23. Chapter 23
Serenity
I don’t know how long it’s been since I came up to my room, but I can’t sleep. I’m not even in bed. I managed to wash, brush my teeth, and pull on a nightdress, and that’s where I stalled.
I get as far as my own door three times before I go through it.
The first two times I sit back down on the end of the bed. The third time I don’t. The corridor is cool when I step out of my room. I keep walking.
I’m actually doing this.
The house is dark, and the fires are down to red. Two floors below me, the drawing room clock is ticking, the one I couldn’t leave alone. I’ve been pacing, awake, listening to it since the guests left.
I go along the gallery past the old paintings. Then the north corridor. Then the door at the end of it.
I tried this door on my second day here. It didn’t give an inch. Yves told me anything locked was storage.
Yves lied to me.
It’s his room. My wolf can scent him in there.
My fingertips trace the wood. My heart is loud. He can hear it from in there. He can always hear it…from across a room, through a wall.
I knock.
The door opens before my hand is back at my side. He’s in the clothes he was wearing at dinner, dark pants, dark shirt with the cuffs turned back. No jacket, no shoes, his hair pushed off his face.
Neither of us speaks for a second.
“You didn’t have to come here,” he says.
“I know. That’s why I did.”
I watch the words sink in. His hand tightens once on the edge of the door before he lets it go.
He steps back and opens the door all the way.
His room isn’t what I built in my head. There’s a wide bed with the covers turned down on one side.
A desk with the papers squared up on it.
Books stacked four deep on the floor beside a chair.
A fire burning low. Heavy curtains across the whole of the far wall, floor to ceiling, and behind them the shutters I already know are there.
On a table by the window there’s a small silver bird in a silver cage.
I go to the bird before I go to him. The cage is cold. The bird’s beak is open, and there’s a keyhole in the base with no key in it.
“This is pretty,” I say, because now that I’m here, I’m not quite sure what to do next. “Does it sing?”
“It did.” He hasn’t moved from the door. “I paid far too much money for it.”
“For a bird that doesn’t work?”
“For a bird that doesn’t work.”
Of course you did.
I turn around. He’s standing there with his hands at his sides, waiting, and I understand that he’s going to keep waiting all night if I let him.
So I cross the floor.
I get his shirt open, button by button, and he doesn’t move while I do it. The side that faced the fire is warm, and he isn’t. My palms press against his chest and hold there. It always surprises me that I never feel a heartbeat, but for some reason that’s starting to feel right.
His hand comes up and covers mine.
My fingers stop working.
He’s sending me back.
He isn’t. He lifts my hand and presses his cool lips to my palm, then looks into my face.
I wait for a word. A sign. Something.
He puts my hand back on his chest, and I can breathe again.
I push the shirt off his shoulders and put my mouth at the base of his throat. He’s cool everywhere, and all I want to do is warm him. My wolf leans right into it, and I don’t say one word to her about it.
He takes my nightgown up over my head and folds it onto the chair. Folds it. Then he turns back and looks at me, naked in front of him, and doesn’t touch me. I stand there and let him, and my face burns the whole time.
“Say something,” I tell him, voice hoarse.
“I’ve had three centuries of words.”
“Use one.”
“No.” He steps into me. “You’d stop believing me.”
“Try me,” I say.
He moves closer, his fingers threading into my hair as he lowers his face to my cheek.
“Tu es envo?tante,” he says against my skin. “You are spellbinding.” His lips move to my ear. “Tu es renversante.” He nips my earlobe. “You are stunning.” His mouth finds my jawline. “Tu es éblouissante.” He slides his cheek against my throat until his lips graze my shoulder. “You are dazzling.”
“Okay,” I choke. “Okay, that’s…that’s convincing.” I’m trembling. No…I’m shaking. When I lift my hand to twine it into his hair, I can see the shudder in it.
He works down my body, in no hurry at all, and when his teeth graze over my nipple, a moan gets out of me before I can catch it. His hand slides down my stomach and stops with his fingers just above where I want them. He leaves them there.
“Bastien.” I don’t recognize my voice.
