Page 46 of Unmask
“I still hate you,” I murmured into the dark, voice muffled by the pillow, barely carrying past the quiet.
From the threshold of my vision, I caught the corner of his mouth twitching. Not quite a smile but close. The moonlight spilling through the curtains cut soft shadows across his face, drawing lines over his perfect cheekbones and stubbled jaw. “Letme cross this invisible line,” he said in a husky drawl, “and I promise in thirty seconds you’ll be feeling the opposite of hate.”
A breath of laughter slipped out before I could catch it, and damn him and the way his eyes warmed, just a little, the smallest crack splitting through all the frost I’d been holding on to. “Kreed.”
“Now that’s just unfair, little raven.” The way he said it, as if he could taste every syllable, sent a small shiver down my spine. Not from fear. From something else entirely.
I should have looked away and reminded myself why I hated him, why I needed to keep the walls up.
I didn’t.
I stared at him even as the shadows blurred and my eyelids grew heavy. He just stayed. A steady shape in the dark, anchoring me without chains, and when my body finally sagged into the mattress, breath slowing, heart easing into something that didn’t feel like a constant war…I felt it.
His fingers brushed mine.
With a careful patience I hadn’t expected, he laced our fingers together one by one until his hand was wrapped in mine.
The logical part of my brain warned me to pull away, telling me this was too intimate. I should have shoved him out of the bed, out of the room, out of my life. Instead…I curled my fingers around his, and in the dark, I let myself believe for just a moment that he wasn’t the enemy, that he could be someone I loved, and that maybe I didn’t have to carry it all alone.
Maybe I didn’t want to let go. Not yet.
I woke slowly,the slow that only comes when, for once, your nightmares don’t find you. Warmth blanketed me, steady, solid, and familiar.
Kreed.
My hand was resting on his chest, rising and falling with each breath he took. His arm was curled beneath me, holding me as if I belonged there. At some point in the middle of the night, our bodies had betrayed us, nature taking over. We hadn’t crossed any lines intentionally, but I’d ended up here anyway, tangled with him.
God help me, it feels good.
His scent surrounded me, a mix of woods, hints of the sea, uniquely his that I was drawn to. I lifted my gaze, careful not to stir him, and found myself staring at his face, so peaceful in sleep, like the demons haunting him had given him a rare reprieve.
He was so fucking gorgeous.
That infuriating jawline, the way his lashes brushed the tops of his cheeks, the slight part to his lips as if he was on the verge of whispering something. My heart squeezed painfully in my chest.
My heart…yearned for him.
My body craved him.
And my soul…it reached for his in a way I didn’t know how to stop. Or if I even wanted to.
A slash of sunlight cut across his face, painting a line down the hollow of his cheekbone and catching on the two faint scars beneath his right eye. I’d never asked how he got them. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Some part of me feared the answer, but I remembered the first time I saw them, wondering who put them there, what kind of pain he’d endured. They weren’t the type of marks that faded. They stayed etched into skin, into memory.
My fingers itched to trace them, to feel the raised skin with the pads of my fingers. To press a kiss to the old wounds likeI could somehow erase them, but I just lay there, watching him breathe, because moments like this, unguarded and fragile, were rare, and deep down, a part of me was terrified it might be the last.
His breathing changed. Subtle. The pause between inhales stretched a fraction longer. His fingers twitched beneath mine, just slightly, barely enough to register unless you were watching like I was. He was waking up.
I should have looked away or shut my eyes and pretended to be asleep, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. My gaze stayed fixed on his face, on the slow blink of his lashes as he fought against sleep’s retreat, and when those familiar silver irises opened and locked on mine, I forgot all about propriety.
He looked at me with heavy-lidded eyes and an expression carved in stone, but his eyes… God, his eyes burned.
My heart kicked hard.
Rolling away would be smart. Distance, that was what I needed, but instead, my traitorous fingers drifted down the center of his chest, stopping at the flat press of his abs. The worn cotton of his shirt annoyed me.Why the hell was he still wearing it?
These were the intrusive thoughts I shouldn’t be having. It was too hard to remember I hated him when he was this close.
He continued to watch me, waiting to see what I would do next. I didn’t even know. A blaze of heat began to burn hotly inside me. The air between us thickened, heat rolling off him in quiet, pulsing waves.
