Page 64 of Little Blue

Peering at Ilya, I see him for all that he is. He’s not morally yellow or white or light at all. He’s not even morally grey. He’s black as sin. Dark and forbidding as the depths of a corrupt nightmare where the touch of a talon doesn’t maim, but instead promises a ripple of sin, a quake in the foundation that holds my own moral compass, shattering it. Obliterating me.

His stillness is unsettling, the way his animal eyes track me as I move, is darkly thrilling. I’m like a butterfly caught in the haze of a blizzard. He’s a man crafted of ice and shrouded in smoke. Yet, somehow, he ignites me like no other.

I can come to only one conclusion. I yearn for the way he strips me of my will. I crave the depravity in his stolen touches. In his obsession, I have uncovered a need. A deep-seated desire with roots so twisted and ugly, I can have no hope of tugging it from where it grows in the core of me.

Maybe it stems from the moment my father left me to fend for myself. The abandonment has left the little girl in me craving someone strong, so strong that I no longer have to be the only source of strength I know, to carry myself further in this life.

Maybe it’s the assault I suffered at the hands of my foster brother. With him, I’d felt disgust and horror. But maybe it unlocked something with me. Something dark and ugly that doesn’t just crave dominance, but needs it.

Maybe that’s why I respond to Ilya like I do. Because I’m ruined, my pieces irrevocably broken. Maybe that’s why I seem to fit so perfectly with this jagged, sharp man.

He’s broken, too.

I’m not ready to admit this weakness to him. I’m not ready to strip myself any barer than he’s already stripped me.

“Goodnight, Ilya.”

“Irelynn,” he calls, my name deliciously rough where it falls between us. I don’t turn to face him as I wait for whatever it is he wants to say to me. “Get some rest, my heart. We have a big day tomorrow.”

I don’t respond. But if he thinks I’m going to rest after that—he’s lost another marble.

Twenty-Seven

Ilya

Learning of the true extent of her inexperience has both tamed the monster inside me and pushed him to the very edge of his control. Her innocence is the only thing that holds my urge to claim her at bay. It’s also the thing I crave most to claim.

I don’t know how someone so alluring, so beautifully sensational and entirely unaware of her appeal, has remained innocent for twenty-one, nearly twenty-two years. I know for a fact that at least one man has tried his hand at making her his. Even thinking of how her boss had asked her out sparks a jealous, possessive wildness inside me that I have to work to tame.

Opening the door of the bathroom, I step into the candlelit space. I’m awarded with a sharp, sugary little gasp. Then she breathes my name in that husky, sweetly tempting way she does.

If she knew how it nearly brings me to my knees every time she does it… Fuck.

The power this woman wields over me.

She tries to cover her naked body from the gaze I rake over her and fails. Desire slams hot inside my body, but I force myself to move to the head of the tub. I shed my jacket and roll my sleeves, lowering onto my knees as she sits up to look over one slender shoulder at me. Her blue eyes are big with uncertainty and—longing?

Christ, I hope so.

“Let me wash your hair.” I reach for the clip she has holding her strawberry gold hair on the top of her head.

“No.” She leans away from me, adding, “I washed it last night. My scalp will hurt if I wash it too often.”

I concede, reaching for the body wash that smells like me. I really need to order some things for her. Or better yet, take her shopping.

But I like when she smells like me. I like her in my clothes.

I should have known better than to think I was cut from a cloth different from my father. I always wondered if the day would come when I’d fall into this dangerous obsession for a woman, I would make mine. Then, when I struggled to feel any kind of interest in any woman, I thought that maybe obsession wouldn’t be for me, after all.

I should have known better. After the way my cruel and unaffected father fell for my mother, and my younger brother, Kane, fell for his now wife, Nevaeh, I should have known my own time to obsess over a woman was only a matter of time.

Rubbing the soap into a lather of suds, I bring my hands to her skin. She’s so soft. A glaring contradiction to the rough pads of my scarred, calloused hands.

Her skin is smooth and unmarred. The wounds of a war shrouded in shadows don’t paint her flesh as they mar mine. Her flesh isn’t thick with experience, colored with the stain of time. Youth clings to her like the innocence I long to taint, to claim. So pale and lovely.

From where her head is still turned to me, I watch as her pink lips part on a shallow inhale. Hunger gnaws inside me that I ignore, my hands caressing her soft flesh as I rub the soap over her back. After a minute, some of the tension leaks from her body, and she leans forward to relax her front against raised knees.

Sighing, she rests her face on the arms she’s folded atop her knees, then, as I continue to massage her gently with my newly gentle hands, she speaks. “Do you really kill people or is that something you said to make me afraid of you.”

---