Beneath the Stars (Falling Stars 4)

I could feel it now.

Seeping from his spirit and saturating the atmosphere.

Agony and shame and the deepest, starkest kind of grief.

I didn’t knock.

I just twisted the handle and pushed open the door to the chaotic darkness that echoed back. The man the storm in the middle of it.

I found him across the room. His shape nothing but a massive silhouette where he sat in an oversized chair in the corner. The hulking outline of him slung back in the plush fabric.

I took a step inside.

The air shivered and rushed.

I squinted through the darkness, allowing my sight to adjust. For all the lines and curves and angles that made him up to reveal themselves.

His hair was untamed and wild, his beard thick, his arms rested on either side of the chair. A beer bottle dangled from the fingers of his left hand.

The lines on his rugged face were carved into something vicious and desolate.

Right then, he looked like a Viking who’d conquered all his enemies but had been left with the burden of their blood on his hands.

Terrifying.

Fascinating.

Easing into the room, I snapped the door shut behind me.

At the click of the lock, a grunt hit the air.

A bluster through the oxygen.

“Shouldn’t be in here, Maggie.”

In the disquiet, my teeth raked my bottom lip, and my knees wobbled as I took another step his direction. I did my best to keep my voice light. “Judging by the look of you, I think this is exactly where I’m needed.”

It didn’t work. Not when the words quivered with my worry for him.

Another grunt, and he took a long pull of his beer, eyeing me with those blue eyes through the clouds that rumbled, his voice a roll of low thunder. “You think you know me? Think you know what I need?”

It was a challenge.

A warning.

I took another step closer.

“Yes. Maybe not all the details, but yes.”

He scoffed a self-deprecating laugh and rubbed a flustered hand over his face.

I took no offense because it was clear all the hostility vibrating from him was directed at himself.

He took another long pull of his drink. “Well, I’d like to spare you those details, Sweet Thing.”

Bitterness poured out with the words.

“And what if I offered to hold them?”

He watched me, that hard gaze getting softer with each step that I took his direction. “Then I’d say you should stop bein’ a masochist.”

“I don’t think that would be possible with you.”

A rough scrape of affection climbed his throat.

I felt it like a caress across my skin.

I ran my palms up my arms to chase the chill it lifted, trying to stop from completely losing myself to him.

But I thought it was stupid to think I wasn’t already there.

Foolish to think there was any stopping what I felt when I eased down onto the soft, thick carpet of his room. Like I needed to get down on his level. Or maybe the man just had me on my knees.

“And how’s that?” Rhys asked.

I shifted around onto my bottom and wound my arms around my knees to give me something to do with my shaking hands. Especially when the only thing they wanted to do was run over his body. Brush across his face. Take away some of his pain.

Squeezing my legs, I contemplated for a second because it was something I was just coming to understand myself. “I guess I was probably eleven or so when I started to realize I was different. That I experienced people differently than they experienced me. That I felt what they did, and it affected how I felt, too. Their moods catching. Their smiles and their tears. Their fears and their worries and their joy.”

The smile I cast him was wistful.

Sadness blew through his expression, though he cracked the words like a joke. “That sounds horrible.”

Rocking a bit, I watched the way his expression danced and played.

Dark and light.

Heavy and soft.

Everything itched and pulled.

It was painful trying to sit still with him so close.

“Sometimes it is. But sometimes…” I hiked a shoulder. “Most of the time…it feels like it’s my purpose. Like I’d be missing something if I wasn’t experiencing it. It feels right.”

“A blessing and a curse,” he quietly mused.

“Yeah.” I nodded, hugging my knees tighter. “But with you…” I swallowed around the lump lodged in my throat, and my brow squeezed as I tried to make sense of it. “It’s different.”

Blue eyes sought me in the darkness, tracing me like he was chasing down a dream. “How?”

It was no longer a challenge.

It was a plea.

“I can feel you feeling me, and I think maybe you can feel me feeling you. And it feels like…it feels like a communion. Like an actual connection. Like we’re bound in some essential way.”

Air huffed from his nose. “Last person you want to be communin’ with is me.”