Page 126 of Crown of Thorns
“Come on, let’s go up, baby. To your new room.”
Noah tries to hide it, but he looks damn impressed with my wing. I mean, it looks pristine—all whites and golds and greens. I love my place, but like Arthur and Gaël, I’m going to have to organise my own place in Monterrey Castle. Or most likely, around, since Noah owns a significant ass amount of ground. And though he may not have the money to build a house on it, I do.
“Your place is pretty.” His grey eyes are turbulent when they take in everything, then linger on the bed.
He looks at me like I’m a miracle he thought he’d lost.
I drop my robe, step into his arms, and he holds me like he never intends to let go. We don’t speak for a while. There’s only breath, and warmth, and the way our skin remembers each other. The bed creaks as we fall into it—slow, reverent, greedy for all we lost.
Later, I lie against his chest, drowsy and filled, and I know, we’ve rewritten something tonight.
Noah lifts me and slides me on top of him as he sits against the headboard. His big arms wrap around my waist as my back rests on his chest, my legs between his, and my head pressed to his shoulder. For just a moment in time, it feels like we’ve lived here our entire lives, just existing together, being peaceful.
Happy.
“It’s time to let the past go. Time to live in the present and the future,” his quiet voice carries through the room, sucking all the air out of it.
“Time to rewrite your legacy, baby. You’ve got powerful ancestors. All this land, countless possibilities.” He turns my way, but I shake my head before he can say anything.
“I have money. You can build whatever the fuck you want.”
“A castle?”
“Absolutely.”
“I often wondered who I would have become had I not been kicked out of my home,” he says out of the blue, the rough timbre of his voice vibrating against my back, sending shivers down my spine.
“W-what do you mean?” I whisper, my voice cracking under the weight of his words. I know what he means, I think at least, but I want him to continue talking, need him to open up further until I can crawl inside and offer shelter.
“I used to look up at them. Teenagers my age who hung out on the streets without a care in the world. They’d look down on me, taunt me as they left a coin, or accuse me of running off to my dealer for my next hit.”
“Did you…”
“No, darling, never. And the day I turned eighteen, I left the streets and rented a shared bedroom. I just wonder…if I’d been a careless teenager myself, where would I have ended up? Would I still live here in Saint-Laurent? What sort of work would I have chosen? What would have been my favourite colour?”
“Red,” I joke.
He grins at that, losing some of the tension. “And then you danced into my life. You tore my heart open and made yourself a home inside. You’re the one who makes me question everything I’ve ever believed in and take away the heaviness that has always surrounded my world. You make it light. Fun. The sort of life I always wanted to live.”
His words blast into me like a rocket, and my chest swells, until it becomes impossibly full. It’s dizzying, overwhelming...
“For so long, education was the only thing that mattered in my life. It was the only guarantee of keeping my bed and staying off the streets. It was my safety net, my friend, my lover, my enemy. It was the only thing I had. But then you came into my life and filled me up. Not the darkness, me. So I mean it when I say that you, too, live inside me. You’re etched into the stillness now, where the war used to rage. I don’t just love you—I need you in ways I can barely speak aloud.”
“Good.” My breath skims his lips. “Because I refuse to think about it.”
“I might be a little grumpy.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“And I need my personal space.”
“I’ll give you just enough to miss me.”
“What if I continue working in Monterrey?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” I lift a brow.
He shrugs. “Perhaps your dad?—”
