Chapter 36
I wasn’t looking, of course.
Not deliberately, at least. Bath or no, it was true that he had been an utter shit to me.
He’d just been forced to relive what was probably one of the worst days of his life, too, even if he seemed resolved to deny the fact; as long as I hadn’t figured out what to do with that, gawking at his naked presence seemed both discourteous and rather embarrassing.
All the same, it was close to impossible not to catch glimpses from the corner of my eye as he stripped naked – long, wiry limbs, coiled, slender muscle.
Those hell-cursed scars, scattered across his arms and torso, reflecting the golden glow of the fire as he moved towards the edge of the basin and knelt there.
‘Warm enough?’ I asked, pointedly busying myself in another direction with finding our towels.
‘Quite.’ There was a soft splash as he slid in. ‘Almost as if someone recently heated a volcano to its bursting point nearby.’
I huffed a laugh despite myself and chucked the first towel in the general direction of the pool.
His gaze prickled on the back of my neck as I went on rummaging in the next bag, but he didn’t speak until I turned towards him again, careful not to let my eyes stray down.
Only his head and shoulders rose above the water. The rest of him …
I probably shouldn’t be thinking about the rest of him.
‘If you …’ His voice was a fraction strangled as he leaned back against the far side of the basin, steam curling around him. ‘If you’d like to have a wash, you can come in, of course. Happy to look the other way, if you prefer.’
Yes, please, I should have said.
How very considerate of you, I should have said.
Instead …
Instead, I looked at him. Truly looked at him, for the first time since we’d returned to the cave.
Saw the tension in his jaw, the burnished purple of his hair.
The eyepatch he wore even in the water, hiding the scar beneath.
And more than anything, the look that simmered in his remaining eye – a darkness that was half warning to stay the hell away from him, half plea to come closer, closer, closer.
He’d risked his own life to save mine tonight. That was an undeniable truth. He’d brought back my knives. He’d called me a woman whose boots Belloc wasn’t worthy of crawling beneath.
He’d also gone out of his way to hurt me when I’d come too close to liking him, but everything considered, I began to suspect that might have been a lie.
I slowly said, ‘And what would you prefer?’
He stiffened. ‘Thraga.’
‘It’s a question. Not a request.’ I knelt and untied my boots, kicked them aside, flung my socks after them. Taking off my knives, I added, ‘Tell me to go to hell if that’s how you truly feel, but don’t you dare lie to protect me from myself. You ought to be better than that.’
He didn’t speak as I carefully put my knives away in a safe corner of the cave.
Didn’t speak as I dragged my ruined tunic over my head and dropped it onto the floor, then began untangling my mud- and ash-stained hair.
But when I shook out the strands and looked up, an eternity later, he hadn’t moved. He hadn’t averted his eye.
I waited.
‘Feel equally free to tell me to go to hell,’ he said, voice just a little rough. ‘But if you insist on the truth – I could watch you for days and still not see enough of you.’
Goosebumps trickled down my neck, my arms.
I lowered my hands without another word and began stripping off my trousers.
My clothes were torn and muddy. I had been travelling for ages; I probably smelled of sweat and horse and mortal fear.
But the weight of a single purple-flecked eye clung to my every move as I bared my scarred, scrawny legs, and under that intoxicating scrutiny, I couldn’t be bothered to cower. I couldn’t be bothered to hide.
I stepped out of my trousers and drawers. Bunched up my undershirt. Pulled the white linen over my head.
Stood.
Naked.
And still Durlain watched me.
Neither of us spoke as I lowered myself into the basin – hot water lapping against my calves, my thighs, my hips.
But his eye followed every step, drank in every grubby, sinewy inch of me …
and when I was done scrubbing my face and rinsing my hair and finally settled myself against the smooth side of the cave and met his gaze, I knew he saw the question on my face.
‘More truth?’ he said, sounding resigned.
‘Yes.’ I inhaled deeply, sucking the warm steam into my lungs. ‘And no protecting me.’
Again he paused, face a study in shadows.
Around him, the water was nearly entirely still – still enough to distinguish the cold, white lines of his scars beneath the surface, the curve of a hip, the length of his legs.
The half-hard weight of his cock – caught somewhere in the twilight between restraint and desire.
‘I’m frightened,’ he said out of nowhere, voice carefully level.
