Page 64 of Crying Wolfe
Never had he felt a climax so completely. So intricately. From his own seed leaving his body, jettisoning her womb before he sank so deep, he touched the edge. It pulled from him in confounding surges, like waves breaching the shore and crawling higher than they dared before.
Finally, his pleasure ebbed, and he dropped his forehead between her shoulder blades.
She pressed a soft kiss against the indents her teeth had left in his palm, and the tenderness in the gesture threatened to unstitch him.
A tremor undulated down her spine, passing between their joined flesh and licking his own back with electric pleasure.
It was like being released from chains he’d worn for damn near four days. Andromeda had nothing on him, as he’d have preferred literal chains to the ones she held over his soul. “I’d better make peace with this now,” he lamented breathlessly. “Doesn’t matter how hard I try to be free of this, I will never be able to give you up.”
It was Rosaline who disengaged from him, moving as far as she could in the confined space to straighten and smooth her skirts back down her legs. As he tucked himself back in his trousers, she bent at the knees to retrieve her ripped undergarments before facing him.
“How hard did you try to be free of me?” she asked, her voice dull between her own beleaguered breaths.
Smoothing down his hair, Eli castigated himself for making it sound worse than he’d meant it, but he answered her honestly. “That morning I left, I’d almost convinced myself I wouldn’t return…”
“Because of our predicament.” Her shadow shifted, and he wished like hell he could see her face. “The predicamentIput us in.”
“Because you stole the chalice and lied to me about it for weeks.Weeks.While I tore this world apart looking for it.” He turned from her, his hand landing on the latch of the closet. Why the fuck were they hiding in here, anyhow? They’d done nothing wrong.
“No one would blame you, if you went back home to America,” she said tersely. “It’s very probable you will feel less trapped there in all that wide open space. Don’t they call it the land of the free?”
And just like that, his warm afterglow flared into a temper. “Don’t act like your life wouldn’t be easier without me to keep an eye on your sticky fingers. I’m not the thief here.I’mnot the liar, or have you forgotten? I’ve donenothingto break faith.”
She was silent for so long, their breaths became cannon blasts over a dark battlefield. He could sense her behind him. Close but not touching. Her heavy exhalations breaking against his spine.
They’d been as connected as two bodies could be only seconds ago. Hell, his orgasm still shimmered along his spine.
But there was a chasm growing between them he couldn’t see his way across.
“You abandoned me fordays,” she accused in a voice so low he had to strain to hear it. “Left me with no word, no goodbye. You did that to be cruel. To hurt me, because I hurt you. But there’s a difference between what we’ve done to each other, Eli. Ineverintended you any pain. Had I known how my actions affected you, I would have cut off my own hands to keep from offending you like I did. But you…you deserted our marriage without ever allowing me a voice. And now you’ve decided to return to our bed, because your lust will not allow you to leave your thief of a wife?”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“It’s what you meant,” she insisted.
“And what if it is? This thing you do, it isn’t right. Why can’t you just stop?”
“Don’t you think I’vetried?” she railed, her voice raising in both pitch and volume. “I don’t want this. I would give anything not to be this way!”
At that, Eli paused, utterly confounded. “Then…why?”
“I wish I knew.” She was back to barely above a whisper now, a bleak thread reaching through the dark to lance him with her pain. “It started when I was nine. This…this overwhelming need. I would have such fits, such bouts of pure physical suffering. My chest would feel like it might explode, my skin would be raw, my lungs refusing to work. The doctor said it was nerves. Tried to dose me with all sorts of tonics, but nothing worked… At least not well. The first time I took something, it was after my mother had berated me for an eternity. The relief I felt was indescribable, and so then next time I was in trouble, I did it again. And again. And each time I did…I’d gain control over the sensations threatening to rip my heart from my chest.”
Eli swallowed around a lump of sympathy. Caleb had suffered something like she described. Conniptions of heart palpitations and uncontrollable shaking. Especially in times of stress. He’d become convinced that he couldn’t breathe. That his throat was closing over. They went to the doctor several times, only to be told he was fine.
But he wasn’t fine…
“Does your family know? Does Morley?”
She shook her head. “Don’t blame Morley, he has no idea.”
“I was asking if anyone ever offered to find you help… Did no one else realize? Your mother, or father?”
“Only my Uncle Reginald, but…” She shifted again, her shadow becoming smaller. “He…he made it worse.”
“The fuck did he do?” Eli demanded, his entire being screaming at the stars to not let his dark suspicion be true.
“I’d stopped for a while, after finishing school,” she remembered aloud. “Emmaline and I realized that I seemed to get worse during times of stress, and if I cultivated other behaviors, I could keep the need at bay…but then Father stopped coming to visit often, and Uncle Reginald moved in with us at Fairhaven.”
