Page 40 of Iron Blade

“Sure, promises, promises…” I rolled my eyes.

“I promise you everything that I am, and everything that I have, if you just let me bind your hand in marriage.” His hand traced my arm, down my bare skin, to my hand, where he lay his palm on the back of mine and intertwined our fingers.

“No.” I shook my head. “I will never rely on anyone for anything ever again. I will never be poor again. I will stand on my own two feet from now on. Not like when I lost my father. I will never beg for the kindness of strangers, or be at someone else’s mercy, Mr. Green.”

“So much pride.” He leaned down and touched his lips to my bare skin, placing a sweet, closed-lip kiss on my neck. “What is it that they say about pride and the fall?”

I tried to pull away again, but he tightened his embrace. It wasn’t imposing. It was almost like he was trying to comfort me. His embrace did calm me, like the comfort of being safely tucked in a familiar blanket.

Or a straight jacket.

“I will never let you fall, Kira Kekoa. Never.” There was a new ferocity in his voice. One that hadn’t been there before.

“You will if I keep rejecting you.” I turned my head just a fraction. Just for a moment.

“Not even then, love.”

Chapter fourteen

Titania

Eoghan

She fell asleep in my arms. I let her, unwilling to break the contact that she had allowed.

What was it about this woman? What was it about her that drew me in like a moth to a flame?

She was a nymph, a siren. She could so easily conjure my ruin, and I went to her with no fear, no hesitation. I didn’t even care if she’d drown me with her song.

I slowly lowered her onto the couch, sneaking out from beneath her. I placed a pillow below her cheek, and let her sleep, as I went into the bedroom to retrieve an emerald colored blanket. It was thick and heavy, and when I placed it over her, covering her beautiful, dark skin, I had a vision of her in a dress of that same vibrant green, with an emerald ring on her finger.

My mother’s ring. An emerald of the deepest, darkest green, surrounded by diamonds, on a golden band.

Black is the color of my true love’s hair…

She had shown up with her hair loose from its usual bun, and just like I fantasized, it was long and wavy, down to her waist. It was coarse, but silky and full of life. Seeing the strands of it over her bare shoulders filled me with an unfamiliar longing.

I lifted the lid of the coffee table, to show the compartment underneath. I pulled out the sketch pad of heavy weighted paper, and pulled out a 2B medium charcoal pencil, and sat on the floor as I sketched her sleeping face.

Her curls had drifted over her cheek, wriggling free from where they had been tucked behind her ear. I wanted to tuck it back, to see the perfect roundedness of her warm, tanned cheek. But I didn’t. She was perfect without adjustment. Her plump lips, the way her curved body showed the beauty of her shape, even from beneath the blanket…

I suddenly had a vision of her in an enchanted wood. The kind with glowing fairies, and streams with diamond white rapids. She wasn’t just some fairy or nymph there. No, she’d be a queen. She was Titania in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I chuckled, realizing that if she was Titania, the Queen of the Faeries, then I was Nick Bottom, the man with an ass for a head. Or at least… I wanted to be. I wanted her to wake and look at me with the magical podium of love in her eyes, and for her to fall in love with me as Titania did. Then again, I also wanted to be Oberon, her husband, jealous of a little changeling boy that she adopted. After all, they were wedded, and belonged to one another.

I would be her monster, if it meant that I could be the monster she loved.

I spent the night drawing her that way - as a slumbering fairy queen. I sketched until my fingers were stained black, and page after page of my imaginings littered the coffee table. Each one, a masterpiece, even as they fell short of the beauty that I watched in the golden sunset that crept in through the windows.

What would I do for a kiss?

I had offered her a gallery, for the chance to taste her sweet pussy. But for a kiss… what would I give?

A kiss meant more.

I had been in dozens of women, fucking them with a fervor like my cock could empty out the demons that lived in my mind. But I had seldom ever kissed them. Hell, I had rarely ever looked at them, really. Even if I sketched their naked forms in my studio at the Green Mansion. Even as they stripped for me, swaying in an erotic dance to titillate my visual senses. They were one of a hundred. One of a thousand.

Names, faces, voices all blurred together. But not her. Had she been a dilettante, then… maybe. So many people were just that. Philistines, and amateur, pretending to understand art while having nothing but the silence of an empty wind between their ears.

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