‘Panicking, quite possibly. I don’t do sentimentality, you understand.
I don’t do impulsive desires and ill-considered choices.
Self-restraint is what’s kept me mostly alive in all these years – and then you walked in and started pointing knives at me, and now there seems to be nothing left of me except impulsive desires and ill-considered choices. ’
‘Technically speaking,’ I muttered, because the alternative was actually responding to any of that, ‘you were the one who walked in.’
His glare was as murderous as any he’d ever sent me – yet at the corner of his lips, a tiny tremble didn’t manage to stifle itself. ‘I was shoved. And that wasn’t the point.’
No.
No, it really wasn’t.
But he was standing two feet away from me, the both of us naked, in a steaming hot bath.
I had almost died. I’d seen a man killed twice before my eyes.
I’d believed myself alone and had been wrong, I was hurting and exhausted, and Durlain Averre could watch me for days and still not see enough of me.
It might be a terrible idea to see the point, or it might be the best idea I’d ever had.
‘What you’re saying’ – my voice was a fraction hoarse – ‘is that you lost your nerve and pushed me away as hard as you could, because the alternative was giving in to what you want, and if you give in to what you want, you feel like you might die.’
He averted his gaze, horns glistening in the firelight, eye very, very dark. ‘That about sums it up, yes.’
‘So should I walk away now – get out of this bath without touching you, sleep on the other side of the fire? Is that what you’d prefer?’
‘No.’ It came out fast, almost urgent. ‘No, it’s not.
Hell have mercy on me, Thraga – do you want the truth?
Wanting you feels like I’m hurtling straight towards my second death, and I can’t even care anymore.
I don’t fucking care – because the moment you stormed out of here, I realised that pushing you away makes me feel like I am already dead. ’
It hung suspended in the steam between us.
He didn’t move. Neither did I – as if the slightest shift might shatter whatever fragile thing was forming between us in the firelit dark, in this secret little hideaway at the edge of the world.
My body felt hotter than the water. Hotter than the molten rock that had spilled from the volcano above.
I was falling.
I was free.
‘So what,’ I said carefully, ‘are you waiting for, exactly?’
He made a small, pained noise … and then he was moving.
I had maybe a quarter of a second to brace myself before he closed the distance in one fluid motion, one hand pressing me back against the stone, the other locking behind my nape to drag me closer.
Water sloshed around us. Steam whirled furiously.
I caught one last glimpse of his face, his raw, ravenous expression – and his lips crashed against mine.
I stopped thinking.
He kissed me with a hunger that bordered on despair, tasting of blood and berry cake, of bottled-up need.
Tongue and teeth. Biting, sucking. I clawed my nails into his back and felt his moan shudder all the way down his spine; he pressed me harder against the wall of the cave, fingers tangling in my hair, his skin hot and slick on mine.
The hard ridges of his scars were as warm as the water.
I traced one down his shoulder blade, and he hissed against my lips as if in pain.
I pulled away, gasping for breath. ‘Not good?’
‘Not sure. Sensitive.’ He seemed equally lost for air, pale cheeks flushed with heat, eye a fraction wide as he searched my face. ‘Thraga …’
‘Don’t say this is a terrible idea,’ I warned him.
‘It is a terrible idea.’
‘Doesn’t feel like it.’
‘No,’ he said roughly, hand tightening in my wet hair, tilting back my head.
He was so gloriously tall. Locking me against the dark stone with his arms and his body, eclipsing all of the firelit cave behind him – yet another cage, but this one I’d chosen.
‘It doesn’t. Which makes it all the more dangerous. ’
But his cock lay hard and hungry against my stomach – no more doubts, no more self-restraint. His breath was shallow on my face. And mists take me, the expression on his face …
Hollow. Haunted. The look of a man who’d seen hell and needed to remember what he’d come back for.
A slow, dizzying thrill shivered through me.
‘I’m beginning to think I like dangerous things,’ I breathed.
‘Then we’re both doomed,’ he said, voice low, and kissed me again.
It was slower this time, and more deliberate – not so much gentle but rather methodical, in the most unbearable of ways.
He was teasing, testing. Learning the shape of me with every brush and twitch, building the slow, torturous anticipation of something that never came …
until I could no longer stand the persistent sense of almost-but-not-yet and bit down viciously on his bottom lip, hoping that would shake the frenzy back into him.
It didn’t.