The admission of my true desire and knowing it was what I wanted most in the world had me shaken, but clearly our encounter with the Lady had affected Kat, too. I needed to comfort her when she came back. My problems could wait.
I cleared the plates with a word and called for the fire to burn warmer. With the curtains drawn, it felt intimate, like this was the middle of the night and not morning. I scoffed when I found candles and matches, and set to work lighting them the old fashioned way. To think humans did this all the time.
The bathroom door clicked open, and I smiled. “Look, they have candles. How quaint.” Grinning, I turned. “I thought you would like—”
Finishing that sentence was impossible.
Because in the doorway stood Katherine, hair loose over her shoulders like a spill of fire, a sheer nightgown skimming over her perfect curves.
My head spun as all the blood rushed to my cock, and I had to squeeze the mantelpiece to stop myself tearing across the room and devouring her whole.
It didn’t help that as she sauntered this way, the nightgown opened to reveal one of those thighs I’d so thoroughly worshipped.
But for all that she moved so confidently, I couldn’t miss the little note of uncertainty in the rise of her eyebrows.
Toe-to-toe with me, she stopped, and my heart thundered, demanding to know why there was any distance between us. I had to yank my reaching shadows close—they wanted her almost as much as I did.
She took a deep breath and raised her hands. I knew she was aiming for my chest, and it was easy to catch her wrists. Her poison-darkened fingers curled, and my ring on her finger glinted.
Mine. Yet part of me still flinched away.
“Katherine?”
The light hairs on her arms rose as she met my gaze and pulled against my hold. “You swore on your magic, Bastian. And I understand now—I know how much it means.”
She understood the depth of what I’d pledged to her. Maybe she even had an inkling what I’d told the Lady of the Lake. My heartbeat was the thundering hoofbeats of a whole herd of deer.
“Please.”
It was a miracle I didn’t lose myself right then and there.
That word. What it did to me, coming from her.
Fuck.
Drawing a steadying breath, I stroked the inside of her wrists and watched the goosebumps rise on her skin. “You want touch.”
She bit her lip and it took me right back to every time she’d tried to bite back her cries of pleasure and I’d made her fail.
Oathbreaker, part of me whispered.
“I shouldn’t…” I gave a shuddering exhale like I could blow her sweet scent from my lungs. “I shouldn’t touch you except to give you your antidote.” It felt like someone else was speaking, reading from a script of everything I should and shouldn’t.
“You held me before. Didn’t you say you were just giving me water when I needed it?” She gave me a wide-eyed look and in that one second I almost—almost—believed her innocent.
But she asked me please and now watched my lips, waiting for my response.
This was not the innocent Lady Katherine Ferrers.
This was my ember.
Mouth suddenly dry, I barely managed to swallow. “I was wrong. There is no ‘just’ between us. Only everything.”
With a little breath out, she lowered her gaze. Ashamed? Regretful? Didn’t she want the same thing, after all?
I released her wrists and took hold of the mass of her hair, finding it still damp at the nape of her neck. Slowly, I wrapped it around my hand until she was forced to lift her chin and look me in the eye. “Is touch all you want?” I gave a gentle tug as her hands planed up my chest, sending a streak of need through my nerves. “Don’t lie to me.”
“No,” she whispered. “I want you, and yet I shouldn’t. Every part of me calls for every part of you, but I don’t want you to regret anything between us.” Her eyebrows crashed together. “How can I want such contradictory things?”
I huffed, letting myself sink into her space, mouth only a few inches from hers. “Isn’t that what life is?”
Mine had spent the past thirty-five years tearing me apart. I wanted peace, and yet I wanted my father alive. I wanted a life, and yet I wanted to keep my hands on the reins of court. And just as I’d told Rose…
“I want you, Katherine. Yet part of me can’t bear the thought of becoming a person who breaks a contract. Not now that I know.”
And that was the contradiction that tore me in two.
Because I had fallen for her. Irrevocably. Helplessly. Perfectly.
Not just on this trip. Long before that. But… these days spent alone enjoying each other’s company, working together to look after our mounts and on our questions for the Lady of the Lake… it had broken down every attempt I made to deny or downplay it. It had made answering the Lady’s question easy, albeit terrifying.
Kat’s lip wobbled before her chin jerked upward—as far as she could with my grip on her hair. “But it’s not your contract to break. It’s not even one I chose.”
I sighed even as I pressed into her touch and my free hand slipped around her waist.
She saw me as putting her contract before her, but it wasn’t like that at all. Not once I’d got over the initial shock.
“I have killed, tortured, deceived. I’ve broken so many things, I lost count, but never a contract. That was one thing I could still hold sacred. I want to tear that damn marriage contract apart and take you so thoroughly, you don’t even remember his name. And yet… yet part of me still clings to the idea that I have this one thing I haven’t broken.”
Her eyes glimmered in the candlelight, and it felt like she saw me. Not the Shadow or the Serpent or the Bastard, but me.
I pressed my forehead to hers, sharing breath, for a wild moment wondering if I could just push her against the wall and sink into her.
Oathbreaker. My insides shrank away from that word, easing my throbbing cock.
She squeezed the front of my shirt. “I understand. It’s the only part of yourself you haven’t surrendered to duty.”
I wanted to surrender it to her, though. Or at least my conscious self did.
She gave a slight smile, stroking my collarbone. “You need a scrap of something to hold on to.”
I almost laughed with relief, but my throat was too tight. “I do. We will free you from this contract, Katherine, I promise. One way or another. Then my subconscious can shut up, and I will make up for every time it’s denied us. In the meantime…”
Releasing her, I backed off.
She swayed towards me. “What are you doing?”
“Obeying the letter of the law, if not its spirit.” I sat at the centre of the settee. “Come here.”
She approached so quickly, she couldn’t have taken a moment to think of it. Because she was that sure or because she wasn’t thinking? But she’d only had one glass of brandy, even though it was good stuff—rich and smooth, the way she liked.
Still, considering her past, it didn’t hurt to check.
“Will you do as you’re told, Katherine?”
Her cheeks flushed a deeper pink. “I will.”
“Will you tell me to stop if you want me to?”
“I will.”
“Are you my ember?”
“Yes,” the word spilled from her on a breath.