37. Piper Under the Oak Tree
Chapter thirty-seven
Piper Under the Oak Tree
The apple slips from my fingers at the jolt his hand creates in me. Tristan is looking at me the way he does when the careful gentleman mask slips — like he's forgotten every polite thing he's ever learned in centuries and is remembering something older. Something hungrier.
The blanket smells like cedar and something herbal. The brook murmurs behind us, water sliding over pebbles with a sound like scattered glass, and the oak's canopy throws down coins of gold light that shift and recombine across the blanket, across his hands, across the riding jacket he's wearing.
"You dropped your apple," he says. His voice is that low, unhurried Scottish burr, each vowel rounded like river stone.
"I know." I tuck a loose strand of auburn hair behind my ear.
He doesn't pick up the apple. Instead, he shifts on the blanket, and the space between us shrinks to nothing. I smell him — that scent I can never place properly, not cologne, not soap, something darker and cleaner, like the inside of a stone chapel where candles have been burning for hours.
"Piper." The way he says my name, almost breathless, is like he's tasting it. Like the word has weight in his mouth.
His face is close. Close enough that I can see the texture of his full lips.
“You beguile me, Piper.”
My heart does something complicated. A tightening, a quickening.
Maybe not my heart, exactly, but the muscles between my ribs.
They pull taut the way they do when I'm standing at the top of a ladder about to step onto the rung, that half-second where my body knows what's coming before my brain commits.
I think about what I saw in the stables.
I don't want to, but the memory surfaces like water finding its level — Justin's head turned, Tristan's mouth on his wrist, the wet sound of swallowing, the blood, the way Tristan's eyes had been open and black and utterly vacant, the way they'd snapped to me in the doorway, pinned like a butterfly under glass. I’d run.
And now I'm sitting on a blanket under an oak tree, and his mouth is three inches from mine, and I haven't run.
"Tristan." I say his name back. It comes out quieter than I intend, rougher, the consonants catching in my throat.
His hand moves. The signet ring on his right hand catches the light — the day ring, I know that now, an ornate ring with a dark stone, the thing that lets him walk in sunlight without burning. He holds the apple up and examines it with exaggerated seriousness.
"Granny Smith," he says. "Tart. You always choose the tart ones."
"I like things that have a bite to them."
His eyes flick to mine. The silver flecks contract, and something darker bleeds in at the edges of his irises. He holds the apple out to me, and I take it.
I bite the apple. Tart juice floods my tongue, and I watch him watch my mouth, watch the way his throat moves as I chew, and I think: he's hungry. Not for the apple. Not for food at all.
I set the apple down on the flat stone beside the blanket. I don't look at it again.
"Come here," he says. It’s not a command. It’s a request shaped like one, the words careful, the old-world courtesy holding the want in check like a bridle holds a horse.
I don't move closer. I stay exactly where I am, three inches away, and I watch his composure fracture in stages — the slight flare of his nostrils, the tension in his jaw, the way his fingers curl slowly into the blanket.
He's holding himself back. I can see the effort of it.
Something about watching this powerful, ancient, dangerous thing strain against its own leash makes my breath come shallow and my skin prickle with a heat that has nothing to do with the afternoon sun.
"Piper." My name again, and this time there's an edge to it, a rawness.
I close the distance.
My lips meet his. The first thing I note is they are cool and thick and plump.
Then I notice the taste, faintly metallic, like old pennies, like the air before a thunderstorm.
He doesn't move for one full second, and I feel the stillness in him, the absolute control, the way he's letting me set the pace.
Then his hand comes up. His fingers slide into the hair at the nape of my neck, and the touch is so gentle it's almost not there — just the graze of fingertips against the fine hairs, the lightest pressure, like he's asking permission with every nerve ending.
I make a sound against his mouth, not a word, not quite a moan, something between — a vibration, a hum, an involuntary response that I feel in my own lips before I hear it in the air.
He deepens the kiss. His other hand finds my waist, and his palm settles there, broad and sure, fingers curving over my hip bone.
I can feel each individual finger as they map the geography of my body with the precision of someone who has had centuries to learn how to touch.
His mouth opens against mine, and his tongue finds the seam of my lips and traces it, not pushing in, just outlining, and my lips part on their own, a reflex, a door swinging open because the lock was never really locked.
His tongue touches mine, and the feel of it sends a jolt through me that lands low in my belly, a contraction of muscle that I feel in my inner thighs. I push into him, my hands finding the lapels of his riding jack.
He makes a sound. Low, deep in his chest, a vibration I feel through his sternum against my palms. It's older than a moan, more elemental, like the sound a large animal makes when it's been caged and the door finally opens.
