Page 59 of Tempting Fate
Now that was a particularly terrible idea. When she looked like a perfect angel, a halo of gold cast over her hair by the lone lamp. Her unblemished skin glowing in the dark like a beacon. Eyes bruised with smudges of exhaustion beneath, but glittering with something both dark and dazzling.
He didn’t want to close his eyes, not when it would hide this vision from him.
“Please close your eyes?” she beseeched him. “I can’t do this if you’re looking, I’m not brave enough.”
He shut his eyes, unable to deny her anything.
Trusting she wouldn’t hurt him.
Fingers slid up his chest to the muscles beneath his neck and then around to feather through his hair and draw his head low.
A kiss, no more substantial than a cloud of mist, whispered against his lips.
He should stop this. Not here. Not now. Not when she was in such a vulnerable state and his entire body was just one raw nerve.
Begging to be touched. To be soothed. To be stroked and caressed and all of the things he’d never been before.
All of the things, he realized now, that a human needed to feel alive.
To feel… anything.
The revelation came in a flood of unwarranted emotion as she teased the curves of his mouth with little presses and plucks of her own. Nibbling at his top lip, licking the bottom one before retreating. Testing the scar at the corner with a dart of her tongue.
Growling, he ripped his mouth from hers and brushed her hands off his chest before he gave her his back and retreated toward the door.
The little pats of her bare feet on the flagstones told him she didn’t allow his withdrawal. “Gareth? Did I do something wrong?”
“All of this was wrong,” he remonstrated in a dark, guttural tone.
But nothing in this world ever felt so good.
His name was not Gareth, for one, and then the truths only became more destructive from there. “You should be the one with your eyes closed,” he snarled. “You shouldn’t go around kissing monsters.”
“Oh no.” She rushed around him, gripping his shoulders just as he’d done to hers before. “No, Gareth, you mustn’t think that. You arenota monster It’s the world that is monstrous.” Her palms lifted to his jaw, cupping it on both sides. “You are… a marvel. Your presence has been a miracle to me. I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t found me.”
It was the trust in her eyes that tied him in knots. The earnest glow on her features that laid him to absolute waste.
“Felicity, I am not— I’m nothing like you think. You haven’t witnessed who I am or what I am capable of. You might imagine you have because you saw me end less than a handful of men in your defense, but I promise you. It’s so much worse than that.”
“How?” Her hold didn’t let up as she held his face captive in her velvet grip. “Tell me.”
“There is no point in confessing because there is no absolving me,” he warned, encircling her wrists and pulling her palms away from his skin, deciding to give her what truths he could tell. “I cut out all of the soft parts of myself when I was very young. I had to, so I could be steel and stone rather than flesh and blood. I did it so I could perform the ghastly deeds required of me, but only at first. After so long, I began to enjoy violence. And a few years later, I’d gone past caring at all. I became bored with it. Cold and impenetrable. Unfeeling. Ruthless. I’ve hurt those who didn’t deserve it. I’ve taken what didn’t belong to me. I’ve exacted revenge much more excruciating than the actual insult. You can’t begin to understand who I—”
“Look here.” She tucked chilly fingers into his and he couldn’t help but warm them. Using his acquiescence, she brought one of their joined hands to his chest, and spread his own fingers over his heart before covering it with her palm.
“You are not steel and stone. This is flesh and blood. Warmth and awareness. You are a man, not a machine. And though you are hard, I do not think you cut out your softness. Someone else tried to cut it out of you, but you did not let them. I think you buried it somewhere in there, where they could not find it. Perhaps whereyoucannot find it, and have convinced yourself it does not exist. But I believe you could uncover that softness and reclaim your good heart. Let it beat again.”
Gabriel had to swallow twice before he could form words. His limbs had become paralyzed, his pulse erratic and strange. His head swam with a miasma of thoughts, desires, fears, and fantasies. “I don’t know how…”
She brought his knuckles to her cheek and dragged the downy skin over them like an affectionate cat before pressing her lips to each scarred bone.
His chest pumped harder as he watched, a captive of her sincerity.
“I think you do.” She flicked a gaze at him from beneath her lashes. “You are gentle with me…”
“I don’t always want to be.”
A shy curl of her lip was her astonishing response. “Maybe someday, you won’t have to.”
