Chapter 22
Chapter
Twenty-Two
The creepy hour, I think distantly, my head full of slow sand, the kind of waking that comes up out of deep sleep in stages, eyes open on their own, brain trailing a few heartbeats behind.
The cottage is cold. That’s the first thing I catch up to. The wood stove I banked before bed shouldn’t be dead yet; the radiator by the wall is on low, and the room isn’t freezing per se, but there’s a current moving through it, the moving kind of cold, the kind with a source.
The second thing is the smell. The bedroom smells of the bay.
I don’t move. I keep my eyes on the ceiling and my breathing level while I work out that the cold is coming in from over to my right, the wall with the wardrobe and the window.
I turn my head slowly toward the corner.
The wardrobe’s there. Ornately-carved, dark, vaguely person-shaped in the dim, the thing my eye has snagged on all these nights and corrected before I freaked myself out. Just the wardrobe, my brain offers, trying to be helpful though it’s tired. Not a person. It’s never a person.
Then my eye keeps going, to the window.
It’s open. Open wide, actually, the curtain pulled inward on the cold, breathing in the darkness outside.
I never opened it.
I closed it before bed, I know I closed it because it was cold out and also I salted the sill heavy hours ago with my own hands.
But now…that salt is broken.
The clean white line I laid is scattered back across the sill in a smear, like a hand went through it. The cold’s coming straight off the loch, through my open window, and I’m working out how the fuck and what the fuck, when the shadow of the wardrobe shifts out of the corner of my eye.
It fucking moves.
Just slightly.
But the wardrobe can’t shift.
The wardrobe’s stood in that corner, not moving for decades, I’m sure. It isn’t the wardrobe that moved, but the dark beside it, the dark in front of it, the vaguely person-shaped dark I’ve dismissed as just a wardrobe…except tonight, when I stare at the shape, it doesn’t resolve into carved oak.
It resolves the other way.
Into my worst fears.
Into a man.
Internally, it’s like all systems stop—my lungs catch, my muscles freeze—while externally I also go still, the stillness that lives below thought, a rabbit hiding in the grass, prey operating on instinct only.
I can only lie in my own bed and look at the corner of my own bedroom where a fucking man is standing in shadow.
The intruder doesn’t move for a bit either.
He’s letting me see him.
Then his face shifts, and his eyes catch the very dim light that comes through the curtains, from the outside security light that’s posted by the front door.
For one beat his eyes are black. Not shadowed, but black. Wet, and depthless, and lightless, the way the loch goes at midnight where the bottom’s never been mapped, two points of nothing at the height a man’s eyes would be, fixed on me.
Then gone. Back to faint hint of glacial blue.
I don’t make a sound. I would if I could, but my throat’s shut in terror.
Then he takes a step toward me, and I gasp, and the floorboard under his foot doesn’t creak the way it should. I’m starting to wonder if he’s really here at all.
He answers me with another silent step, and the shape resolves into Alasdair fully as he comes out of the shadow.
But now I know he’s also the…thing I just saw in the corner.
He takes another step, stopping at the foot of the bed, wet and naked.
I haven’t moved. Haven’t told him to leave, haven’t sat up, haven’t reached for the lamp. I’ve lain here with the quilt to my chin and watched him cross the room toward me and done nothing to stop him. Has this been some kind of test, one that I’m about to spectacularly fail?
He lays his hand on the footboard. No weight on the mattress yet, just his fingers around the wood, and he looks at me down the length of the bed.
He doesn’t speak. He just waits.
The waiting is the worst of it, because the waiting is where I could still send him away.
He’s approached me slowly, like the way a cat comes after a mouse, but also giving me enough time to do the things I need to do.
In the last minute, I could’ve screamed or sat up or said no, but I didn’t, and this last stillness is him showing me he knows I won’t say or do any of that.
He knows me well, and I hate it.
And in this moment, for not stopping him, I hate myself.
He puts a knee on the mattress and the bed dips, and at last I make a sound, not a word, just a small involuntary noise from the back of my throat, because now I know this is real.
He puts the other knee down and moves over me on his hands and knees, slow, so slow, prowling. His face comes out of the dark above mine, eyes very close and blue and looking at me like he’s about to take something from me, rather than give.
He stops with his hands either side of my head, his weight not yet on me, his face six inches from mine, and he draws the quilt down.
