Page 81 of Angel in Absentia
“The devastation will be gruesome,” he said, a fact they both knew, but he seemed compelled to bring it up.
“If you need a healer,” she started, fire working its way into her voice. “You’ll need a healer.”
He inspected her closely. The thunder churned beyond them. A flash of lightning broke the sky. His face was unreadable, eyes burning. His body, even his fingers, felt tense under hers, and she didn’t understand the reaction when so often he seemed at ease. “We will go first without you. I don’t know what will be waiting for us. I’ll come back to retrieve you in the throne room in three hours. In the meantime, I’ll need you to rest and recharge. Prince will be your escort and he will bring you back at any risk of death,” he said with clear restraint.
It was clear he didn’t want her to come. It was very possible he didn’t even want to go.
She looked at him and swallowed, and a powerful feeling filled her chest. They were in the forest again, just the two of them, cast in the wild expanse of the trees. They looked at each other, and she felt her energy reach for him, screen through him as if trying to sense a lie, but she wasn’t. Her energy was rampant and connective, and he was suddenly the sole focus.
He seemed to sense this testing touch of her power, visibly tensing, his eyes searching hers as if unsure of what she was doing. She wasn’t even sure what she was doing, still feeling drawn across the world from repetitive healings, and wanting, more than she ever had, to reach him. Her power filled the space around them, released and uncontrolled, aching to touch everything, connect with it, speak to it.
It seemed like such a natural thing to reach for his face, to caress the skin, soothe the endless sea of suffering that she felt writhing underneath. There was so much of it that she already felt herself getting lost in its blackness. Like magnets, his energy called to her own.
She reached with both hands, and he looked at her hands as if he ached for them. Clea thought that he would remain still, allow her to make real contact at last, but then he moved with surprising speed and severity.
He grabbed her wrists and turned her before she could touch his skin. Her breath was nearly caught in her lungs as he slammed her hands against the stone wall of the temple. As if snapped from a daze, she realized what she’d almost done.
“I didn’t—” she started apologetically, wincing at her own impulsive foolishness, her words spoken against the wall.
“I know,” he whispered, and the huskiness of his voice drew her into a sudden, alert stillness. She felt his body behind hers, the warmth and strength of it, demonstrated in the subtlest way by a gentle grip on her wrists that was full of potential.
She opened her mouth to speak, to say anything, but her words had stilled in reverence of this moment as if held prisoner by a silent guard who demanded the moment be left untouched by any interruption of her voice.
There was a spell in his hands, an energy she couldn’t explain, but her entire body began to soften under the firmness of his grip as if he drew the tension out of her. He was one thing, she was the other, and side by side, she felt herself begin to dissolve into the energy that he was not, the energy she wanted to be. The agonies of the present moment were at the brink ofbeing abandoned, if only for a second of relief. She hurried away from them; their lurking dangers only added to the urgency of savoring this exchange as it was.
His grip extended beyond a form of control. Drawn up and out, her lungs opened, her heart raced like a rabbit, and still, she relished the lightness of it, felt a mantle lift from her shoulders and bind itself to his hands. For a moment, everything was painless, her suffering delivered into his hands.
She felt his breath on her throat, and she swallowed, closing her eyes. He cradled her body against the shell of his. Clea resisted the urge to lean back against him, tilt her head against his shoulder, and express the worrisome things she felt, breathe them out never to return.
She sucked in a breath when his free hand grazed the lifted hem of her dress, coiling it around his hand. It was slow and careful, giving her every opportunity to object.
“There is the door,” he reminded her, his voice tense, at the edge of control. The door he offered, she knew, was to leave this moment, an invitation to decline him.
She held her breath just as the metallic touch of cool fingers, sharp and warmed by her skin, grazed the line of her knee. They drew across her outer thigh, following the path of the illness he’d removed. The feelings were powerful and curious ghosts of those from the altar at King Kartheen’s castle, and she was there again, experiencing something she’d relived a thousand times before in her mind, at last allowed to relive it again.
Her eyes shut and she swallowed, trying to control her breathing as his finger slid across her hip bone, following the marks of theillness across her stomach with such precision that it was clear that he remembered them perfectly.
The fingers were sharp and cool, dangerous as they moved against her soft, warm skin, cutting a path through which those old sensations bled from memory. The silence held little but her breathing and his against the rain, his hand tracing along her abdomen.
Her mind flickered into blankness like a flame straining for air, some sensible part of her reaching for an awareness of the outside world, while the rest of her dissolved. He held her with one hand and stirred her with the other, transforming her into raw, thoughtless energy as if she were a spell he was casting.
Her heart drummed almost painfully. Free of her control, it was a riot in her chest and it took everything in her to simply inhale and not hold the air hostage. As if in every way aware of this inner transformation, perhaps through the catch in her breathing, the subtle shift of muscle and skin beneath his touch, her thundering pulse, Ryson whispered praise into her ear.
“Good. Take every breath,” he said and those words alone in the growl of his voice nearly made her lose it again. His hands followed the lines of her former illness, moving between and over her breasts and down again below her navel, until she knew their next path, but he stopped there.
She shifted beneath his touch in the silence, immersed in a different world, this dark, warm place apart from the constraints of everything else that mattered.
His fingers traced small circles over her skin as he whispered, both beseeching and commanding, “Say my name.”
What were names? She hardly remembered she had one, and she dug through every locked vault of her mind, straining to whisper the word she’d refused him only hours ago.
“Ryson,” she said, relenting.
“Good,” he said with pleasure and perhaps a whisper of relief, and she was pleased that he was pleased, alarmed at how she suddenly yearned for that.
“Again,” he whispered, and she consented breathlessly.
“Ryson.”
