Chapter 25 Selene #4
He buried his face in the bend of my neck and breathed in my smell.
I almost groaned from the pain of his crushing grip as I fought with myself, fought the part of me that wanted to give in.
I didn’t want to do it, not now; it would be too humiliating after what he’d just told me, after everything he’d done.
I wanted to be better than I was before. Stronger. I needed to learn how to love myself as well. But then a tear rolled down my cheek, and the urge to kiss him, to taste his lips, began to build inside me.
No, dammit.
I didn’t have to do it. I couldn’t do it.
“Outside, Megan kissed you. I saw it,” I said brokenly, pulling away from him. Neil stared intensely at me, his hands still clinging to my body, digging in like claws that wanted to keep marking me.
“It’s not what you’re thinking. We have this connection that I can’t explain, but that’s it,” he answered uncertainly, as though searching for the right words. I stepped back; I would have rather heard that she was just another fling for him, but I’d known all along that wasn’t the case.
“Are you in love with her?” I asked him directly. His eyebrows shot up in surprise, like I’d said the most ridiculous thing in the world to him.
“Fuck no! Absolutely not!” he blurted out immediately, not even thinking about it. There wasn’t an ounce of hesitation in him, and that did reassure me a bit.
Then, his eyes drifted back down to my mouth, and I realized what he was about to do.
Did he seriously have the balls to kiss me after all of that?
Neil clearly wasn’t interested in wasting any more time, though, because he bent his head and grazed my lips with his own. When he felt my tacit agreement, he kissed me fully.
He did it so slowly, so delicately, that it actually hurt me. A pain I couldn’t name or describe suffused my chest as if to remind me how it had been without him and how I’d never be able to forget him.
My fingers splayed out on his chest, creeping down to his abdomen. He clasped the nape of my neck possessively to pull me closer to him, but he didn’t go overboard. He wasn’t demanding anything.
It was a gentle kiss but a powerful one as well.
Neil had become my whole world.
I breathed through him; I fed myself on him.
His absence had made me sick and nearly drove me insane. There was no cure for the devastating kind of love I had for him.
“You should rest,” he said firmly after a little while, breaking the kiss.
I immediately felt the loss of his lips.
He was surely stifling his own desires because I was hurting, but if he’d tried to make love with me right then, I would have given in.
I would have let him peel away every reasonable thought I had and sink down deep into my soul once again.
But my body was in no shape to keep up with him.
Fortunately, he had some common sense even if I didn’t.
“Yeah…” was all I said, my cheeks aflame. I felt like I was burning up, and I wasn’t at all sure it was just the fever. Neil slowly guided me back down on to the bed. I kicked off my shoes this time and slipped beneath the blankets to cover myself.
He sat down beside me.
He arranged the blankets over me, revealing a sweetness that I hadn’t seen in him before except with his siblings.
“You worried about me now? Surprising…” I bit my tongue, but it was too late; his eyes moved from the blankets back to my face, and I was embarrassed by the dumb comment.
He just gave me a small yet head-spinning smile and didn’t say another word.
Then his stare turned blatant, delighted by my spreading blush.
I held his gaze, sucking in a breath when he laid a hand across my forehead.
“You’re sick. I’ll stay with you until the fever breaks.”
An odd warmth spread through my chest at all the attention he was giving me. It was a kind of tenderness he’d never shown me before. His big hand felt cool against my overheated skin, immediately soothing.
“Tomorrow you’ll have a fever too if you stay close to me. You just kissed me,” I mumbled, blushing again when he gave me a cheeky smile.
“Don’t care. I’d die for a kiss from you,” he answered sincerely, and there wasn’t even a flicker of mockery in his eyes.
My heart did somersaults in surprise.
Did he really just say that?
Or had the fever started burning off brain cells?
I didn’t say anything in response, just snuggled down under the blankets and rested my head on the pillow, seeking some sort of respite for my worn-out body.
The clean softness of the material all around me had my eyelids drooping.
I tried to ignore the chills that made me shiver constantly.
I fell asleep once again, but nightmares troubled me, made me mumble nonsensically.
I woke up a few hours later and looked around for Neil, but I couldn’t find him.
Did he leave already?
