Page 82 of Iron Blade

“I was nothing until this moment,” he said, before his breaths evened out, and we both gave in to the joy of sleep, his cock staying inside me, contaminating my dreams with lustful images of us, joined and grasping at one another, even as the darkness tried to pull us apart. “I was nothing until I loved you, Kira Green.”

Chapter twenty-eight

Photograph

Eoghan

Two days passed in quiet bliss. We spent it drinking wine from the cellar, and making do with the cold cuts in the fridge, and a loaf of bread Dairo had the housekeepers deliver. My dear cousin, and his attention to detail.

With a second of guilt, I realized that the food here had been left by Malinda Brock, the housekeeper’s daughter. The woman who was far too infatuated with me for comfort.

I dismissed those thoughts because they didn’t belong in my honeymoon. Not when I was looking at my wife, sitting at the window, her feet up on the edge of the chair, and a book on her thighs.

She was wearing my silk shirt from the wedding. The shirt was unbuttoned, leaving a beautiful trail of her brown skin down to her navel.

“It’s creepy that you keep drawing me,” she said with a grin, her eyes never lifting from the book, as she twirled her finger around a long curl.

“I’d photograph you like this, if I could,” I admitted, hearing the scratch of my pencil on the paper. I didn’t look at what I was drawing. I knew what it would look like when I looked down. I knew my hands, and their work. Instead, my eyes stuck to the curve of her cheek, and the sweet arch of her eyelashes. “But I’d never allow a photo of you out in the world. This is a vision made for me, and me alone.”

“Get a polaroid?” she said, with a little smirk.

I lifted a brow. “And what if some maid or servant cleaning the house found them? I’d have to gouge their eyes out and beat them into a coma so that the image of your beauty didn’t even live in their mind.”

“Possessive,” she said, her voice a gentle, sensual moan.

“This vision of you only exists for me.” I ruminated on the possibility of something being made only for me, and only existing in my brain. It would certainly be more intimate that way. That when I died, so would the memory of my Muse.

Still, I knew I wanted pictures of her on my phone, on my wall, on a frame by my bedside.

“I’ll need pictures of you,” I said, “but not so… intimate. I think pictures of your glorious face will be enough.”

“So take one,” she said.

“I will.” It was a sudden statement as I fished into the nightstand to get my phone. “Grab your little flower crown.”

I should have had a photographer at our wedding. I should have had a thousand pictures of her in that damn dress, walking down the aisle, even if it was in an empty church.

Maybe I could recreate it in a painting.

I had never put much stock in photographs because there was so much that they missed. They might be able to get clinical accuracy, but only a painting could capture the spirit and aura of a person. Like the portrait I was making now of a bride basking in the love of her groom.

Her dark eyes finally looked at me.

“Don’t move!” I commanded, and she looked back down at her book with a smirk. “I’m almost done with this one.”

I glanced at the paper and saw that the bright colors of the window, and her in shadow, was almost complete. More than a perfect facsimile of the image in front of me was the feeling this image evoked. She had an ethereal glow, and whether that was a figment of my imagination or if it was real, it didn’t matter.

The feeling evoked by the sight of her was as important as the literal image that could be snapped by the imperfection of a camera.

I ran my finger over the charcoal, spreading it across the paper to make the correct spread of shadow beneath my wife’s breast. What would I name this portrait? I wasn’t sure. I leaned back in satisfaction, gazing at the image I had created and the woman who inspired it.

“Through the eyes of Kira’s husband,” I said out loud, as I wrote it down in the corner of the paper, giving the creation a name.

She looked at me, her head tilted, her face almost grave.

“You take that seriously, don’t you?” Her voice was filled with wonder. “Being a husband.”

I folded the cover of the sketchbook, to close it on my lap.

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