“You need touch. We all do. Come here.” I pulled her against me, delighting in how perfectly she buried her face in the crook between my shoulder and neck. I skimmed my hands over her back and pulled her to her feet, so I could hold her full length against my body. The hairs on the back of her neck rose and her arms tightened around me.
Heart beating a heavy rhythm, I brushed my lips over her ear and dipped my fingertips under the edge of her dress, skimming her skin.
She drew a shaky breath against my throat, lighting up my body in a dozen different places. “But….”
“This isn’t…” I swallowed, edging closer to a lie. “I’m just holding you. It’s only touch. Not breaking any rules.” True enough—barely. “I can’t stand the thought of you trapped in this invisible bubble, afraid to go near anyone. Let me do this for you, Katherine,” I murmured against her hair, high on her springtime scent. “You’re dying of thirst.”
She lifted her head, eyelids heavy. “And you have water.”
I inclined my head, inches away from a lie. Because whatever I told myself, that wasn’t the only reason for this. The main reason, yes. But not the only one.
She pulled her hair over her shoulder and nodded.
In silence, I unbuttoned the back of her dress, inch by frustrating inch, letting my fingertips trace circles and spirals over her spine as it was revealed. Once it was open to her waist, I slid my hands under the silk and pulled her tight against me. Her warm, soft skin was a wonder I could lose myself in. The only thing I could possibly like more was the little sigh she gave as she melted into my hold.
I was so lost in every touch, every scent, every sound of her heavy breathing, I didn’t realise her hands were skimming up my chest until she reached my nipple, stealing my breath.
“Katherine,” I murmured, not quite an admonishment, but low enough to make her questing fingers fall still. With a gentle shadow, I guided her hand away and pulled it around my back. “This isn’t for me.”
She lifted her head again, lips parted, and I was ready to pull away if she tried to kiss me. “Is that what you told yourself when you didn’t come in Albion?”
Of course she realised. She was no fool.
“Yes.”
“And when you told me about the coup, you deliberately painted the worst version of it so I’d think you were a selfish traitor who killed his father for his own advancement.”
To hear her say it hurt—physically hurt. Yes, preventing the coup had improved my position—made me the Night Queen’s Shadow—but that had never been my motivation.
“You neglected to mention the lives you saved, the war you prevented.”
Fuck. She saw. She saw everything.
Her eyes were tired, her voice dreamy, but she drove right to the centre of who I was.
Hands on her waist, I turned her. Safer without her looking at me. I caught my breath and managed to answer, “Yes.”
The dim light picked out the curve that swept from her back into her waist and out over her backside, and I ate up the sight as I peeled off my shirt.
We stood on the edge of madness. But I could keep myself on the ledge, and I’d hold her there, too.
I pushed her long-sleeved gown over her shoulders, letting it catch on her breasts, and crushed her against me.
Her whimper almost destroyed me. The feel of her hot skin against my chest was its own kind of sweet torture. But it was touch, and I’d promised to give her that.
“Katherine,” I said against her ear. I couldn’t stop saying her name—my damnation, my salvation, my everything in between. “I knew that with you, I risked spilling dangerous secrets. If I kept my desire leashed, I could keep control. I started off telling myself that touching you, teasing you was all part of luring you in. When I realised that was a lie, I told myself it was for you. And it was.” I swept my lips down the column of her neck—close to a kiss but not quite.
“Yet it was for me, too. All these years of loyalty to a realm that looks upon me as the man who killed his own father, and there you were treating me like… like a person. You reacted according to how I behaved. When I was an arse, you treated me as such. When I touched you, you reacted not to a reputation, but to me. Stars above, that was a heady combination. So when you looked at me differently… even though I intended to push you away, it was still a knife between my ribs.”
My eyes burned with that image. It was seared in my soul. Her face, hurt and tearstained, the shock, the confusion, the re-evaluation of the man she’d shared so much with.
“I hated myself.” I didn’t mean to say it out loud, but it rumbled out from somewhere deep inside. “Hurting you like that. Being that person.” Eyes screwing shut, I buried my face in her hair.
“I know.” She squeezed my arms around her waist and reached back, cupping my cheek. “I know.”
We stood there a long while, this embrace somehow turning into something that was soothing me instead of her… or perhaps as well as her.
Eventually, I had the strength to straighten and pull back.
By the time she turned, holding her gown over her chest, I was on my knees.
“Katherine.” My heart was in my throat, finally able to spill what it needed me to say. “I kneel for no one, but here I am on my knees for you. I am sorry.”
Her eyelashes fluttered. “You already apologised. I forgave you.”
“Not like this. What you said about choice has been on my mind, burrowing into it, like you planted a seed and now the roots are in me. I hadn’t thought about it like that. All I could see was how horribly you’d been treated, how much you held back, and how much I wanted to give you some spark of pleasure to counter it. I decided I would treat you like the precious flame you are and pile fuel upon you until you were truly ready.” I shook my head, queasy with how blind I’d been.
A frown pressed between her eyebrows, and she shook her head. “You don’t need to—”
“I do.” I hung my head. “I do. Because you were right. Was it really a choice if I didn’t give you all the information? If you didn’t know what you were getting into? All I thought about was how I was giving you something more than you were taking for yourself… That I was being better than those other men who’d used you. But…” My breath failed me, trapped in horrible, harsh guilt that I’d been battling for months. “But I did use you to my own ends. I manipulated and tricked you even as I was trying to ‘free’ you. I was no better. I see that now.”
When I looked up, her frown had gone, and now her lips had parted as though she meant to speak but words evaded her.
So I pressed forward with mine before my bravery fled. “I may not ever deserve your forgiveness, but I need you to know that I am sorry, and I swear I’ll never do anything like that to you again. I swear on everything that I am.” I placed a hand over my heart, shadows pooling around me as I pressed my other hand to the floor at her feet. “I swear it on my magic.”
The stone floor answered, old, old power lifting its head from a long slumber, and I could feel the land, the Great Yew outside, the very soul of Elfhame listening.
Kat’s gaze raked over me, passing from one eye to the other, to the hand over my heart, to my knees digging into the polished floor and the hand placed between her feet.