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Cupping my jaw with one hand, he traces down my chin with his thumb, roving down the column of my neck with heaving breaths that heavy the lower he strokes.
“Everything is always so black and white. Do and get done. Not you though. You’re an unbelievably stunning melange of colours that bleed into everything.”
Sitting back on his heels, Freddie trails all the way down to my hips before he lifts my legs up to his chest and tugs my skirt off. While he takes my trainers and ankle socks off, he continues. “You’re my sole focus, and it makes it so hard to see everything else for what it is because all I’ve wanted to do is protect you from all this pain. Not because you don’t belong…”
He trails soft kisses over the inside of one ankle and then the other while he massages my feet with his hands.
God, it feels so damn good that I can barely make sense of what he’s telling me as he continues kissing down my legs, hands following the trail of his lips.
“I wanted to keep you on the outside so that you could never be used in this war,” Freddie murmurs over the top of my lacy knickers.
Every inch of my skin is burning for him. For his touch and his kisses. I’m burning and aching desperately for more of him. To feel him in every part of me, inside and out. I need to feel his crushing weight and to be so overwhelmed by him that everything else ceases to exist.
“You are so much more than a pawn, Georgina,” he breathes over my skin, laving the light bruise the seat belt left on my chest. Large hands grasp the back of my knees and hook my legs over his hips. Once my feet are crossed at his arse, Freddie settles above me, braced on his forearms while he holds my gaze with his. “You’re more than a mere pretty picture, Swan. You’re mine. All mine.”
Hope and light unfurl deep in my chest as he smiles down at me, blooming into something I’ve never felt, that surpasses everything I ever thought I could feel. A deep-set yearning that is astronomical. So much bigger than me. So much greater than any other want or wish.
“You make me feel,” he says.
The words are a soft rumble in the breeze as his body lowers to mine and his weight encases me completely. Crushing and sublime, it squeezes all the air from me so that my insides scorch as fiercely as my skin. The roots of my hair pinch as his fingers comb and tug through it.
“I’ve never felt someone else’s suffering before. I can see it, and I know it’s there by logic…rationale. But you…you…” His breath hitches as my hands pull at his shirt and slip beneath it, flattening to the pronounced curve of his back while his gaping mouth ghosts over mine. “I feel you. Your thoughts and all your emotions. I feel every part of you, and it’s why…it’s why I love you.”
My heart gongs at the sound of the promise from his lips because that’s exactly how he says it. Every time, no matter the context. Those words are always a promise. It’s not a mere feeling or emotion—from him it’s an eternity of moments and memories and a lifetime of me and him. A never-ending forever that echoes through me.
“You are not nobody. You are never on your own. You are my heart, the best part of me. I feel what you feel, and you feel so much. Georgina, you feel everything deep and in a way that opens up the world to me.” Blue steel eyes gloss over with a consuming awe that obliterates me, and as his gaze swims with the same amazement and sensation broiling inside me, I lift myself to close the gap between our mouths.
While his hands cup the back of my head as we devour each other’s breaths, I cup his face with one of my hands while holding as tight as I can with the other.
I love him. I love him beyond reason. I love him beyond logic. He’s all I’ll ever need. Everything I’ve ever wanted without even knowing.
“You are not simply light and colour that brings everything to life. You are a magnificent wonder. My entire world, strong and fierce, and because of that you will always have another dawn. Even in your hopelessness there is always fire, and as impossible as it may seem right now, you will survive.”
“I will…?”
“You will, Swan.” Between kisses, he repeats, “You will.”
Licking into my mouth, he sits back on his heels while I grasp his face in my hands, and he unbuttons his shirt. He’s so agile; every move he makes is purposeful and sure. So sure that when he pushes to his feet, his momentum takes me with him. I’m on the tips of my toes as I kiss him, holding on to him with my fingers wound in his hair while he unbuckles his belt and kicks off his shoes before pushing his trousers and boxers down his thighs. Using his feet, he pushes them down to his ankles and kicks them to the side.
Hands grasp my arse, kneading as he trails them to my hips and hooks his thumbs into the top of my underwear. It’s been so fucking long that the graze of his thumbnail on my sensitive flesh is enough to make my entire body convulse in his hold. Rolling my thong down my thighs, he lifts me off my feet with his forearm under the curve of my bum.
Teeth nip at my lip as he takes complete control and slowly drags my bralette up my chest, only breaking our kiss to pull it off me. And as he stands looking at me with a part-sad and part-frustrated expression on his face, my eyes go to the bullet wound on his arm and then the side of his chest.
“I could’ve lost you too,” I whisper, trailing my fingers lightly from one wound to another.
The air whispers around us in the trees at a distance and the foliage clinging to every surface around us. Slowly, he spins me around with the tips of my toes balancing on the top of his feet. The mossy scent of the water along with the perfume of the seeping leaves envelops us, and all I can feel is relief that he is here. I am here. We’re here together. It could’ve been so different.
“There was a long moment where I thought I’d lost you, and if I had…”
“You didn’t and you won’t.” Freddie spins again, and it’s now that I realise he’s dancing with me. He’s holding on to my dream when all I’ve thought about the last few days is walking away. It’s what makes him the only man I can ever love. The only soul that I will ever be a part of. “You’re my swan, Georgina. Do you know what that means?”
“You think I’m pretty.”
A low chuckle rumbles from him as though I couldn’t be more wrong. “You’re not pretty—you’re staggeringly gorgeous. Exquisite. But that’s not why you’re my swan. Or because I think you’re graceful. Not because I love to watch you dance.”
Pulling back, he stops by the edge of the water, arms banded around me while I try to decipher what he means. All this time I assumed he called me swan because of the ballet. I can’t quite remember the first time he called me that. A part of me wants to believe that it’s what he’s always called me because the way he’s looking at me right now makes it seem like it’s something monumental.
“A swan’s love is of a lifetime. It’s a tie that not even death can sever.” With a deep inhale, he leans over me, hands splaying across my shoulder blades as my body bows to his. “I meant it when I told you I don’t do love. It’s not how I’m built. It’s not in my nature, or at least it wasn’t until you. I obsess over things and people because I am a firm believer in integrity. That means that I will stop at nothing for the people I let in, something that I don’t do easily. I don’t have friends, I have family. Anything or anyone outside of that is background noise.”
