Page 58 of Tempting Fate
“You are safe. I have you.” He cupped her head to his chest with one hand, the other spanning her trembling spine. “Slow your breath.”
“I can’t,” she gasped. “My skin is on fire and my limbs are so cold. My throat will close, I feel it.Oh, God.”
“I won’t let that happen,” he soothed, watching the pulse jump in her neck like a caged hummingbird. “Just breathe with me.” He deliberately expanded his ribs, then contracted them, urging her to do the same.
At first, her inhales were wobbly. Hitching and much too fast, but she did as he bade her to do. She focused. And after several silent minutes, her breaths matched the rhythm of his with only a few hiccups.
The tremors in her limbs gentled and she melted against him in a boneless drape of exhaustion.
“There now,” he said. “Do you want to tell me what frightened you? Was it a nightmare?”
“I don’t think so. Sometimes I— I wake like this. I can’t stop it. It’s like a wave that drags me under and drowns me in dread.”
“Why did you come out here?”
Why didn’t you come to me?
“If I stay in the dark, it often won’t relent, or it will plague me well into the morning. Sometimes I can distract myself out here until it goes away. The chill of the air, the busy garden chores, splashing my hands and face with cold water, burying my nose in lavender. I can focus my mind on other things, and eventually it passes. But… this time it felt impossible.” Her head lifted from his chest, and the night chill kissed his skin.
Skin.He’d not buttoned his shirt.
“You’re better now?” he ventured. “Can you stand?”
Nodding, she allowed him to help her up, but when he would have pulled back, she stepped forward, keeping their bodies pressed together.
“Wait.” She laid her cheek back against his heart, finding the rhythm with her ear. One arm slid around his torso to rest on the column of muscle next to his spine, and the other traced the blue tattoo of a sneering skull right below his clavicle. “I didn’t know you looked like this.” Her fingertips charted a course over his pectoral, finding other images in the sparse smattering of hair on his chest.
She’d be too kind to say it if she found him hideous to look at.
His body was an unsightly map of fearsome beasts, weathered ships, weapons, icons, and symbols of death. She shouldn’t look, but damned if he didn’t want her to discover every inch.
“What are you doing?” This time, it washisvoice that trembled.
“I cannot say. I just… like the way you feel.” The hand on his back tested the dips and swells of his muscle there, fanning across his expanse of smooth skin. “The way you look.” Her slight fingers skipped over the sensitive protrusion of his nipple with a featherlight caress, leaving trails of fire in their wake. “The way you hold me.”
“Felicity,” he growled as she bumped her way down a few ribs, finding the bandage on his healing wound and tracing the outside.
“I hate that you were hurt because of me.”
He hated that she might be in danger because of him. Hated himself for lying to her, and for the truths that would cause her pain.
Hated that there was a decent voice somewhere beneath his thundering desire— so faint and low— that told him to pull back. To button his shirt and take her to bed.
Toherbed.
Alone.
Gooseflesh rose over his entire body as she angled back to look up at him, drawing her hand around his torso until both palms splayed against his chest.
His breath locked behind his ribs as he discovered things about himself he never knew before. Things he imagined other people did know by his age.
Because they’d been touched by other human beings.
The feel of her nails brushing his skin was possibly the sweetest sensation he’d yet experienced. He wanted more of it. He wanted to lean into a scratch like a needy hound. The place where his ribs winged into his back was ticklish. And the graze of his nipple could be felt as a jolt of pleasure in his cock.
Pleasant lessons were these. Blissful discoveries.
“Close your eyes,” she whispered.
