She wasn’t alone now.
He found his rhythm, and as he did, she found hers. Not fighting against him, but moving with him. Not the same as he did, but to complement. Their differences fit here. Her softness working with his hardness. Her body yielding as his advanced. And she learned quickly that surrendering here gave her power that she’d never imagined she possessed.
He kissed her, rocking hard against her body. She barely had time to grab hold of his shoulders before she was sent straight over the edge into oblivion. Left spent, shaking and dependent on him to keep her from sliding onto the floor.
Wave after wave of sensation she was unprepared for. She had no defenses against it, because she’d never seen it coming.
She’d had no idea it would be like this. None at all.
As he growled out his own release, his body pinning hers harder to the wall, she wrapped her arm around his head, holding him steady, her fingers laced through his hair. He stayed there for a moment, breathing hard before wrenching himself away from her. Leaving her cold, empty.
And no less connected to him.
That should have eased, shouldn’t it? Now that he wasn’t inside her, shouldn’t she feel the change?
She looked up into his eyes, dark, blank. And she knew that for him it was over. She knew that no part of her lingered inside him, as he did her.
And then, as if to prove her suspicion, he turned on his heel and walked away, leaving her standing there against the wall shivering and changed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ANDRES CALLED HIMSELF ten kinds of fool on his way back to his chamber. He couldn’t go back into the luncheon, not after that. Anyway, Zara had destroyed his shirt.
He had left her there, similarly destroyed. Altered.
But he didn’t fix things, he only broke them further, so there had been no point in him staying. He hadn’t been able to.
He hated isolation. Hated it. But it was the only way he could regain control after something like that. A fact driven into him from childhood.
It was why his mother had always locked him in his room after an outburst. Why he was condemned to staying in the palace when the royal family went out.
Now he was doing the same to himself. Because he had to do something, anything, to calm the raging monster inside him that had claimed control of his actions.
An image flashed through his mind, her hands wrapped around the fabric, tugging hard, sending the buttons onto the marble floor. The look in her eyes, dark, determined. As with all things she had been uncivilized, untutored, and wholly authentic. For a man who had no idea what his own personal authenticity might look like, it was alarming.
But that wasn’t what disturbed him now. Wasn’t what caused rage to roar through his veins like a ravening beast.
He had lost control.
Civilizing Zara was one thing. It was himself...that was where he failed. He was cracking apart inside. The years spent forming himself into the man he was seemingly washed away on the tide of lust Zara had inspired in him.
The woman was new. The failure was not.
His best effort had never been good enough. When he was a boy he had been the one at the formally set table dropping silverware, fidgeting in his seat. Crawling underneath the table to pick up a crouton he had dropped. And when the thought to get up struck him, he had never been able to control the impulse. Sometimes he would think of something to say, and it would just spill out of his mouth. His father would simply glare at him, his eyes ice. Kairos would pretend it wasn’t happening.
His mother would cry. As though he had done it to her personally. As though he had done it to hurt her.
She had felt everything so deeply. He would make a loud sound and the poor woman would tremble. He wondered at that now, though he’d never understood it then.
Finally, they had stopped allowing him to attend events. The solitude had been frustrating, but better than being set up to fail. Every luncheon, every church service, ever concert...it all seemed designed to doom him.
Then the last Christmas banquet had come. The last one his mother had been at.
He had destroyed that too.
He had tried, and it hadn’t been good enough. He had made her cry one too many times. And he was certain that his father, that Kairos imagined it had been like every other time before. But Andres had felt it. When his mother had wiped that final tear off her cheek, he knew that it would be the last year she ever cried for him.