Chapter 14 #2
“I—oh, thank you,” she said with deep relief, settling her spectacles on her nose. “I can fix it. But…um.”
“Your clothes are still damp, and ice cold besides. I’ll make a fire.”
I set about gathering the dry and cracked remains of basic wooden furniture, making a small, neat pile. With the first strike of the flint, the sparks caught, and soon the cold gray room was filled with warmth.
I turned to find Jesamin still fully clothed. “Do you want to die of hypothermia?” I asked patiently.
“No.” She blinked nervously, her eyes magnified to huge proportions once more.
I unbuttoned my shirt, shrugging it off. “Wear this.”
Her eyes drifted down, then jerked back up. “Thank you.” She took my shirt with trembling fingers, and I deliberately turned my back, laying out her own bedroll and blanket to dry, finding excuses in the back of my head to turn around and rejecting them…
There were soft rustles, and the squelch of soaked boots being removed. When the sounds stopped, I finally turned, my eyes half-slitted and my heart half-hoping.
She sat on the very corner of my bedroll, wrapped in my shirt, and a deep, primal place in my mind purred at the sight of her on my bed, enveloped in my clothes. My scent all over her.
Prickles swept over me, tightening my scalp, tingling down my spine and into my balls. The fabric of my shirt was pulled taut over full breasts, her nipples standing out hard beneath the linen.
“I’ll need you to remove the ball,” I said gruffly.
Pain would help. It would erase the building tension, the increasing need to push her back on the bedroll and rut her, tasting her, drinking her sweet blood, taking her into me as I thrust into her.
The urge to tie her to me pounded in the back of my skull.
I would have to be gentle. I was not quite as dangerous as my brother in matters of sex, but I could still damage her without caution, and now…I had craved her so deeply I wasn’t sure I could hold back.
She leaned forward, patting the bedroll. The shirt gaped open, revealing the soft swells of her breasts, and I thought about merely leaving the ball in place and going outside to stand guard for the night. It would scar over, and doubtless be irritating, but it wouldn’t kill me.
“Come lay down here,” she said, her voice crisp and professional. “But keep in mind that I’m not a healer. I’m likely to make it worse.”
I sat on the bedroll and laid back as she dragged her pack over, kneeling next to me as she dug through the rolled kit of tools.
She held a pair of long, thin pliers up to the firelight, and looked from them to me. “Wroth, I’m terrified.”
“Nothing will harm you while I’m here,” I promised her.
“No, I mean I’m terrified of digging into your body to pull out the ball,” she said, her tone taking on a slightly hysterical edge. “I work with metal, not flesh. What if I go too deep, or rip the wound open—”
“Jesamin.” I reached out to lay a hand on her, and realized too late that it landed on her bare thigh.
My cock hardened further, straining against my trousers, and I prayed she wouldn’t notice.
And it was too late to move my hand without making things worse.
I left it on her smooth, soft skin, hoping my fingers wouldn’t tremble.
“When I became a vampire, my head had nearly been cut off. When I went Below, I was bitten, stabbed, had my skull partially crushed, and broke all my ribs. When I came up to free humans from Thurn Hakkon’s cabal, I was gutted by wargs.
Torn apart from head to toe. Believe me, you and a pair of pliers are not going to do anything worse than that. ”
Jesamin ran her eyes over my torso, picking out the scars hidden by short, fine hairs. “Well, thanks for putting it in perspective,” she said dryly.
I patted her thigh, and pulled my hand away regretfully. “You’ll do fine.”
“Honestly, I was kind of hoping you would attribute me with a little more menace than that. I could do terrible things with a pair of pliers, if I really wanted to.”
Damn woman, getting a chuckle out of me when I was supposed to be still. “I’m sure you’re a terror. ‘Oh no, hide your wives, she’s got the pliers out again’.”
She smiled as she leaned over me, and I closed my eyes, listening to the sound of her breath as she probed the wound. The pain was trifling, even when she inserted the pliers; all of my senses were focused on her, so close and yet so far away.
Even under the scent of sweat, fear, and the distinct undertone of river, she smelled of herself: milk and honey and blood. My fangs ached, imagining her throat just above me, extended and taut.
She cursed softly under her breath, a stream of profanity that would make a sailor blush. My eyes popped open. “Impressive.”
“I learned from old soldiers,” she grumbled, putting the pliers aside and rummaging in her kit. “It’s wedged under your collarbone. I need…something else. This…spinny-doodad thing. That’ll work.”
“A what now?” I eyed her suspiciously.
Jesamin stared back at me, all innocence. “I call it the swizzledinger.”
“You do not.”
“You can’t complain if the swizzledinger saves your life.” She leaned over me again, prying at something, and with a sharp burst of pain and an even sharper burst of relief, she held up her bloodied fingers, clutching something small and round. “Aha! Got it.”
I squinted at the lead ball. “My life was not in danger from that tiny thing.”
“What about blood poisoning?” she asked archly, wiping her tools clean with a length of cloth.
I laughed, licking a finger and smoothing it over the wound. My flesh began to knit together almost instantly. “My blood would eat any infection alive.”
She leaned over to watch it heal, her brows furrowed with concentration, one of her hands splayed on my stomach. Perhaps I stretched the slightest bit, flexing so she could feel the slab of hard muscle under her palm.
