Page 290 of The Nightmare Bride
And I did. His eyes turned up beneath falling lids. I savored the exquisite, shivering line of his throat as he rasped my name. The pull of taut muscle beneath hot skin, the clench of his abdomen as he spilled his pleasure into me.
I kept going, until he clamped his hands around my hips and held me still, panting and wide-eyed. I leaned down to kiss him. When I pulled back, a fresh shine had gathered along his lashes.
“Gods, you were right.” He blinked hard. “That was definitely worse. Consider me defeated. Absolutely ruined.”
“Mmm.” I hummed, gloating. “Weird that your defeat looks a whole lot like an excess of emotion.”
“Emotion? No. Of course not.”
“Uh huh.”
“Haven’t I told you I don’t have feelings?” He cleared his throat. “You’ve just caught me in a moment of extreme eye hydration. That’s all.”
“Oh, right. And let me guess. Nothing like this has ever happened to you before?”
“Never,” he said, all solemnity.
I laughed, and kissed him again, and his hands found a place in my hair. He kissed me back, with feeling, until everything went quiet within me.
I finally eased off him and nestled into the crook of his arm, letting him tuck me against his side. “Harlowe Hollander,” I whispered. “I do like that.”
“Not nearly as much as I do.”
I smiled into his chest. Beyond the window, the nightmare wailed, and for a hairsbreadth of a moment, I almost felt...sorry for it. It sounded like a child, throwing a tantrum because it couldn’t have its way.
I lay there. This would be the last time I ever heard these sounds, and some part of me felt compelled to commemorate them, somehow. To listen and remember, even though the storm had all but given up trying to break me.
A few minutes later, the wailing changed. Fat raindrops slapped against broad leaves. The plip-plop swelled to a muted roar.
I blinked. Huh. That was new. Nightmares never ended with rain. But I guessed this one was different.
I nuzzled against Kai’s side. “What do you think that’s about?”
He didn’t answer. And when I looked up, I laughed.
He was asleep. Of course.
I studied his face—the broad sweep of his brows, the taper his nose, the arrogant line of his jaw.
The wings in my chest rustled, because this was my husband. In the truest sense, now. And what a husband he was. If I’d fortified my defenses with high gates, he’d scaled the walls singing. If my heart had been a cold, black stone, he’d polished itto onyx, and now it gleamed when held up to his unfailing light. If I’d done my best to lock him out, he’d banged on the door so loudly and for so long that I’d finally opened it, exasperated, only for him to steal inside and declare himself on the front end of an indefinite stay.
Now all I had to do was let him.
I scooted closer, smiling. The last thought I had before falling asleep was that maybe being married felt different, after all.
34.
Kai woke me at sunrise.
The rain had subsided to a murmur. We dressed in the half-light from the window, but something about the dawn looked different. Wrong.
When we emerged from the shack, I realized why.
The rot had gone, its purple glow vanquished by the rain, which still fell in spears from a steel-gray sky.
The swamp glistened, olive and navy and silver. No purple to speak of. The rain soaked us in moments and stuck Kai’s hair to his forehead, but being drenched felt right, somehow. Like a rite of passage that cleansed us, too.
“Ready?” he said.