The room had been swallowed up by darkness, with only a hint of light coming in through the window. It was enough, however, to see that I was alone. I didn’t move; I held still and tried to endure the throbbing pain in my head.
“Neil?” I called out in distress after a few moments.
I calmed down when I heard footsteps heading toward me and then the sound of blankets being pulled aside as someone got into the bed with me.
I felt his breath on my face and his hard chest pressed against me.
He wrapped an arm around my waist and drew me to him.
“I’m right there, Tinkerbell,” he said in a gentle whisper. He held my icy hand in his to warm it up.
“I’m…going to die…” My head hurt so bad, and my eyes were struggling to perceive the world correctly, so I narrowed them as I curled up against him. My body shook all over, and Neil wrapped me in a tight, protective hold.
“No, Babygirl, you’re not going to die. You just have a very high fever,” he answered in a soothing tone, but I still wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t a figment of my imagination.
Did he really stay with me? Or was I still dreaming?
“But what if I am dying, though?” I said in a barely lucid mumble as I relaxed against his powerful body.
“Then I’d die with you,” he answered immediately, a strange certitude in his voice.
“Like Romeo and Juliet?” I insisted. I was genuinely delirious at that point, and he was patiently indulging my nonsensical rambling.
“Yeah, just like them,” he answered, sounding amused.
“But…” I closed my eyes completely, trying to string a thought together. “No, dammit…we’re Tinkerbell and Peter Pan. I finished the book, you know. Peter chooses Wendy in the end,” I went on, making myself sad. I might have started crying again.
Neil drew his nose along my neck and gave a satisfied grunt as he breathed in my scent.
There was no ulterior motive in the movement.
He was just cuddling with me, holding me in his arms. I tried to relax and enjoy the little zaps of pleasure I felt all down my spine.
His stubble was almost ticklish against my skin.
“Mhm…so Peter was a real asshole, then? What happened to Tinkerbell?” he whispered in my ear before nibbling on the lobe and slowly laving it with his tongue. He wouldn’t have been Neil if he didn’t try to slip in a little seduction even in a moment like that.
“I… I don’t know…” I said, trying to remember. Even with the human disaster right there next to me, I found my eyelids shutting once again as sleep overtook me.
I spent the night like that, grasping on to him as I was tossed between overwhelming heat and icy chills. My heart raced, and it got hard to separate my sleeping world from the waking one.
I was babbling all kinds of nonsense, most frequently Neil’s name.
My breathing was rapid, and I groaned constantly at the ache in my head that wouldn’t go away.
I tossed and turned, kicking aside the covers before plastering myself against him.
I clutched his chest when I dreamed that he was leaving with Megan and was only able to relax when he spoke to me soothingly, assuring me that he was still there and wasn’t going anywhere else.
“Neil…no…no…” I babbled at one point, my body jerking but my eyes still closed. I clasped his arm in my sweaty grasp, seeking his protection.
“I’m right here. I brought you some medicine.
Take it and your fever should start to go down.
You’re going to feel better.” His voice sounded far away, but I could still hear it.
His face was semi-obscured in the dim half-light of the room, but I could see just enough to know that he was beside me, trying to soothe me.
He dropped a delicate kiss on my forehead, then the tip of my nose, and then my lips.
“You’re going to feel better, Babygirl,” he repeated against my mouth.
I smiled, but it was so small he probably couldn’t make it out in the darkness.
Nevertheless, he smothered it in a possessive kiss.
His lips were cold or maybe mine were just so hot—either way, it was the best feeling in the world, having his mouth on mine again.
He pulled back way too soon, and I grunted out a protest. His mouth was a temptation that I couldn’t resist, not even when I was sick. I told him that and heard him chuckle.
“Still the same Babygirl.” He pushed my hair aside and gently rubbed the back of my neck, trying to relieve some of the soreness in my body, the exhaustion that had seeped into my muscles and bones.
His touch apparently had magical properties because I sighed, contented, and inched closer to him.
This time, I buried my nose in his chest and breathed in his masculine, sensual smell.
Maybe I told him that because he answered me with, “Now’s not the time to be thinking about that, Tigress. Be good…”
Neil Miller telling me to be less horny? I laughed until I fell asleep in his arms.
When I woke up, I finally felt better.