“How’s that for fiend healing?” I asked with a grin, and she shook her head, fingers trailing over the ridges of my abdomen.
“Impressive,” she mimicked, but there was a distance in her voice that hadn’t been there before as she turned away.
With the ball removed, there was no longer any need to have Jesamin close to me. The thought of her distance hurt far more than the removal had.
“You should eat now,” I decided. “And we’ll warm you and sleep.”
Before rushing into the depths after her, I’d grabbed one of the packs with human food and clean water. It wasn’t the sort of feast I’d like to spread before her, but it was better than watching her fade from hunger.
I filled a small pot with one of the waterskins, poured in a muslin ball of herbs and grain, and shredded dry meat to rehydrate as it stewed, setting the pot against the coals of the fire.
Jesamin remained curled on my bedroll beside me. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she was staring down at them.
“What is it?” I asked, finding that I did care what she thought. She could be thinking of the most nonsensical things, about swizzledingers and spinny-doodads, and I’d want to hear about them.
She sighed through her nose, twisting her fingers together until her knuckles turned white.
“Renaud would not have come for me,” she finally said, her voice soft.
She looked up, her dark waves spilling wildly over her shoulders.
“I was thinking that if he were here, he would not have come for me. I would have gone into the orchard. I would have died there and my father would never have a body to bury. But you came for me, and you promised you always would come for me, as though that were nothing at all. Something like eating or breathing, something you don’t even need to think about. ”
I swallowed, feeling my heart race from a distance. To tell her the unfair truth, or a lie to push her to arm’s length?
My mouth spoke the truth for me. “I don’t need to think about it. It is something I will always do.”
It wasn’t fair. I couldn’t have her, and I could promise her nothing. She could not be mine.
But it was true. I would go where she went, without a second thought.
“Do you feel for me…as I feel for you?” she asked shakily, not meeting my eyes.
“Yes.” It was the unvarnished truth. It felt like it’d been a long, long time since I’d spoken such a genuine and sincere thing aloud.
Jesamin’s full lips trembled, and she pressed them flat. “We cannot be anything to each other. Our worlds are separate.”
“Above,” I corrected her. “Our worlds are separate above.”
She opened her mouth, closed it again, and looked away at the fire.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I asked, leaning forward to take one of her hands.
“If…if we were something to each other Below, it would be harder to say goodbye when it ended,” she said softly. “I could not stay in the Rivers and see you with Esteri and…live happily after that.”
“Esteri is less than nothing to me,” I snarled. “She is a burden forced upon me, a yoke around my neck, a—”
Jesamin silenced me with a finger to my lips, and heat coursed through my veins at her touch.
“She is a pure-blooded Veladari lai,” she said.
“She is backed by every highborn noble in the Rivers, and the prosperity of the trade routes rely on your marriage. She is certainly going to become the next Lady I must answer to, no matter how you feel about her.”
“I won’t marry her,” I announced. “Simple as that. They cannot force my hand.”
Jesamin smiled sadly. “Things will look different in daylight. When the stakes are before you, the choice will not be so simple. You told me yourself—you would do anything to ensure your people were never forced down here again.”
It was terrible to admit she was right. Never would I leave my people to the whims of the loyalists.
I shook my head, squeezing her cold hand. “I don’t wish to hurt you, Jesamin. I…I will not speak to you of my desires, if it makes it harder for you. But neither will I lie to you and say I would not drop everything to come to you, if you needed me.”
“That’s what makes this so hard,” she said, her voice thick. She blinked rapidly, taking shallow breaths. “While we’re Below, I want to pretend the world above doesn’t exist. That it’s just us, and we have all the possibilities in the world.”
I bowed my head. The beast in me desperately wanted Jesamin now, in all ways, pretending exactly what she offered—that the world was only us. The man in me wanted her heart and soul, to walk into Owlhorn with her on my arm.
I couldn’t have both.
“Whatever you decide, I am for you,” I finally said. My hands trembled on hers, wanting to touch all of her, and it took everything in me to hold myself back. “I will not willingly break your heart, but I will not turn you away. The choice is yours.”
She swallowed hard, licked her lips, and turned her too-bright eyes to me. I felt that she had been watching and weighing me this entire time, looking past my exterior, finding bits and pieces within me I hadn’t known existed.
“I’ve always thought in the long-term.” Her voice was hardly audible when she spoke. “I’ve made my plans with long years in mind. Being spontaneous, courting inevitable pain…it’s unlike me. “
She took a deep breath. “When this is over, I will leave the Rivers. But while we’re down here in the dark, you are mine.”
I almost wanted to push her back, tell her no. I couldn’t abide the thought of her leaving for one of my brothers’ holds, never to see or hear her again.
But I was hers. It was the rightest thing I’d ever heard in my life. The sensation of the mountain on my back crumbling away, the shackles around my ankles clicking open, everything falling into place as it should be.
She gazed at me evenly. “Can you agree to that?”
“While we’re here, you are mine,” I agreed, my mind ticking away, considering future choices, the difficulties I’d face, and how willing I was to throw it all away.
We stared at each other in silence. Jesamin swallowed, the flutter of her rapid heartbeat sending the sweet scent of blood into the air.
And a moment later, with those words sealing what little there could be between us, we moved. We crashed together in a tangle of limbs and lips and teeth, determined to steal every moment left to us in this darkness.