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Alaric whirls me, pinning me between him and the door. Without a fire in the hearth, the room is dark, lit only by the dim light of lanterns piercing the linen curtains over the window.
He looks at me. Traces his fingers over the features of my face. “You are beautiful. Though, I suppose I must have told you that countless times, I cannot help but say it again.”
I go still.
He lowers his hand, his guard slamming into place. “What is it?”
“I think you might have… once?” I say uncertainly.
He frowns, but the tension leaches out of him, and he shrugs. “Nevertheless, you are beautiful. And I look forward to discovering what it is that made me fall so madly in love that I would bind myself so irrevocably to you.” He dips his head and trails kisses along my jaw, inching lower between words, making my nerve endings come alive, and my skin more sensitive to his ministrations. “I wonder… could it have been the way you taste? Or was it the sounds you make? Perhaps it was the feel of your body….”
The heat in his voice, more than the words, exposes me more than if he stripped me bare before the world. Alaric trails a series of kisses down the column of my throat and over my shoulder. By the time he reaches the neckline of my dress, he’s already loosened the lacing, so it easily heeds him.
“No…” he murmurs. “It wouldn’t have been something so simple. Such things would only make it impossible to resist your claim on my heart.” He takes his time, revealing me inch by inch, tasting my skin as his hands lift my skirt, allowing him to grip the backs of my thighs, and pulls my hips against his.
He has never made me feel as if my worth to him was tied to the way I look, not even now. I wrap my arms around his neck as he takes the peak of a breast into his mouth. The sharp points of his fangs scrape over my flesh.
A moan slides from my throat. I am glad he is holding me upright because I do not think I could stand on my own if I tried.
He moves to the left and pauses long enough that I whimper. When his fingers brush over the scar above my heart, I freeze. It takes an effort to open my eyes and meet his gaze.
“What happened here?” he asks so quietly I barely catch it.
That is a whole other conversation I am not sure either of us is ready to have just yet. It would be easy to say it was nothing or that it happened a lifetime ago. Still, I cannot bring myself to diminish or lie about the reasons or costs of my actions.
So, I pull myself against him and bring my mouth to his, kissing him as if I am drowning, and he is air. He yields to me, walking backward until he bumps into the bed and falls back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CLARA
I landon top of him, straddling his hips, and reach for his shirt. As I work the first button open, Alaric captures my wrists, his eyes shining.
“No,” he rasps.
We stare at each other for what feels like a lifetime. I frown, not quite understanding. I shift to move off him. “We don’t need—”
Alaric rolls us, pinning my hands above my head. His chest rises and falls with quick breaths, body seeking mine even as he goes to stop this. “It’s not that. I have every intention of taking you tonight,” he tells me. Slowly, he releases my hands and sits back, turning his face away. “I do not want you to see… how monstrous I am.”
The confession costs him. The way he feels about his scars is a wound all its own, invisible to the eye, yet bone deep. It’s something he’s carried with him for so long that not even Elizabeth’s curse could erase it. When he’d given me the second mark, I hadn’t known him well enough to see his insecurity, and he had no intention of bringing it to my attention.
I slide off the bed and stand. Alaric watches me cautiously as I slip my arms from the sleeves. The dress pools at my feet. “And my scars?”
Pain is written across his features as his gaze drifts from the web of scars at the crook of my shoulder, the still pink mark above my heart, gliding over to the slashing lines on my forearms and down to the four pale stripes over my abdomen. Then lower still to the three jagged marks below the knee on my left leg.
“It is not the same.” He shakes his head. “You are beautiful… and human.”
“It is the same—whether you are human or vampire or demon,” I say, stepping up to him. He reaches for me as if he can’t help but grip my waist. “Your scars are the reminder that you fought to survive and won.”
Alaric closes his eyes and swallows. And I know no one has ever told him that before because he has never allowed himself to share this vulnerability.
“You are perfect, inside and out.”
When he opens his eyes again, he stands and curls a hand around the back of my neck, then rests his forehead against mine.
This time, when I go to unbutton his shirt, his midnight eyes lock intently on every movement of my fingers, breaths coming in quick, shallow bursts. But he doesn’t stop me from sliding it over his shoulders and down his arms. I drag a finger over one of the raised lines.
He shudders and closes his eyes as I go from one to the next, all the way down his abdomen. I lean forward and press a kiss along his jaw as I trace a scar below his waistband. That touch sets something off in him. His eyes flash, and the next thing I know, he lifts me up and lays me down on the bed.
