Like after the last and most powerful earthquake and tsunami to hit Japan. Years later, over twenty-one thousand people were still missing.
“After The Organization took me when I was four, it took a long while to understand I was imprisoned and that I’d never see my family again, the family I barely remembered anymore. It was twenty years later that I managed to escape.”
Unable to hold back, she pulled him down to her and sealed his lips with her own, as if she could absorb his remembered pain and abuse.
Letting her drink deep of his essence, he swept her around to bring her beneath him on the gigantic couch. He stretched over her, his daunting hardness pressing where she needed it through their clothes. He was clad only in black pants. The rest of his body was a poem of defined, elegant muscles, packing unimaginable power, flexing and straining their hunger over her. How she’d soon have to live without this unbridled joy of feeling him like this, she couldn’t begin to think. She’d done it once before, falling into the suspended animation that had been the only way she could survive. She had no idea if she’d be able to seek its refuge again.
Her heart thudded painfully as Raiden pulled back from their kiss and started to rise. Unable to let him go, she clung to his arms. He let her, surrendering to her caresses like a great feline inviting and luxuriating in a worshipper’s petting.
Then his eyes took on that reminiscing cast again. “I was always angry that I didn’t even remember my family. I wished I had been older when I lost them so I’d at least have the memories. It made it so much harder finding their trail.” His gaze focused back on her, that gentleness entering it again. “But just now as you said you remembered everything about your mother, I realized that I got the better deal. Memories are far more painful than their absence.”
Feeling her throat closing over what felt like barbs, she struggled to keep her eyes from filling with tears.
Before she lost the fight, he speared his hand in her hair at her nape, pinning her head down to the couch, tilting her face up to him. “So you’re not a real redhead, either.”
“No.”
His other hand threaded through her hair, combing it over and over. “You made a very convincing blonde, too. Any shade suits you so much it looks as if you were born with it. Until you try the next shade and it’s just as incredible on you.”
She stored away the praise he lavished on her, saving it for the barren years ahead. Even if it was mostly about her looks, which weren’t hers anyway anymore, she would hold on to it.
She shrugged. “Blond colors were the best to turn into others at short notice. Now that I have no need for changing colors, I can maintain a darker one.”
“But now that you don’t need to change colors, why not just go back to your original one? Wouldn’t that be more convenient? Or do you like how this shade makes you stand out here?”
She couldn’t tell him she continued dying her hair obsessively because she couldn’t bear seeing the thick white lock that had grown in her crown after she’d left him. A glaring souvenir of the most mutilating period of her life.
So she told him the reason she’d chosen this shade instead. “This was actually my paternal aunt’s hair color. I loved her so much, thought she looked like a fairy queen with that hair. And I made my face look like a childhood friend. At least, what I think she would have looked like as an adult.”
“Are your aunt and friend dead, too?” At her difficult nod, the empathy she thought she saw in his gaze grew contemplative. “So you’ve created this new identity from the memories of the people you loved and lost, becoming a living memorial of them.”
Surprise at his analysis made her lose the fight, hot, stinging tears rushing to her eyes.
Averting them, she whispered, “I never looked at it this way. It just comforted me to look in the mirror and see a reflection of the ones I loved, to hear the name that reminds me of my mother’s soft voice telling me stories in the dark.”
Bringing her eyes back to his with a gentle hand on her cheek, his fingers wiped away the tears that had escaped, his gaze lengthening, deepening, until she felt he’d fathomed her every secret without her needing to tell him any more details.
Suddenly he asked, “How many disguises did you have in your life?”
Blinking to clear her eyes, she attempted a mischievous smile. “Aren’t you all questions tonight?”
His answering smile was equal parts hunger and self-deprecation. “You fascinate me. I thought I was undetectable until you. I’d give anything to pick your brains.”
“Anything?” She ran a finger down his chest, then the groove separating his defined abs, then lower.
“Name your price.”
“Any price?”
He just nodded, his expression avid, his irises looking as if they had the sunset at his back trapped in them.
God, how could anything be so absolutely beautiful?
Sighing, she arched up into his length, ran greedy hands down his muscled
back. “You know my price.”
“That’s not a price, that’s a privilege. One I’ll take full advantage of, as soon as you quench my curiosity. So how many?”