“Ask me.”
“Please.” Definitely not my voice.
He goes down on his knees. His hands open my thighs. His mouth settles onto my pussy, cool and wet, and what breaks out of me is closer to a sob than a word. His tongue works, slow and patient, steady circles over my clit while my hand closes on the back of his neck.
I’m sure he can feel my pulse through his mouth. He finds the rhythm of it and matches it, and then he goes faster than it, and my knees quit.
He catches my hip with one hand, holds me up, and keeps going.
“Oh… Oh!” My eyes roll back as the sensations build.
His tongue drags over my clit. Two fingers push into me. My hips work against his face without asking my permission, and he lets them; he takes whatever I do, and the heat goes up my spine into the back of my skull. I clutch at his shoulders to stay standing. It’s not working.
“Bastien, I can’t—”
He lifts me. One moment, I’m teetering over him, the next, I’m off the floor, and then he gets me to the bed.
I sit, and he pushes me back, hooks my knees over his shoulders, and puts his mouth on me again.
He stays there until I unravel, both hands twisted in the sheet, my thighs shaking, everything in me pulling tight and then letting go all at once.
“Yes…Yes… Ohhhhh…fuck!” I’ve never been this loud with anyone, but the man has a talent with his tongue that he’s clearly had plenty of practice at.
He straightens up. His mouth is wet with me. He wipes it with the back of his wrist.
“Get your pants off,” I say. Shameless. I’m past caring.
“Is that how it is now?” He’s teasing me.
“Yes,” I say. “You told me I’m the one who decides. I’m deciding.”
He gets his belt open. I’m up on my elbows watching. When his cock comes free, it’s thick and hard and smooth, and I get my hand around it before he’s got the trousers off his ankles.
A rough sound breaks out of him, right at the edge of a groan. His hand grips the bedpost.
“Lie down,” I tell him.
He doesn’t respond straight away.
Then he lies down. He lies down on his own bed because I told him to. Long and lean and toned in all the right places. I’d spend more time admiring him if I wasn’t so impatient to have him inside me. I put one knee on either side of his hips and hold his cock steady and lower myself onto him.
“Ooooohhhh…” I moan. The stretch is enormous. I go slow with it, an inch, then more, my hands on his chest, working him into me while my body figures out how to take that much. He’s cool inside me. I’m slick and hot around him.
His hands come to my hips. They don’t push.
“Serenity.”
“I’ve got it.” I say it through gritted teeth.
I take the rest of him. Then I sit there with him all the way in and don’t move, breathing, my thighs burning, and I look down at his face.
His jaw is locked. There’s a shake running through both his arms. All that experience in him, and he’s trembling under me in his own bed.
“You decide.” His eyes are on me.
I start to move.
I go slow because slow is what I want, and every drag of him inside me hits somewhere deep that the fury against the door never got near. His hands stay on my hips and follow what I do. He lifts to meet me, and I set the pace, and he keeps it.
My hair comes down over my shoulder. He gathers it and puts it back. His knuckles brush my throat on the way, and his fingers stay there a moment on the pulse.
He licks his lips. He wants it. He’s wanted it since I came through that door. But he’s waiting for me to offer.
Something goes through me that has nothing to do with the heat.
I put my hand in his hair. I lean down over him and turn my head and bring my throat to his mouth.
“Take it.”
His teeth go in.
Oh, fuck. Oh—
The flood comes up out of the bite and runs into the heat already climbing, and this time nothing is in its way. No shame to shove it under. It’s just overwhelming, and it goes down to where he’s moving inside me, and the two of them stop being separate things.
I ride him hard. He drinks through it, moaning against my throat with a sound that vibrates in my skin. His hand grips my hip tight enough to leave something in the morning, and I want the mark. My other hand finds his shoulder for balance, and my nails go in.
It hits me and keeps hitting, both of us one thing instead of two, over and over until I can’t think straight.
“Bastien— God, Bastien!” comes out of me before I know I’m saying it. Against my throat he makes a sound I’ve never heard out of him before, rough and low, and his hips drive up and stay there while he comes, mouth sealed to my pulse, drinking.
