“Please...” I murmured into his mouth. “I need you.”
He reared back, his eyes burning with endless passion. His lips were kiss-swollen, and his scruff bristled like a caveman...but something was wrong.
Those eyes.
Neither black nor blue, undecipherable from green or hazel.
There were too many shadows in them. Too many horrors. Too much pain.
It broke my heart.
I cried for the splintered soul within.
And then, he kissed me viciously.
Slamming into me, he poured every shred of himself into me, feeding me every splintered piece, begging me to mend him, to stitch every tear and glue every fragment so one day he might have eyes that looked back with vibrant color instead of dead with despair.
But as he kissed me harder, as his touch turned desperate and the connection between us flared with fire, I began to fight.
It was too much.
Too hard.
I wasn’t enough.
I would never be enough to fix this man.
He would drown.
And I would drown with him.
Water babbled.
Air vanished.
No!
He didn’t stop.
Didn’t let me go.
He just kissed me harder, deeper, killing me with his unhappiness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE GENERATOR TURNED OUT to be an easier fix than I’d thought. Which was a good thing, seeing as I hadn’t brought any tools with me. I should’ve. I would’ve if I had half a working brain and not this mush of concussion. How was I supposed to fix anything without the necessary tools?
Idiot.
At least nature had taken pity on me and the issue turned out just to be debris. The turbine was buried beneath a pile of muck. I’d been right that the storm, when Gemma climbed up the cliff and tried to drive herself away, was the reason for the unworking machine. Mulched grass, twigs, and rotting bracken had wedged around the blades, tangling into a nest that wouldn’t allow water to spin the turbine.
After a few minutes of pulling, yanking, and struggling to hold my balance as I stooped over and worked, the first groan of the ancient propeller twisted and water coaxed it to move quicker. I cleared the rest and waited for a little while, partly to get my nausea under control and partly to check that no other debris arrived from upstream to clog it again.
The steady whirr of power being conjured from the water, and stored in the bank of batteries that would one day likely cease working, filled me with relief. For now at least, we had power. Electricity that meant we could continue living in a mansion with privileges such as an oven, fridge, and pressurized water to flush toilets and grant showers. Cold showers, mind you. And fucking icy in winter, but the electricity quantity only stretched so far.
Standing, I cricked the new twinges in my neck and rolled out my spine that made sure I understood it wasn’t happy about my current state of health.
My gaze ran over my valley to the cliff beyond. I didn’t go blank again. My thoughts remained my own and I shook my head for the hundredth time that I was still alive after a fall that high. Honestly, I couldn’t believe I’d survived.
Surely, something like that wasn’t survivable. Either it was some sick twist of fate or I was the butt of some obscene joke: permit the man who was more than happy to die but was too cowardly to do it himself an almost immortal ability to walk away from something that should’ve left him in pieces.
Literal, actual pieces.
Yet I’d walked away.
Well, she’d pulled me away but that was beside the point.
I still had full range of motion and wasn’t crippled. I still had my mind, even if it was a little scattered and sick at the moment. And sure, I had kinks where there used to be no pain, most parts of my body didn’t feel put together right, and my arm was taking its sweet time to knit together, but all in all, I’d been lucky.
So, so fucking lucky.
So...why do I feel so wretchedly lost?
Taking my time to climb from the concrete box, I gritted my teeth against the vertigo that clung to me like a bad smell, and planted my foot on slippery water-rippling rocks.
Everything inside me ordered my head to come up and check that she’d stayed. I’d fought the urge to look at the bank ever since I’d left her coughing because of what I’d done. But...I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t look because if I looked and she wasn’t there—
Fuck me, I couldn’t even finish that thought without clutching at my heart and rubbing at the agony inside me. An agony that hadn’t been brought on by falling off a cliff but by falling in an entirely different matter.
Focus.
Get back across the river without drowning.
Haze flickered over my eyes as I kept my attention steadfast on the rapids and squinted as the sun bounced off crystal clear water. A few fish scattered past in the current, seeking deeper pools, while the crayfish in this area favoured the shadowy inlets closer to the cave system.