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He couldn’t quite explain it, couldn’t quite pin what it was and where it had manifested from. But he wasn’t about to give up the moment before he was forced to.
Their breathing had long since returned to normal before a breeze clipped through the open window and she pulled back, her lips full and red raw, a flush still in her cheeks.
Sitting on the stone ledge, she moved her hands inward along his chest as her eyes swept over him. “The scars on your body, so many of them. What are they from?”
He stiffened slightly. “The years surviving. The years on the ship. Everywhere.”
“An answer that isn’t an answer.”
“Elle—”
“One. Just tell me about one.”
His lips pulled inward, everything in him wanting to refuse. To not mar the moment with the past. To not let the darkness take over the shreds of light he was just offered.
“What about this one?” Her fingertips ran along the left side of his chest, a feather-light whisper of a touch along the crooked scar that sat diagonally over his heart.
He closed his eyes for a long second.
“Rune?”
“I got that one the day my father died.”
“How?”
He opened his eyes to her. Her look was fixed on his chest, on her fingers moving along the scar from end to end. “I was angry. Stupid.”
She nodded, not prodding for more.
And then her head sank forward, her lips soft against the ragged line of skin. The first woman to ever touch the scar. Every other woman he’d been with had looked at that one scar as a curse.
A scarred heart promised no love.
But Elle had just kissed that scar.
He grabbed her shoulders and pushed her away from him. “Why did you do that?”
Her blue eyes opened wide at him. “It looked like it needed to be kissed.”
“What?”
She shrugged. “I wanted to feel it. Feel you. What happened to you. Touch it.”
No words. No words for what she’d just done.
So he grabbed her fully, his right hand deep in her hair and he dragged her body back into his, her breasts pressing into his lower chest, her breath hot and humid on his skin.
What the hell had he just done? Just let happen?
Her fire was going to burn him.
Scorch him to a crisp if he didn’t get his head straight.
{ Chapter 9 }
“Don’t say a word, don’t interject anything into the conversation unless you are specifically asked twice.” Elle looked down, smoothing the skirts of her riding habit for the fifteenth time. She shouldn’t be nervous—Lord Kallen adored her and she knew it. Of course, she’d never shown up in his drawing room with a strange man in tow.
Her look flickered to Rune. “He asks people questions all the time that he doesn’t want answers to. So the question has to be repeated twice—three times is best—before it is answered. And stand behind me, not next to me.”
