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“This is a silly conversation.” I drop his hand. “What does it matter when the situation you describe will never happen. Neither you nor I know what our unfinished business is. If we have not been able to solve this for ourselves in several centuries, then what hope does Bree have? For all that she wishes things to be different, I am perfectly content to remain in this house forever, knowing that I have a piece of her love. You should learn the same contentment.”
“So you can watch Pax and Brianna doingthat,”he spits the word, just as Bree’s moans echo from the bathroom, “and not be wracked with envy that you cannot join in?”
“Icouldjoin in if I weren’t out here having a fruitless conversation with a sad poet prince.”
“It’s not the same,” he mutters angrily. “It’s not the same if we cannot have her heart or her soul or her body. It’s not the same when he has a body and we don’t.”
I shrug. “I am happy for them both.”
“Argh, why must you be sonice?” Edward clutches his head, his fingers tearing through his unruly dark hair. “You’re supposed to hate me. Why can’t you hate me?”
“Edward, you are my dearest friend. Remember the day I appeared at this house, a newly minted ghost, and you took me under your wing? You explained ghost mojo. You helped me avoid being skewered by Pax when he decided to practice stabbing Druids. You showed me your trick with the liquor cabinet for the days when I did not feel like my cheerful self. You wrote me that dreadful poem for my birthday – a travesty of literature, but I appreciated the attempt. I could neverhateyou.”
“Some friend I am,” Edward murmurs. “Ambrose, if you had any idea of what I’ve done to you… Pax gave me his forgiveness tonight, and it is extraordinary and wonderful, and it made me realize that there’s something I need your forgiveness for. But I am not worthy to ask for it, not after I—”
But then, he stops talking, because Bree and Pax enter the room. And I can tell from the sharp intake of breath and the lack of clothing rustling, that they are both naked.
7
Bree
Edward is speaking, urgently and ardently, but he stops as soon as I step into my bedroom. His dark eyes burst with flame-filled light at the edges as he sees me naked, carrying the handful of moldavite stones I had in my pocket. The corner of his mouth quirks up into his signature smirk.
“Thou art a dream,” breathes Edward, taking a step toward me as if he is dragged by invisible hands. “A living sculpture, a vision of loveliness that surpasses all my earthly description—”
“Good, you’re back to your old self,” I say with a smile as I squeeze Pax’s hand. “Don’t describe me. There are many more things I’d like you to do with that tongue of yours.”
The air in the room shifts. Edward’s eyes roam down my body, and he wets his bottom lip in an expression I can only describe as hungry. Ambrose remains still, listening, his face open, rapturous. A dark, wanton heat sinks into my stomach.
“I almost lost you tonight,” I say, my voice catching on the words. “I…I know I said terrible things to you, and that we have a lot of stuff to work out, and we don’t even know if Jack the Ripper is gone for good. But for the next little while, I don’t want to think about any of that. I don’t want us to be complicated. I just want to be…us.”
Ambrose inclines his head. “I’d love nothing more,” he says formally, as if I were inviting him to tea instead of an orgy.
“I promised that I would show Ambrose another way to please a lady.” Edward’s Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “Roman, will you indulge my whims, since you are the one who can touch her as we cannot?”
Edward and Pax regard each other, and something long unspoken passes between them. I know they’re both searching for their place in this new hierarchy of ghost and Living, both used to being the alpha males of their own domains. But Pax shrugs and leans in to kiss the top of my head.
“Not for long,” I promise Edward. “I swear to you, I will free you and Ambrose, too.”
“How much it would please me, were that true,” Edward says as he closes the space between us. He raises his hand to my face, and I try not to think about how I can see my bed through his translucent form. His fingers graze my cheek, warm and tingling against my skin. The touch of a ghost who almost but can’t quite grasp me.
He tries to anyway, cupping my cheek and tugging, drawing me forward so that our lips meet.
Unlike Pax, who is all blood and enthusiasm, Edward’s kiss is measured, languid, probing, as if we have all the time in the world and he intends to use it to map every inch of my skin with his mouth.
Gods, how I want that.
For a few glorious moments, I forget that he is a ghost. He feels so real, his lips searing hot against mine. The way he makes me feel – that’s more real than anything. This needy ache drops through my body, right into my toes.
But then, his fingers curl into my hair. They accidentally slip through my skull. The heat of itburns, and I experience a flash of memory from inside Edward’s head – his father, the king, red-faced and yelling at him in front of a room filled with courtiers. The ache in my belly becomes a churning sickness, a gnawing, twisting shame.
Edward pulls back. He fixes his too-perfect features into a mask of mirth. I wonder what he saw in my memories.
“I am sorry,” he says, his lips the perfect poet’s pout. “I cannot even kiss you without taking more from you than I have to give. I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve you.”
“You will always be enough for me, just as you are.” I reach for him, but he steps away.
“I cannot. Not tonight.”
