Page 120 of Her Cruel Redemption

Slowly, he began to smile. Widely. Like sunlight breaking across his face. Dimple and all. ‘Alright.’

I swallowed, completely unnerved by the pulsing, expanding, consuming warmth in my chest, the way it seemed to want to leech out and take over my entire body at the sight of that fucking smile. Still didn’t trust the feeling. ‘Alright,’ I said, brusquely, turning my back on him to pick through the basket again, busying my hands. ‘Do you want a drink before I finish it all?’

He didn’t answer. I heard his footsteps behind me, hands stilling as I felt him draw close, heat beginning to flush my skin. But he didn’t reach for me. When I turned, it was to find him standing so close, so readily within my grasp, looking down at me with an expression that mirrored that warm glow in my veins. But it was like we didn’t know how to touch each other anymore. I felt so raw, so exposed, my skin so sensitive that it seemed to react to just the flicker of his gaze when he dropped it down, brushed it across the sweep of my neck, raising goosebumps even without touching me, found my lips. He seemed to be almost holding his breath, and it was so strange, that waver of uncertainty I saw in his eyes, so unlike anything I’d ever known in him before. In all the problems between us, all the dysfunction, there had never been uncertainty in this part of who we were. He had seduced me as easily as breathing, as though he knew my mind and what I wanted just as well as he knew my body and how it needed to be touched. The hesitation now was enough to draw my hands to him.

‘Your clothes are crusted with salt,’ I admonished softly.

‘So are yours.’

‘We’ll have to wash them,’ I said, caressing a button on his shirt with my fingers. Undoing it. Slipping down to the next one, and the next one, until they were all gaping open. Exposing skin as I slid the fabric off his arms and it dropped to the floor. My breath caught for a moment at the sight of him, at the bruising. His stomach and ribs were blotted with patches of purple and blue and black.

‘I’m alright,’ he said, reading my expression. ‘You’ll just have to be gentle with me for a few days. No stabbing or lightning bolts to the chest.’

I laughed, but the sound came out high and strangled. ‘I’ll do my best.’

His jaw tightened as I trailed hands over his shoulders, my chest aching. He held so still as I traced his collar bone, his stomach, found the ragged white scar I had put there, his eyes fixed intently on my face, so intently I had to drop my gaze. Gently, I laid my palm against his chest, felt the thrum of his heart, the quickened pace of it.

He took a hold of my wrist. ‘It’s yours. Do what you want with it. Bruise it, break it. Carve it from my chest. It’s yours all the same.’

I anchored myself against that steady beat. ‘You love me,’ I said, and it still sounded like a question, even though I knew. Iknew.

His chest rose and fell as he took a deep breath and released it. ‘I love you,’ he said. His other hand found my chin, lifted it until I was looking up at him again. ‘And you love me.’

I licked my lips. Swallowed. My heartbeat was frantic. But I held his grey eyes. Because I had felled a kingdom and stared down an army and called storms from the sky. I wasnotgoing to be cowed or defeated by this. ‘I… love you.’

I had only a moment to admire the relief, the triumph, thejoyin his eyes before he was kissing me. My hands laced around his neck, holding him there, drinking him in, my whole body softening against him in the liberation that has washed through me in saying those words. Like I was finally allowed to feel the things I had long been beating down and trying to smother. His hands were slower, more hesitant than they’d ever been as he moved them down my body, breaking the kiss to lift my tunic. I raised my arms, let him draw it over my head, and then he was moving behind me, hands already at the laces of the vest I wore beneath. He peeled it off me and it dropped to the floor, leaving me in just my pants, my focus entirely absorbed in tracking the way his hands brushed along my shoulders. His breath was warm against the back of my neck as he paused there, as though he was waiting for something. I wanted to turn, to read his expression, see the look in his eyes, but then he caressed my neck, traced the line of my collar bone, brushed a kiss against my ear. As he trailed the backs of his fingers over my shoulder, down my spine, pausing to caress every dimple, every mark, every freckle he found on my skin, the aching warmth became too much to hold and it spilled onto my cheeks as tears. No one had ever touched me so gently. I’d never have expected it of him.

He was standing before me again, hands running over my bare stomach, trailing kisses along my jaw. He paused when he tasted the tears. Drew back, scanning my face. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m scared,’ I whispered. And even just doing that,admittingthat I was scared, felt so dangerous. And yet… what a relief it was to say it.

‘Why?’ He brushed a thumb across my cheek, collecting my tears.

‘You’ve hurt me before. What if you do it again?’

He said nothing for a long moment, only sweeping his thumb back and forth across my skin, expression grave. But his eyes. The way he was looking at me. No one had ever looked at me like that before. It was almost reverent. It made me feelseen. ‘We were never going to get love right on the first try,’ he murmured. ‘People like us don’t know how to do it. We’ve never lived it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn.’

I drew my hands up his arms, over ripples of muscle and shoulders, twining them in his hair, pulling him to me and kissing him hard. I couldn’t say the things I felt, didn’t know how to, so I would kiss him and hope he knew them. And it was something so wild and terrifying to kiss him, more than it ever had been, now that I’d told him I loved him. Now that it was burning through me and I was allowing myself to feel it. I wanted to touch him all over, wanted to trace every rise and curve of him with my tongue, so I took his hand. Led him to the bed. Sank onto the dark blue covers. Warm sunlight caught on the ridges and edges of him as he stood before me and I unlatched his belt.

‘How gentle?’ I asked, looking up at him as I ran my hand over the bulge in his pants and caught his sharp inhale, my fingers itching to hold him, stroke him, and watch his expression fracture.

‘Maybe not so gentle,’ he said, voice rough as he leaned down, unbuttoning my pants. There was nothing gentle in the way he was looking at me as I lifted my hips to let him slide them off me.

‘Good,’ I whispered, pressing my mouth to his stomach, blood quickening as I found the ridge of his pelvis, felt the strain of his cock as I rubbed my palm against him again, chased his pants down his hips. He was hard and ready and when I took him in my mouth, ran my tongue along the shape of him, his hand shot out to grip the headboard and the other gripped my hair. I loved the sound he made, the fact that I made him make that sound, and my fingers curled into his thighs, holding onto him as I tried to see what other noises I coax out of him. But too soon, he was drawing back, planting his hands either side of me, breathing ragged and heavy.

‘This’ll be over in another minute if you keep that up,’ he said, crawling over me, kissing his way up my stomach, lingering to trawl a tongue over my breast, to take my nipple gently between his teeth as I threw back my head and gasped at the quickening tide of pleasure racing over my skin, ignited in every place his body touched mine.

A moment later he dropped to his elbow with a sharp hiss, hand going to his side.

‘Are you alright?’ I asked, raising myself up on my elbows.

He offered a crooked smile. ‘Fine. Just a broken rib complaining.’

I pushed him up, sliding out from under him until he was sitting on the bed and I was kneeling before him, anxiously studying him.

His breathing was still strained, forced, like he was controlling the pain. ‘Don’t look at me like that, I’m alright.’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this. You need to rest.’

---