Then it lets us both go. I sag, feeling the tension leaving him as I sink onto his chest.
His mouth stays on my throat until the punctures seal. I stay where I am, collapsed over him, my forehead on the pillow beside his ear.
My wolf lies down inside me and closes her eyes.
He rolls us and pulls me into his side, and I end up with his arm around my back. He’s got sweat on him. Mine. He hasn’t got any of his own, and he isn’t going to. I rest my hand on his chest and find it dry everywhere I’m not touching him.
“You don’t sweat.”
“No.”
“I’ll need a while to get used to that.”
His hand moves once in my hair. I turn my face into his shoulder and keep it there.
“I didn’t know it could be a thing I chose,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. His hand stays where it is, then slides down over my shoulder. His fingers find the inside of my arm and go up the scars from the wrist. He goes over them one after another, and I let him.
“Over a year,” I say. “Twice a day at the end of it.”
“I know.”
“You haven’t got a single mark on you.”
“No.”
“You’ve lived so long, and nothing touched you.”
He’s quiet long enough that I think that’s the end of it. Then, “No.”
I’m asleep before I work out what he meant.
I wake up cold on one side. The fire’s out. The room is black. It takes me a moment to remember whose bed this is and why my hip hurts.
He’s on his back with one arm out across the sheet. He’s gone. Properly gone. He drank deep and now he’s down somewhere I can’t reach.
My body’s been running on ward hours for a year, and it wants to be up, so I get up. My nightgown is on the chair where he folded it. I put it on and stand in the dark.
There’s a thin gray line along the bottom of the curtains.
Morning. It’s morning out there. My rooms are the only ones that let the light in, and they’re two floors away, and I don’t want to go back to them.
I go to the curtains.
I want to see which way this room faces. I want to know what’s under the window, whether there’s a road, whether there’s a wall. I’ve been exploring this house since the day I got here, and I never got to see this part.
I pull the curtain an inch, then pry the shutters apart a fraction. Light comes through the slats and lands across the sheet, over his right hand.
His skin turns gray. Then it splits.
He groans, low and hoarse, still fast asleep. His whole arm jerks in toward his body. Smoke comes off the back of his hand, thin and pale. The smell of it hits my wolf, and she comes up off the floor of me snarling.
No! No, no—
My hand slams the curtain shut.
I didn’t decide to do that.
I did not!
I’m across the room before I know I’ve moved. His hand has curled in against his chest. I get it in both of mine, and at first I can’t see the damage, then the wolf takes over, and I turn it over and look with her eyes.
A split across the back of it, black at the edges, three inches long.
Oh, my God!
There’s nothing I can do for it. Nothing to clean, nothing to bind that would mean anything on flesh like his. I put his hand down on his chest and pull the sheet up over the whole arm.
He doesn’t wake. He doesn’t do anything at all.
I go back to the window.
I put both hands on the curtains, drag them together, and hold them overlapped.
There’s gray coming through at the bottom where the fabric ends short of the floor.
That tiny sliver that first drew me here.
I get the blanket off the foot of the bed and push it along the hem, all the way from one wall to the other, on my knees, working it into the gap with the heels of my hands.
Then I go along the whole wall with my fingers to find where else it comes through.
Two places. One near the frame, one at the top corner where a hook has come out.
I take his jacket off the chair and wedge it into the first. For the second, I stand on the desk in my bare feet and hook the fabric back over the rail, and the papers he squared up so neatly go off onto the floor, and I leave them there.
When I’m done, there isn’t one line of light in the room.
I get off the desk. My hands are shaking, and I press them together until they stop.
What did you do, Serenity?
What the fuck did you do?
I could have opened it all the way. Stood back. Waited. By the time anybody came up those stairs, it would have been too late.
He had to have known that. All it would take was for me to get those shutters open.
He’s asleep anyway.
I get back into the bed on the window side, between him and the curtains. My hand goes over the cloth on his and stays there.
Behind the shutters, the light keeps coming up. I don’t sleep.