Page 98 of A Heart So Haunted
“I’ll tell you what I did,” he whispered.
My eyelids shuttered. This was it. He was right there. Every inch of my body ignited in a slow burn of anticipation. His hand raked into my hair, right at the nape of my neck. Knotted into a fist and tipped my head back. He had to feel it, too. I didn’t stand on an island alone.
I answered so faint, I hardly caught it. “What did you do?”
His resolve—the shield he sometimes erected between us—cracked.
“I killed him,” he whispered.
And then Hadrian kissed me.
Chapter Nineteen
Words burst into ash. Anything he said fell away as soon as his lips met mine. They pressed, lenient at first. Tentative, like I might pull away.
A soft sigh slipped through my lips.
Then—more. More pressure, more urgency as our exhales knotted and his tongue pressed at the seam of my lips. I opened, needy and ready, as a grunt fell from his throat. The way it reverberated into my mouth made my knees week.
What kind of man would he have been had he lived in my time? Would I have frozen when our eyes met?
Would I have let myself fall in love with him?
My hands landed on the opened buttons of his shirt, slipped around his neck. His skin felt cold at first, but then it flamed to life. I reveled in the way his shoulders felt under my hands, how his body curled over mine. How I leaned in, how he leaned over, how he was everywhere. The kiss was life in an inhale, need in an exhale. His free hand cinched my waist, pulled me close. Every hard part of him pressed against the concaves of me.
In that moment, I’d never felt more beautiful and ugly all at once.
Did he feel the divots in my hips? Did he notice the way my shoulders had no cushion, how fullness didn’t live in the right places?
Gnarled warnings reared then. All those angry, snide comments.
Too skinny.
You look dead.
Why do you have peach fuzz on your arms?
Why does your face look like that?
Just as I felt myself stiffen, he murmured, “Divine.”
My hands stilled. The white-blond tresses tangled in my fingers. He couldn’t be telling the truth. He might think he meant it—but it couldn’t be true. Suddenly, I thought of the years he’d spent alone, isolated. Breath by breath, I felt my hold loosen. I was the first warmth he’d felt, the first body he’d cradled, and I warred with the idea. Of course, he would latch onto me.
Divine, he’d said. A visceral hunger lived inside that single word.
A single thought: A starving man would eat anything to gain satiety.
Would that same hunger, that rawness, been in his words for anyone else? Or was that admission only meant for me?
Because Hadrian wasn’t meant for this world, he wasn’t meant for this time, he wouldn’tstayhere. Hadriancouldn’tstay.
He bit my bottom lip. It took every ounce of willpower to not give into the feeling, the rush of heat, the need. Suddenly, I was keenly aware of how fast my heart thrummed, how fast his matched mine. As if they were trying to tangle through our sternums.
“Hadrian,” I whispered against his mouth.
Immediately, he stilled. Our lips barely broke apart. When he opened his eyes, they were yellow.
Then, the single sentence wiggled its way to the forefront of my mind:I killed him.
