But nothing about this felt easy. It was hard in the most beautiful way. Too much and not enough all at the same time.
Heaven and hell converging on a beach.
As we had always been.
He slid his hands down my back, gripped my hips and pulled me up against him, urged me to stand on my toes, and then he lifted me up off of the sand by my thighs, wrapping my legs around his back as he took advantage of the fact that he now opened me to him. He braced me with one arm and put his hand between my legs, stroking me, stroking me until I cried out.
Until I thought I might cry.
He was brilliant. And we were brilliant together.
I had missed this.
As if a part of myself had been revived and I was now whole.
Then he laid me down on the sand, his hardness pressed against my center, and I arched against him, seeking to find the thing that I knew only he could give.
He had ruined even that for me.
Because the pursuit of my own pleasure, when I ached in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep, always took the shape of him.
He was a fantasy I could not banish.
I could want nothing and no one else.
So I had forgone even the pleasure of release on my own, because I couldn’t bear to fantasize about the man who had abandoned me and my daughter.
But he hadn’t.
And he was here. And he was mine.
And I was his.
“Give it to me,” I whispered. “Give me your darkness.”
And I did not have to ask him twice.
He wrapped his hand around my head, burying his fingers in my hair, lifting my head from the sand and kissing me with a punishing strength that took my breath away.
He shifted between my legs and surged inside of me, his strength, thickness and power causing me to gasp.
I was unused to this kind of penetration, and it hurt just a little bit.
And somehow that felt all right.
Somehow it felt fitting.
That this was like the first time.
He was in me. All around me.
We were one again, and that was the most right thing in the world even if I couldn’t explain it. Even if I couldn’t understand it.
His touch left trails of heat across my skin, and as he surged inside of me, over and over again, I was close to completion.
Not just in the sense of pleasure, but in the sense of a wholeness, a fullness and realness that I hadn’t known had been absent from me.
The sun was behind his head, and each time he moved, a flash of light would blind my eyes and then it was him. Hercules.
And even when I closed my eyes, he filled my vision, the light from the sun painting ghosts behind my lids.
Hercules.
It had always been him.
He had always been my sanity and insanity. My joy and my sadness. My ruin and my triumph.
He had always been.
He always would be.
And I realized in that moment, as I opened my eyes again and stared at that dear, beautiful face carved from rock, at those eyes that were capable of making me feel desired and making me feel destroyed. That mouth that I knew could deliver the most beautiful of compliments and the most cutting of cruelties, that this was what I had avoided.
Because I knew that once he touched me, it would be undeniable.
And I had thought that perhaps we could parent side by side and have some sort of sweet, amicable relationship. A marriage that was in a marriage. A life together that wasn’t together. Hercules and Marissa with a space between them rather than wrapped around each other, but that had never been possible. And it never would be.
Because he was my other piece, whether or not I was ever his.
He had been the path to myself, and I had spent years living away from him, and I had not lost that.
My strength. The fortitude to stand on my own feet.
Even when I thought he had caused my diminishment, I had known that he had also created in me the strength to endure it.
The strength to go against my father, the confidence that what I felt and what I wanted was right.
A whole woman. Not a girl who was under the oppressive thumb of her father, who knew nothing of the real world or what she could be.
Hercules’s woman. And that was when I shattered. Not slowly as he was doing, but one moment I was whole, come together completely, and then I was shattered, tossed into the wind like a billion stars in the sky.
And being broken with him was better than being whole had ever been.
Because he was the one who had made me.
And he was the one who had broken me.
I cried out his name as reality shattered through me, digging my fingernails into his shoulders. I had never done that before. I had never left a mark on him. But I would now. The joy that I took in our union would stay on his skin.
And I was proud of that.
With a growl, he froze, finding his own release that left him panting and spent just as I was, his forehead pressed against mine.
We shared the same air. Shared the same breath.
And for a moment we even seemed to share the same heartbeat.
But then that moment was over, and I remembered.
I remembered that he was bleeding something black and ugly from his soul, and I had managed to put a tourniquet on the wound, but I had not healed it.
I looked up at him, and I pressed my hand against his chest. “Tell me.”
And on a ragged curse, still buried deep inside of me, he pressed his head against my neck and groaned. “My father is dead.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hercules
I DID NOT know what had possessed me to make that confession, still inside of her, still in reach of heaven.
I should not have done what I did. I should not have gone to her as I was. More beast than man, jagged and sharp and unable to control the rage that was coursing through me.
And Marissa did not deserve that.
Whatever I might have thought about her, she did not deserve that.
But she had said yes, and more than yes, she had taken the step toward me as I had demanded.
As if that had somehow taken the blame away from me. To put that squarely on her shoulders as I had done.
Take me.
She had commanded that I take her.
But she had taken me, and thoroughly at that.
In the sand, yet again.
Would I ever have this woman in a bed?
It was a question that I wanted an answer to.
But she had asked me a question, and it had nothing to do with when we might come together again.
I had answered.
And now there was a deathly, still silence between us.
She shifted beneath me. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Two words. So quiet. Infused with sympathy.
Empathy.
She knew. She understood. That a horrible father could still be mourned, that the grief for someone such as him could be complicated and double-edged.
I barely understood it myself, but she did. Because she had been through it before. “It means it’s over,” she said softly. “And that is a terrible blessing.”