His hand tilts my head back, and the kiss changes angle and deepens it.
His tongue slides against mine with a slow, deliberate rhythm that makes my hips shift on the blanket, makes my thighs press together, makes the seam of my pants press against flesh that's swelling and warm and aching.
I pull back an inch. My lips are wet, swollen and tingling. His eyes are open, and they're not grey anymore. The black has bled in from the edges and consumed the silver, but I'm not afraid.
I don't do the safe thing.
My fingers find his cheekbone, that high, sharp ridge that could cut paper, and I trace it with my thumb. His skin is smooth — unnaturally smooth, like polished marble, like the surface of an egg with no imperfections.
Beneath the cool surface, I feel something. A hum. A vibration. Like there's a current running through him, something electrical, something that my own body recognizes and responds to the way a tuning fork recognizes its note.
He turns his face into my palm. His eyes close, and his lips press against the heel of my hand —more like a vow, a mouth making a promise to a piece of skin.
"You're warm," he murmurs against my palm.
The hand on my waist slides to the small of my back, and the pressure pulls me forward until my chest is flush against his.
I tilt my head and kiss the corner of his mouth, and I feel the muscle there twitch under my touch.
He’s perfectly still. I kiss the other corner.
I kiss the bow of his upper lip, the full swell of his lower, and each kiss is slow, deliberate, a builder laying bricks, one at a time, with mortar between.
His breath now comes out ragged, and it's cool against my lips, and I realize I'm teasing him — deliberately, carefully, with the same precision I use when I'm stripping paint from old wood, working in small sections, patient, thorough.
His control breaks.
His hand on my back pulls me into him, and his mouth takes mine with a hunger that's been leashed and starved and is finally being fed. His tongue now pushes past my lips, claiming. He kisses me as I drown in it.
My hands find his hair. My lips move down, kissing his jaw, his throat, the place where his collar meets his skin. I feel the lack of pulse under my lips.
I suddenly feel a tenderness so sharp it cuts, a protectiveness that makes no rational sense, because he's the dangerous one, he's the predator, he's the thing with fangs and strength and six centuries of violence.
I'm a woman with paint under her nails and a mortgage, and I want to protect him from the absence of his own heartbeat.
"Tristan," I say against his throat, and I feel his whole body shudder.
His arms tighten around me, and he pulls me down onto the blanket.
I'm on my back and he's above me, propped on one elbow, his dark hair falling forward, his black eyes searching my face with an intensity that makes my ribs ache.
His thumb traces my lower lip, touching me, and the gesture is so intimate, so proprietary, that my breath stutters and my hips arch off the blanket. "You came to me, Piper. After you ran. After your discovery."
"I came back."
His hand slides from my face to my neck, and his fingers curl around the side of my throat. He's savoring the blood that flows there.
He unbuttons my shirt slowly. His fingers slip beneath the fabric, and I feel the cool of them against the swell of my breast. My skin breaks into goosebumps so intense they almost hurt.
He traces the curve of flesh above my bra, and his touch is sensual, careful, the touch of someone handling something he's afraid of breaking.
I want to tell him I'm not breakable, but I don't say anything because his mouth is on my neck and I understand that he can feel my blood moving beneath my skin.
That he hears it, smells it, that the sound of it is as loud to him as the brook is to me, and I feel the danger of it like electricity.
He kisses my throat tenderly which sends a spike of heat through me that lands between my legs.
His thumb now finds my nipple through the lace of my bra. The friction is maddening — not enough, too much, the wrong angle, the right pressure — and I make a sound I don't recognize.
We kiss and caress and roll on the blanket together until the light changes, until the golden coins of sun on the blanket shift and stretch and turn amber.
His hands explore the territory above my clothes — my ribs, my waist, the curve of my hip, the bare skin of my arms where my sleeves are pushed up.
My hands learn the architecture of him — the broad planes of his back through his shirt, the hard ridge of his shoulders, the cool silk of his hair, the strength and size of him.
We don't go further. Not here, not now. We don't need to. The wanting is enough, the ache of it, the slow build, the way each kiss peels back a layer and reveals another one beneath, and I'm falling, falling, and this time I know what he is, and I'm falling anyway.
The brook murmurs. The oak sways. The apple sits on the flat stone, half-eaten, but I don't care about it anymore.
I don't care about anything except his mouth on mine and my hands on his skin and the absence of his heartbeat beneath my palm.
The absence is becoming, against all logic, against all survival instinct, the most comforting silence I've ever known.