Page 155 of Deadwood
My palm flattened to his chest as I drifted closer. “I think you’d do anything to keep your people alive.”
A sort of predatory glint took form in his gaze, and I looked down, focusing on where my hand made contact with his skin. My core heated, every nerve in my body lighting up like a match as my palm tingled against him. His finger hooked under my chin, lifting my head so that I had no choice but to face him.
Everywhere we connected sparked like a life source flowed through our touch alone. Something darkened in my peripheral, and at first, I thought it might’ve been the sun finally disappearing for the day, but upon closer inspection, it wasn’t that at all.
The water was turning a deep purple.
I went to draw my hand away from Bowen, but he grabbed my wrist, holding it in place.
“Why is it doing that?” I asked, confusion and slight panic lacing my words.
“It feels you,” Bowen answered, but provided no further clarification.
Violet ripples collided with our bodies as my brows furrowed. “Feelsme?”
“It’s not just the minerals working alone to cause that color, but the magic, too. It can sense your emotions. How you’re reacting to being in this spring with me.”
The furrow of my brows deepened. None of what he was saying was making this any clearer.
“I saw you in the tunnel,” he admitted. “With the fire magic. How it reacted to you, and you to it. How it didn’t ink you that day in the market.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “It’s just magic?—”
“You don’t have to hide from me, Auria.” With his finger still hooked under my chin, he moved to place his palm against my cheek. “I see you. All the things you try to keep secret, I notice. All the hurt you try to keep bottled inside, I feel.”
“I’m engaged,” I blurted, scared of what his words were doing to me. How they were making me feel. I didn’t want to hurt him when I left, and these feelings he was admitting… They would only lead to heartbreak.
But it wasn’t as if my engagement mattered anymore anyway. Lander and I had both agreed to call it off as soon as the bridge was rebuilt and we made it home, which would be any day now.
“Who do you think you’re fooling? Because it’s not me.”
“I don’t take you as a fool,” I defended. He was anything but.
“Then what do you take me as?” As if an answer to that question might be so simple.
And it truly wasn’t. I didn’t have an answer because I was quickly coming to find that I took Bowen aseverything. The reason I was able to step out of my comfort zone and feel safe. The reason I was alive. The reason I’d been second-guessing returning to the place I had grown up—the place that’d only served as my prison. He had shown me what freedom could look like. How the sun felt on my skin if I let myself bathe in it. That my magic wasn’t something to be ashamed of, but rather proud of.
How my heart seemed to skip a beat every time I saw him.
“Give in, Auria,” Bowen murmured, his voice a caress on the part of me that wanted to do exactly that. “Stop holding yourself back from the things you want most in this life andgive in.”
And maybe it was the water, or the chill catching on the dusk air as the sun fell behind the horizon, giving us the privacy we desired, or the words he spoke so blissfully that drew my lips to his.
Or maybe it was simply what I wanted, and I was able to do it.
“Fuck this,” I muttered, right before our mouths molded together in an explosion of hunger and need.
My hand slid up his chest to wrap around the back of his neck at the same time his fingers tangled in my hair, pulling me flush against him. Our lips fit together like they were meant to be, and I wasn’t sure if it was me or the spring, but the water seemed to warm around our bodies.
A wisp of air floated up the center of my back, and I realized it was his smoke that caressed me as his tongue slipped past my lips. I welcomed him, my own dancing with his in a rhythm only the two of us could make together. As if that sparked a match, the kiss became ravenous, our mouths became rougher, starved of the other like this wasn’t enough. We were each other’s oxygen, our only source of life flowing between our ravaging kiss.
Our breaths melded together, and he inhaled deeply as he consumed me, pressing his forehead to mine. “I can smell what I do to you.” His hands tightened in my hair, like it was almost painful for him to admit that. “All I want is to taste your sweetness on my tongue.”
A small whimper escaped me at the thought of him doing just that, and he swallowed the sound with another kiss. He pressed his lower body to mine, his hard length a tease where it rested against my stomach. Suddenly, my senses became overloaded with a wave of honey and sugar.
“Make that sound again,” Bowen pleaded, murmuring the words into my mouth before he pulled his lips from mine to pepper kisses down my jaw, to my neck.
He wrapped an arm around my waist as my back bowed, my head tilted up toward the sky as I exposed my neck further for him. He kept me upright when my legs wanted to give out from the surreal need for him, and a wave of dizziness came and went. Never mind the vulnerability in this spring—I didn’t think anything could stop me from wanting more of him. Ofthis.
