Blakeshire (Insight #9)(24)

“You can glare at me for saying this, but would the fact that she let you call her that in this life not be a clue to you that she was not me?”

“It was. But how was I to know there was another girl with your image that had a past with me? In my mind, I was trying to move on to the next life so I could be with the girl that demanded that I walk a tight line, that I never blur the lines of truth.”

“So that is why you so willingly chose to lay down your life? You were testing her?”

“No.” My eyes moved across her curious expression, hearing Zander’s one-word advice in my mind: honesty. “I laid down my life for my people.”

“You do love them,” she said, almost to herself.

“They need to be saved, Madison Marie Blair; one way or another, they need to be saved.”

She believed me. A smile spread across her face.

“You’ll find the way,” she promised.

“We. We will find it.”

“I’d smother in that palace.”

“What does the palace have to do with us saving them?”

“The ‘us’ was you and Willow days ago.”

“No, it was me, Willow, Landen, and the entire dimension of Chara.”

“True.” She reached to mirror my gentle caress. When her fingertips reached my lips, I sighed.

“I’ve been haunted by a phobia, an image, and now that I have no fear I want to end that.”

“What image?” I swore I’d stop at nothing to slaughter whatever had hurt her in the past.

“A woman, I think. She scared me away from water when I was a girl…I saw her again when I came to save you. In the paintings.” She let out a breath. “If she was to trying to keep me away from you, then I have no choice but to believe that she is trying to keep me away from something just as sacred.”

My entire body relaxed, and naturally, with a careful ease I leaned in to let my lips meet hers.



Madison



My soul exploded, and I could swear that my very being was reaching for him to come closer. The scent of roses filled the room as his warm tongue reached for mine and I tasted the sweet, powerful flavor of mint. That flavor was fast becoming an addiction; one that I knew no matter how obsessed I became with would never grow old.

Gently, he caressed my hair with the palm of his hand as his lips danced with mine. Every cell in my body was on fire; with the simplest gesture, he could make my heart race, my core clench, and my breath cease.

My hand reached for his arm and pulled it around me as I edged closer, taking control of this rush. I felt the power behind his kiss intensify, the warmth of his skin under his shirt. Without even thinking about it, I pushed the button-up shirt off his shoulders. He rolled on top of me, giving me permission to take it off his broad shoulders.

As his lips traveled down my jaw, then my neck, he braced his arm by my head. For some jacked-up reason, I opened my eyes—and when I did I saw his tattoo, a dragon wrapped around a willow tree. My body tensed, and he noticed immediately, stopping his pursuit. Slowly, his eyes rose from the rim of my shirt and followed my stare. I had killed the moment with one glance.

He rolled to his back, stared at the ceiling, and his jaw flinched in anger.

“I’ll get over it one day,” I uttered nervously, hating how cold I felt all of a sudden; the room went from a thousand degrees to twenty below zero in an instant.

“Madison Marie. I don’t want you to get over this tattoo.”

That statement made me feel so sick that I could barely breathe.





Chapter Five

Drake




She stiffly rose from the bed. Honesty was not my friend at this moment, but I was about to make it a servant. We needed to bury this hatchet one way or another.

I reached for her wrist. “When are you going to stop running from me?”

Tears burned in her eyes as she turned away from me and let her legs fall to the side of the bed.

I pulled myself up on the bed and moved closer to her. Before she found the courage to run, I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her between my legs.

She was stiff and refused to comply easily, but I moved her with little effort.

My tattoo was now squarely in her face. She held her eyes tightly closed as her body trembled in my embrace. I lowered my lips to just behind her ear, knowing that spot on her body was one of many that clearly drove her wild when touched.

“Ask me why,” I whispered in my dark, kingly tone.

She refused to speak. She couldn’t; she was fighting back tears, something she saw as a weakness—but something I saw as a breakthrough. They meant she gave a damn.

As my hands moved across her arms, that glow I saw before was more defined. I wanted to believe it was her soul reaching for mine. The involuntary sigh that escaped her lips told me she felt my touch just as deeply as I felt hers.

“Madison Marie,” I breathed.

“Why?” she said with a quiver full of every emotion I craved to feel, every emotion that told me her soul was made of mine.

I felt my body lose some, but not all, of its tension. We still had a long way to go. “My first...my first everything…was under a willow tree,” I confessed.

She tensed, leading me to believe that by some stroke of luck or favor from the Creator Himself she had dreams that told her that that was the truth. That it really was her that stole my heart a million times over.