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His dark grey eyes opened to her. “I’ve killed people, Tor. I have.”
Her heart dropped into her gut.
“But never an innocent. Never your family. I was there for the barrels. But I was too late to stop anything. And I was a coward. I didn’t help. I walked away. And I have been living with that fact ever since that day.”
“You aren’t a coward, Roe.”
“I am. It is what I am, no matter what I’ve done since that moment I walked away from the fire. Since that moment I walked away from you on the ground, in flames, writhing in pain. A coward.”
The last words slipped out of his mouth with such raw, guttural helplessness, she blinked hard. He wasn’t saying it for pity, wasn’t saying it in a bid for forgiveness. He was saying it because he believed it.
Believed it to his soul.
This man didn’t kill her family, didn’t send flames onto her skirts, torture into her legs. She knew it now like she knew her own breath.
But to him, his actions that day were just as grievous—more so—because he actually had a living, breathing conscience, unlike those other brutes.
She stepped forward and slipped her fingers along the tear in the upper sleeve of his shirt. Gently, the pads of her fingertips went across the gaping slash in his arm. Blood crusting, the muscles of his upper arm twitched under her touch.
She stared at his arm, at the wound that would have to be sewn shut. The brutality of the moment when he’d stalked toward the blackguard that had held a blade to her neck flashed in her mind. He’d approached and killed the man without hesitation and with ruthless accuracy. Keeping her alive was the most important thing to him—she’d seen it the second she was dragged out of the cabin and he was rushing toward them. His sole mission was to keep her safe.
She was the most important thing. The only thing.
The instant she saw him, she wasn’t scared, no longer fighting to free herself. He had her, and she knew it.
Now he needed to know she had him.
Her fingers moved along the wound on his arm. “Do you remember how I told you who I had been was killed on the day of the fire? How I was never the same? And that I had to kill the person I became after the fire, because if I didn’t, I never could have moved forward?”
He nodded.
She looked up at him, her gaze intent on his steel grey eyes that were avoiding her. “You need to kill this person you think you are, Roe. Because you’re not him.”
“I am what I am, Tor.”
He made the mistake of meeting her look and her eyes locked onto his soul. “You are what I know you to be. And you’re not a coward. You’re the man that just gave up every purpose you have on this ship to keep me safe. The man that just saved me. You’re the man I want. The man I want now.” Her right hand moved up, her fingers curling around the side of his neck, brushing along his dark hair. “The man I want to feel inside of me. Feel in my bones.”
He blinked, stunned for a moment at her words.
Stunned so long she feared she had been imagining all of this. This inexplicable draw she had to him. This fire that crackled between them, embers spinning in a dance between hate and attraction.
She didn’t want to kill him. Not anymore.
She wanted to be with him. His body naked over hers.
An intake of breath shocked him into motion and he descended on her, his lips crashing into her hard, insistent, all the rage and disappointment and fury teasing every emotion between them into a heightened peak.
His hands dove into her hair and he tilted her head to the right, slanting his mouth on hers for better access. With a guttural exhale, her lips parted and he took full advantage, his tongue swiping inward to taste, explore.
Her hands went down, unbuttoning the waistcoat he still had on and tugging up on his white lawn shirt, dragging it off his body. His chest bared to the light, she found scar after scar running across his body. She pulled away from his fingers tangled in her hair and moved around him in a circle, her cold hands sizzling as they spread across his hot skin. Her fingers trailed along the cuts of his muscles, the white jagged lines of scars. Too many to count, too many to even ask about.
She rounded him and stopped in front of his torso, looking up at him. It hit her instantly, the look on his face, in his eyes—silently waiting for revulsion. His scars had changed his body—his spirit—irrevocably and he couldn’t hide from it in that moment. She knew the look, for it was the same reaction she had when someone saw her bare legs.
Her hands lifted to his face, capturing his look. “We are who we are, Roe. And I still want you.”
A tortured glint flashed across his eyes, her words striking so deeply she wasn’t sure if he was going to abandon her then and there.
Silence. Staring at each other. Their blood, the air pounding around them.
