10. Aftermath and Atonement #3
It was born of rage and fueled by revenge.
It made no sense, yet it felt like redemption when she pressed her mouth against his and he gave in.
Oh yes, he gave in as soon as they touched, his arms banding around her, pulling her up as he dipped down to dedicate himself fully to the folly Guin had started.
She opened her mouth and his tongue met hers. She was wild with rage and grief and something else. No room for thought. No words would make any of this right. So she kissed him to teach him, to punish him. And he took punishment as if he craved it.
When she jumped, he caught her. When she wrapped her legs around his hips, he carried her. When he sat on the edge of her bed, she continued kissing him, biting his bottom lip until he hissed. A teeth-clashing kiss with needy hands as her skirts pooled around their bodies.
He ripped away from her. “Wait.” The word came out as a breath, raw and hopeless.
Good.
“No.” She kissed him so hard he fell backward onto the bed. Her hands pressed into the mattress on either side of his head, she said, “You wanted to kiss me.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t. Because I would know.”
He turned his head, gave her his profile.
“Look at me!”
He did.
“Kiss me.”
The bed’s canopy draped them in shadows, and as what remained of his glamour drained away in the dark, she saw two things in his green eyes.
Sorrow.
Lust.
Then she heard the wailing of her own heart. She moved to stand, to command him to leave. But the smallest slide of her body toward the floor jolted him into action.
He kissed her, wrapping his hand around the back of her neck and dragging her back down to him. Being mastered by him was what she’d always thought it would be—heady perfection. But it was tainted too.
He rolled her until her back was on the bed, but he didn’t roll on top of her. He melted to his knees between her legs and laid his head in her lap. “Forgive me.”
She sat upright. “No.”
“Please forgive me.”
“Never.”
He lifted his face to her, and his green eyes had the whole of the ocean in them. “Then let me make amends.”
“You can try,” she sneered, tightening her fist in his hair and jerking his head higher. “I do not think you’ll succeed, though.”
He licked his lips. “I’m an optimistic fellow.”
She released him, crossing her arms over her chest.
And holding her gaze, he wrapped his hands around her hem and lifted.
“What are you doing?”
“Atonement.”
“I don’t think that’s found beneath a petticoat.”
The corner of his lip lifted. “We’ll see.”
His hands found her thighs and settled there like brands. The outline of them would greet her next she took a bath, an eternal reminder of strong fingers digging into soft flesh.
He bent at the neck, as if offering her a chance to guillotine him, but when he placed a chaste kiss on the inside of her thigh, all thought of blades and blood flashed out of existence.
Not just one kiss. A hundred. A thousand little kisses in a hot line up her leg until his breath washed across her sex, washed whatever objections she might have formed away.
With one long, slow lick, she forgot everything but what might come next. She tangled her hands in his hair again, this time needing to urge him closer instead of punishing him.
And he knew exactly what she wanted, running his hands up her outer thighs until they spanned her hips, his thumbs seeking into her curls.
“Oh,” she moaned because he wasn’t seeking any longer. In short order, he’d found that tight little bud she’d circled on frustrated nights when she craved a lover but wouldn’t take one.
Too loyal to her lying arse of a husband. All that lost pleasure.
“Your fault,” she said, tightening her hand in his hair.
He hissed in pain then nipped her inner thigh with his teeth. Then he set his thumb to work circling better than she ever could, and he was kissing her, tasting her, building a painful pleasure across every inch of her body.
Yes, his fault.
That why he owed her this moment. For everything he’d denied her. For every lie. He owed her for every lover she’d not taken.
She rolled her hips, encouraging more, and more he gave, knowing like magic exactly what she needed and when, as if the shadows collected around them read her mind and whispered in his ear.
He stroked and licked, dipping tongue and fingers into her, curling them as he pulled them out, leaving her quivering and speechless and so close to shattering.
Her hand in his hair became a lifeline, her only means of remaining upright, and it was not trust that pushed her into release, that fine, pure understanding that someone—the same person winding you tightly with such sweet and frantic tenderness—would catch you after falling.
It was sorrow.
She cried out with her climax. She cried. And she released his hair and felt the silken strands fall away as she fell backward to the mattress.
He whispered curses against her flesh as he rested his forehead on her inner thigh. His lips lingered there in a long and contrite kiss.
Then he left her in nothing but the cold shadows and her own warm breaths, her mind a wailing muddle.
She heard the water turn on in the bathing chamber, and then his footsteps, so she opened her eyes to see the heavy outline of him lumber her way across the room.
“Sit up,” he said, and she did, wiping tears from her cheeks and hugging herself, rebuilding her walls as he loosened the fastenings of her gown, her corset.
All of it gone so quickly. When she wore only her shift, he lifted her and carried her like a child to the bathing chamber, set her into the tub and set a hand on its copper side until it glowed, until a light steam lifted off the water.
She removed her shift and sat, pulling her knees up to her chest.
What now? What did they do now? She felt so empty.
He knelt by the side of the tub and grasped the remaining sliver of soap, dunked it, wetting his shirtsleeves in the process, and reached for her neck with his soapy hands.
She shied away from him, reality quickening into clearness as the memory of her climax faded. This, him—it was too much, too intimate, too everything for a lonely body craving touch.
“Leave. Now.” She sank lower in the tub.
He froze. Then, slowly, he pulled his hands from the water. His sleeves were sopping wet, and he dragged his shirt off as he stood, tossed it to a sodden bundle on the floor. “Let me know if you need anything.”
She wanted to look at the shadows playing across the muscled planes of his chest. She wanted to not feel aroused by the power of his back as he left the room.
Guin wanted lots of things. But those things she’d always wanted most—safety, companionship, love—she could never have.