Page 39 of My Dark Ever After
She did not want to lift her chin, but my grip was inexorable. I was greeted by an expression that rent my chest in two like the swift slice of a katana through the rib cage. Her huge, luminous brown eyes were bloodshot and filled with so much self-loathing I could not bear it. I recognized the emotion because I had found it too often staring back at me in the mirror.
“I was dirty,” she whispered, tipping her head back and closing her eyes so that the hot water splashed across her face. “I’m trying to get clean.”
I realized on closer inspection that her hands were still bloody, clasped under her calves where the water wouldn’t hit them. It must have been Ludo’s blood, because she was uninjured, and thestronzowho had tried to kidnap her had been tossed from the bell tower rampart.
“Will you let me help you?” I asked softly, because there was no doubt she was a fawn right now, hurt and cornered with nowhere to run.
I wanted to be the refuge she did not realize she could find if only she accepted the hand I extended to her.
She stared at it for a long time. Minutes dissolving into each other as my suit grew heavy and wet, my shoes pooling with water. I did not move. I barely breathed.
Trust me,I willed her.
It had once been so effortless for her to do so, to curl into my chest as early as those first few days of knowing each other, when she was too sick to let societal norms curb her impulse to find solace in me.
Now, even shaking with trauma, she was unsure.
Of all the things in my life I had not wanted to do and regretted, lying to her and letting her run home to Michigan without fighting for her was the worst of them. Worse than all of them combined.
Eventually, though, she unwound her arms from her legs and reached a shivery hand up to clasp my own. It felt so small and frail within my grip that for a moment I thought I would break her bones tugging her to her feet. She rose gracefully, with that lithe elegance she seemed to embody no matter the circumstances, so I was surprised when she suddenly collapsed again. I caught her, lifting her against my torso and securing her there with one arm banded around her back. The too-hot water burned even through my suit jacket, so I used the other hand to turn the temperature down and then returned my attention to the woman in my arms.
She had frozen, ramrod straight and stiff like a wooden plank, but after a second, she loosed a long sigh and sagged inch by inch against me. The last point of contact was her cheek resting against my chest, nose turned into the drenched lapel and wet lashes spiky against her pale cheeks.
“I’m dirty,” she repeated quietly. “But I’m so tired.”
“I will clean you,cerbiatta mia,” I told her solemnly, and even though it was difficult to do with one hand, I kept her pinned to my chest while I reached for the almond oil soap on the shelf.
She was content to rest heavily against me as I started with her right hand and then moved on to her left, lathering the soap thickly between her fingers, rubbing with the natural sponge in little circles to banish the blood clinging to the ridges of each fingerprint. Then her arms, slim and pale from the Michigan autumn. She would always be slight because of her illness, but I found beauty in every inch of her. It was not a sexual kind of appreciation, tending to the small swells of her breasts and the tender apexes under her arms, between her legs. It was something sacred that sluiced through my insides like the warm water around us, cleansing me of the impurities I had felt since she had last been in my presence.
Loving Guinevere was my absolution. Worshipping her the only kind of freedom I had felt in the last five years. Because there was nothing responsible about our pairing, nothing acceptable or free from obstacles, yet it was the only thing I had ever wanted viciously enough to fight for without capitulation.
No one would take her from me unless she walked away herself.
Even then, I knew, in a way that settled the panic I’d felt for months, that there would never be a time I did not watch her from afar and care for her however I could get away with. Guinevere’s unluckiness had come to an unnatural end the day she met me. Any lottery she entered, she would win. Any dream she aspired to, I would help her attain. Any future monsters who might come for her would find me there to scare them away.
I was, quite clearly, born to love her.
So after weeks of being unable to express it, I let all the love I harbored for her in my black heart spill over into the simple act of bathing her.
I went to my knees, placed her foot on my shoulder, and used both hands to sweep over her lightly muscled thighs straight down to her calves and the oddly lovely bones in her feet. She shivered still, but this time not from the shakiness of adrenaline giving way to horror.
Gradually, the flush of heat from the too-hot water was replaced with a different kind of warmth beneath her skin.
When her hands slowly sank into my hair, tangling in the strands and tugging gently, I looked up at her through wet lashes to see her pupils blown wide with desire.
“Do you want me to clean you up with my tongue?” I murmured against her skin before licking a droplet of water from the crook of her groin.
She nodded immediately, swaying a little into my mouth.
I hid my smile against her skin and then trailed my lips to the top of her mound, pressing a chaste kiss to the bare skin above her clit before I started to enjoy her in earnest. Even with the water still beating down on us, I could taste the sweet sluice of her arousal against my tongue when I delved between her lips to play at her entrance with my tongue.
She gasped, legs quaking with a mixture of lust and exhaustion. I moved my hands to her pert ass and lifted her against me, moaning in approval against her pussy when she wrapped her legs over my shoulders and clung even tighter to my hair for balance. I shifted slightly so she could lean back against the travertine tiles if she needed to and then devoted myself wholly to the task of feasting on her gorgeous cunt.
I ate like a man starved, and I was. For two months I had assumed I would never get to touch her like this, taste her like this, love her like this again. The idea of sex without her felt bleak, sepia toned where I had once had vibrant technicolor, and my previously voracious sex drive had diminished astonishingly unless I was thinking of Guinevere. Theway she moaned in these breathy little gasps like she did now, writhing on my tongue as I fucked it inside her clutching heat. The way she fisted my hair too tight and dragged her nails down my shoulder, marking me in the most primal way as hers.
I was so hard beneath my wet, painfully constricting trousers that I throbbed fiercely, but I made no move to adjust myself.
This was about her.
