But he was right. I didn’t trust him.
He hadn’t kept me safe from Noel, from the Order.
He hadn’t ever loved me back.
There was still too much at stake to give myself over to him the way I had in those last months at Pearl Hall.
My family, Ashcroft, Salvatore and Dante…least of all, my heart.
“Please,” I gasped softly in benediction. “Please, Xan, let this be enough.”
He stilled at my use of my tender name for him, and for a moment, I worried he would be angry I broke the scene, furious that I would deny him even though it had been years, and I didn’t owe him anything.
But then he pressed his palm over the large ruby sitting in the hollow of my throat and planted a lush, open-mouthed kiss to my pulse point.
“For now,” he agreed darkly. “But the day I demand it all is fast approaching.”
I didn’t ask him why.
Why now?
Why at all?
Why even after all these years me?
I swallowed the burn of them as they lodged in my esophagus. I wanted this—his hands on my body, his cock inside me, his words breathed against my skin—too much to deny myself the wonder of it now. I could let it be goodbye. The proper goodbye I hadn’t been able to have when Noel beat me and chased me off Pearl Hall estate and out of the country. Tears scorched the back of my tender eyes, but I blinked them back and committed myself to the moment. If this was the last time I ever enjoyed sex and intimacy, I would indulge as excessively as Dionysus with wine.
Sucking in a deep, bracing breath, I tipped my head to the side to expose more skin to Alexander’s wandering lips.
He took it for the acquiescence it was.
“Thank you, bella,” he breathed as if accepting a blessing from a priest. “Now, I missed your exquisite body, and I don’t intend to ever go a day without seeing it again, even when we are distanced. Spread your legs for me and show me that gorgeous cunt,” Alexander crooned as he stepped back and reached for the camera he’d abandoned on a side table to the left. “I plan to photograph it before I fuck it raw.”
Cosima
Have you ever woken up from a dream already crying because you know it was just a dream and the loss of it was so real you feel it like a hiccough in your heart?
That was how I woke up the morning after Alexander commandeered my photo shoot.
I was curled the way a cat would, my head tucked into the curve of my arm, my legs pulled tightly into my chest as if I could protect myself from harm by occupying as small a space as possible.
It didn’t make a difference to the man behind me who cupped me like a ladle, the bowl of his hips tight against the sphere of my ass, his front knit skin to skin against my back, his hands and feet tangled with my hair and toes as if he had to possess me from top to bottom even in slumber.
And he was asleep.
I could feel the soft caress of his short, deep breath against my bared neck and the weight of him so heavy against me like a leaden bracket.
More than anything, I wanted to turn into his arms, touch my fingertips to the steep curve of his thick eyelashes, and breathe in his every breath after he took it.
Then, I wanted to spend the rest of the day in the faintly lumpy bed at the quaint bed and breakfast my agent had booked me on the Lizard Coast while Alexander taught me new and difficult ways to worship him.
But I wouldn’t do any of that.
My heart felt newborn in my chest, too weak and too small to sustain the stress of my adult body and mind. I pressed my fist to my ribcage and felt it flutter weakly, a butterfly suffocating trapped in a jar.
I needed distance to build back my walls, to construct a fortress better than the one before so I could survive living without Alexander again. My heart clenched just thinking about leaving him in this bed, let alone spending one day or a dozen strung together without him by my side.
How was it possible to love someone so much when you hadn’t spent any time with them in years?
Was it true that whatever souls were made of, two could be constructed the very same? One heart cut into two and pressed into separate chests with the hope that one day, they would find each other.
I didn’t think God or science or the universe were that romantic or that cruel, but I couldn’t come up with a plainer explanation for my continued and absolute adoration of a man I’d once called my captor.