Page 66 of The Ballad of a Bard

“Tell me.” She uttered lustfully, writhing against him. Against the hardness that stabbed his front. The proof that he wanted her too, especially in this state. “Tell me everything.”

He wanted to. Saints be damned, he wanted to tell her and then dootherthings with her. She dragged against him, the hardest part of him and she sucked in a chilled air as she understood.

“Oh,” She breathed.

West drew the confidence from himself, sighing deeply as hishead dropped slightly. “If I do, then you have to agree that that’s it. Nothing else will happen between us. I won’t cross that line with you. Not while you’re living in my room, sleeping in my bed.”

“It’s just sex, West. Please.”

To hear her beg like that, her tone so full of desperation, he almost gave in. Almost. But that righteous side of him that made him the Northern Star in the first place spoke up, whispering that it wasn’t a good idea. He listened to it.

The blood was slowly returning to his head.

“No, Crimson.” He stroked her face, cupping her cheek. “It could never be just sex with you.”

Her mouth parted, fell open as she understood what he meant. “You said that you never wanted to love.”

“I stand by that.” He confirmed with a dip of his chin. “I don’t. Ican’t.Which is why I won’t venture into any sort of relationship with you. Physical, mental, emotional.”

Her next question pierced his heart, his soul, his very existence. “Because you love me?”

West didn’t know how to respond without breaking her heart into oblivion. A place that there was no coming back from, a place that nothing could climb out of and survive. The very last thing he wanted to do was break her. Not after all she’d been through.

He chose his next words very carefully.

“I think I would fall in love with you if we started something there. I don’t care if it would have begun with an intimate, physical aspect, or not. It will never just be purely sex between us.”

“Is that so terrible? Would falling in love be that wrong?” Crimson pleaded with him. “Is it such a terrifying idea that you don’t even want to try?”

“You will never understand it, not in the slightest.” He shotat her, baring his teeth. “So yes, that’s the closest I can come to explaining it to you.”

“I see.” She snapped, and he saw the old Crimson returning to her expression, even if only by a little. Her chest rose and fell, her breathing became normal once again, as if the spell had finally worn off.

But things had been irreversibly damaged between them. He saw that now. Fine. It was better that way.

“Tomorrow,” West let go of her, “I’ll be staying in my apartments at the Spinning Compass. Consider this room yours. I won’t stop paying for Cobalt’s treatments, either. We’ll continue our search for Heartache, and I won’t stop helping until we find him, you have my word on that. But it’s clear to me, to both of us, that we can’t remain in the same space after tonight.”

She looked pitiful, as if he’d taken her between his hands and snapped her in half. He longed to comfort her, to bring back a semblance of the female that laughed and smiled at him, the one that was his friend. But she wasn’t there anymore.

“Heartstri-”

“Don’t call me that.” Crimson shoved him aside, striding out of the shower and grabbing a cotton cloth off a hanging rack nearby. She wrapped it around her shivering shoulders and sent a wrathful look in his direction. He almost shrank back from it, from her.

But he deserved it.

Deserved it all.

“Muse was right about you. You don’t want to let anyone in, regardless of the cost to those who try. I would have made it worth it, to suffer in the end.”

West hardened himself into steel. “I know.”

Twenty Eight

West’s face held nothing in it that signalled that she could change his mind. The panels of his throat were hard, golden skin plastered in a determined place.

“Fine,” Crimson muttered, the cold seeping into her somewhat immortal bones. The towel wasn’t doing much to cover the barely there corset and under things that Muse had practically shoved her into. “If you’re so determined to leave, then do it already.”

The cold water had soothed her for a minute, allowing her back into her own mindset but it hadn’t lasted long at all. The power of Heartache was still swimming laps under her sensitive skin and it was bubbling into another lapse of lust.

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