and pledge loyalty to her no matter what.
Even if she asked him to mobilize against his brother. Against his people.
And it didn’t matter that she wouldn’t.
What mattered was losing the anchor that kept him from harming those around him.
What mattered was losing the only moral compass he knew how to read.
What mattered was Monte Blanco and it was becoming impossible for him to hold on to that.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t get to tell me that I don’t love you.”
“I cannot,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Haven’t you been listening? Haven’t you heard anything that I’ve told you? Love is the enemy. You’re right. Magic. And magic can be dark as easily as it can work for good.”
“So why can’t you trust that between us it will be good?”
“Because I cannot trust myself,” he said.
She put her hand on his chest and he wrapped his fingers around her wrist and ripped it away. She stared at him, the hurt in her eyes far too intense to bear.
Because he did not have the freedom to be himself with her. It was far too dangerous. And he had been lying. Evidence of his own weakness if it ever existed.
That he had wanted to pretend that what he knew to be true wasn’t. That he wanted to give himself freedom when he knew that he could not afford it. This woman was a gift that some men could have. But not him.
Yet he had been weak, far too weak from the beginning to turn away from her. He’d been given every chance. Every roadblock in his personal arsenal had been set up. She had been intended for his brother, and if that could not keep him away from her, then nothing could.