Slowly, his hand at the hem, the heavy weight of it coming off my chin and my collarbone, down past my chest, past my hips, to my knees, where he folds it back and leaves it, because he isn’t uncovering all of me yet.
His palm comes to the side of my throat. He doesn’t squeeze, doesn’t hold, just lays his hand where the pulse runs, the way he has before, except now his hand is cold.
I exhale, the noise shockingly loud in the room.
He makes a noise back, a small intake of breath, the smallest acknowledgment, like he needed to know I was fully here and present.
Then his mouth is at my throat where his hand was.
Not biting, just his open mouth against my pulse, breathing me in, taking the scent of me into him slow, his nose at the side of my neck and his lips under my jaw, his breath warm.
He stays there a long time, just…smelling me.
I don’t move.
When he speaks at last it’s so quiet I almost miss it. “Foxglove.”
I make a sound. Then find my voice. “The salt.”
I salted the window; you shouldn’t have been able to get through.
“I know,” he says against my throat. “I know what you did, foxglove. The salt would not have stopped me. You knew that when you laid it.” A pause, his mouth moving on my skin. “You laid it for yourself.”
His hand has moved down between my breasts, the backs of his fingers grazing me through the cotton of my shirt, down the center of me to my stomach, where his palm goes flat. I feel the cold of him through the fabric.
“Lift,” he murmurs.
I don’t ask what he means. My body has its own agenda. My arms come up on their own accord, and he takes the hem in both hands, drawing the shirt up my body, the cotton dragging over my hips and breasts and collarbone. Once it’s over my head, he lets it drop off the side of the bed.
I’m naked under him, the cold blowing over me, making my skin tight and goosefleshed.
He looks at me. It’s too dark to read his face well, but I can read the rest, the way he goes still over me, the way his weight settles, the way his breath catches.
“You’re mine now,” he rasps. “You always have been.”
I don’t speak; I can’t.
He puts his mouth on me, starting at my collarbone and working down my breast, my ribs, my stomach, the inside of my hip, then the soft place between my hipbones, an open kiss there, long, his tongue in it, and I can’t help but groan.
His hands push my thighs apart, slow, unhurried, and then he goes down on me like he has all the time in the world, like he’s made time stand still for as long as he’s in this room.
Who knows, maybe he has? At this point I’ll believe anything.
The first stroke of his tongue is flat and slow and I moan loudly in response.
As his mouth works, he places a hand under me to lift my hips, his other arm hooked around my thigh to hold me open.
The cold of him shocks my skin, and somehow it isn’t unwelcome, somehow it’s exactly the temperature I want him, because I’m rising fast and hot—faster than I should—all the waiting and all the dread coming out of me at once.
Then my breathe catches.
I can feel his teeth.
They’re at my inner thigh, and they’re not the teeth he had before, not the teeth any man has—longer at the canines, narrower—and when he closes them on the soft skin there, they catch.
He doesn’t quite break the skin though, he stops just before, holds his teeth there, lets me feel it.
I feel it. Oh, I fucking feel it.
And I’ve never been so turned on and terrified in all my life.
He lifts his mouth and looks up the length of me, his mouth wet, his face shadowed so I can’t see his teeth now, can’t tell if they’ve changed.
He says nothing, just stares with an intensity that makes the back of my neck prickle, that makes my clit throb, my fight-or-flight fully activated, except it’s more like fuck-or-flight.
He puts his mouth back on me, his teeth are blunt again. Or I imagine they are. Or I’m past the point of telling what I imagine and what’s real.
I come with one hand fisted in his thick, damp hair and the other at my own mouth, biting my knuckle against the sound trying to get out of me, because everything feels too quiet, like the sound might wake me up from this beautiful nightmare.
My orgasm crashes through me long and hard, leaving me wrecked under him.
He moves up my body the way he came down it—hipbone, stomach, ribs, breast, collarbone—and kisses my mouth.
His tongue tastes of me and something with the faintest metal in it, like water that’s sat too long in old pipes.
I don’t pull back. He kisses me long, and open, and wet, with his hand between my legs again—two fingers in me now—working me slowly where I’m nearly too sensitive.
He pulls back to look at me.
His eyes are fully black again.
The iris gone, swallowed, no center to them anymore, just the wet, lightless black of deep water with no sun to give it a color, and he doesn’t blink it away this time.
I look at him. He looks back.