The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(94)
Their eyes locked. Then their lips. And finally their bodies, every intimate part of them clenched together, pouring secrets and the past through the spaces contained between their molecules.
Pleasure sang behind the inferno that had become her blood, immolating her ability to draw breath. She felt the pulses of their sex synchronize, reveled in the warm jets of release he buried deep against her womb as they rode a simultaneous release so incredibly high, the cave echoed with the song of ecstasy that promised to fuse their very souls.
For the soft moments after, or maybe an eternity, they rested their foreheads against one another, struggling to regain enough breath to say the words that needed to be said.
He used his shirt to clean them, then discarded it to the sand, still unwilling—or unable—to release her from the prison of his arms.
Lorelai collapsed against him, leached of all strength. A willing captive, yet again. “Are you all right, my love?” She smoothed her hands down his heaving back, nuzzling into the muscular cove where his neck met his shoulder.
His gasp landed somewhere between wrath, disbelief, and laughter. “Am I all right? Lorelai … Jesus seafaring Christ. You were just abducted by a mutinying band of pirates, nearly shot, and then ravaged in a way more bestial than human.”
“I’m no worse for wear, thanks to you,” she said against his fragrant skin. “See for yourself.”
He pulled back only enough to look down at her. More like, to devour her with eyes so dramatic, she had the sense he couldn’t take everything in at once and it frustrated him. “Ash…”
“No, Lorelai, I’m not fucking all right!” he exploded, crushing her to him with even more force, this time. “Goddammit, I saw you slipping through my fingers once again. I was faced with losing you forever. What if you were killed? Taken across an ocean even I wouldn’t be able to forge, as surely in the next life we’ll be forced in opposite directions.”
Lorelai tucked a smile against his chest, as now wasn’t the time, and she had to admit to a bit of pleasure in his admission of how much she meant to him. “I could do my level best to be more wicked,” she suggested. “After what we’ve just done, I’d hazard that I’m well on my way. Then, wherever the next life takes us, at least we’ll be together.”
“No,” he said between feathering soft, desperate kisses over the whole of her face. “You are an angel, Lorelai. My angel.”
“And you are mine.”
“Don’t tease me,” he admonished darkly.
“I’m not. There are many kinds of angels. Fallen ones, for example, avenging ones…”
“I will avenge you,” he vowed against her skin. “Just as soon as I can tear myself from your arms, I’ll cut off every finger he touched you with and make him watch as I feed them to the sharks. I’ll hang his bleeding corpse out like bait and watch them leap for him, taking great chunks—”
“Just stop, Ash. Stop it.” Lorelai ineffectually pushed against his chest, only gaining enough ground to look up into his swirling, fathomless eyes. “I don’t care about any of that. It’s not what I want.”
He gazed down at her in dismay. “What do you want? Anything. Name it. It’s yours.”
“I want you to love me.” She glanced down at his buttons, wishing she’d not admitted it. Wishing she didn’t suddenly feel so vulnerable.
He made that devilish sound she’d come to recognize as his amusement. He tucked a finger beneath her chin, dragging her gaze back up to his. What she read there lifted her soul more than words ever could. “Every word I ever said to make you doubt my love is now a blasphemy to me. I meant it when I told you that I should have said it twenty years ago, before I left … I should have said it the moment I returned.”
A tear slid unbidden down her cheek, and he thumbed it away as he was wont to do. “Why didn’t you?” She wasn’t reprimanding him. She truly desired the answer.
“As a boy, I was afraid that the sheer, unmitigated power of my love for you was wrong, somehow. You were so young. So innocent. And I … I always knew I was this—this monster. Even though I had no memories, there were scars on my soul that were even more ugly and distasteful than those on my body. I couldn’t bear to reveal them to you, especially when I couldn’t remember what made them.”
“And you remember now?” She shaped a hand over his unshaven jaw, her heart welling with a warmth and light she’d not felt since their childhood.
He nodded, swallowing down an emotion that didn’t seem to be easily grappled. “When I came for you, I truly thought myself incapable of love. It was a selfish act. I know that. But I couldn’t admit that what I felt for you was that exact thing. I thought it merely need. I had a void, not only in my memory, but in my soul. That void was you, Lorelai. I’ve always known that.”
“I missed you, too, Ash. Every day for twenty years, there was a hole in my heart that belonged to you.”
“You don’t understand.” He growled as though angry, though with her or himself, she couldn’t be sure. “It’s not that I merely missed you … You are not a hole in my heart, you are the whole of my heart. When I think of a life without you, it is like a life without breath. I’m not me but for you. I exist, but I’m not alive. You said that when you met me, my eyes were dead. They were dead. I was dead. And if I lose you, they will be again. I know I don’t deserve you. I know I’m a thief, a killer, a pirate, and worse. There’s a darkness in me, Lorelai, one I’m afraid will consume your light. But, God help me, I can’t let you go.”