Page 157 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
I unraveled. Sinking my face low into the rug, I screamed out his name as if it was the only one I would ever remember again.
Steeler roared mine through his final thrusts as he came apart inside me.
For a moment, we both quivered to stillness, him still inside me while I faced the dying firelight on my hands and knees.
A boom of thunder made me jerk. Steeler slowly untangled his fingers from my hair and eased himself out of me with a tenderness that I once would have never imagined possible from a male so brutal.
“Are you alright?”
A laugh escaped my mouth. “Alright?” I sat back on my heels as he circled around to face me, his naked body glimmering so beautifully in the low light. “I think I’m more than alright, actually. I just hope Felicityisa heavy sleeper.”
He didn’t chuckle back, but bent to brush a thumb across my face. I didn’t realize he was wiping away a tear until I felt the wetness of it streak across my skin.
“What’s this?” Concern slid across his features.
“Oh, I…”
I was about to say I didn’t know. That beneath all the pleasure and passion we’d just given each other, there was no reason for me to be sad.
Instead, I blew out a breath and asked, “Why don’t you like my mind anymore?” If I was going to demand honesty from him, he deserved to get it from me. Even if that meant saying my insecurities out loud.
“What?” His brows pinched together.
Lightning flashed outside, illuminating the room for a split second before it disappeared again.
“You told Garvis you didn’t want to train me because you couldn’t stand being in my mind, but that was back when I felt nothing but hatred for you. Yet now that there’s... more than hatred, you're still avoiding it.” I wrapped my arms around my bare breasts. “Whenever you talk to me mind-to-mind, you loiter on the outside and never stay longer than you have to. Just... just then…” My belly fluttered at the mention of what had just happened. “…you pulled me into your mind rather than planted images in mine. And whenever you talk about how… beautiful my mind is, it’s always in the past tense. Is it too barren now? Too cold? Too—”
Steeler kept a strong hold on my face.
“I once told you, Rayna, that the first time I laid eyes on you, I saw you had the most beautiful mind I'd ever experienced. No, not just beautiful—striking. Breathless. Wild and captivating and everything I'd never known I needed. It took every bit of control I had to let my eyes slide past you, to remember my job, to not sink into you and lose myself in that stunning labyrinth.”
I blew out a breath of disappointment.
“And all that is gone now.”
“No,” he said firmly. “It’s still there. But it’s my fault that you had to wrap it in ice to protect it. My fault you had to hide it all in that armor. It’s not that I don’t like your mind anymore, Rayna. I am in love with your mind just like I’m in love with the rest of you. But I do not deserve to be inside it.”
I stood up, and he followed suit, our naked bodies separated by nothing but a thin strip of candle-warm air.
He started to turn. “I’ll go get us a washcloth…”
I tugged him back.
“I think youdodeserve it, actually. To be in my mind. I think youareforgivable. I think all of your thoughts come from your heart, too. And I think your heart has always been in the right place, no matter how dark it had to become to survive.”
I was close. So close to telling him the thing my subconscious knew that I didn’t want to admit, even to myself.
“Co—” I started.
BOOM.
The bang of thunder was so much like Lexington’s rampage into the Element Wielder house that we both broke apart, our heads whipping toward the front door of the cottage.
“No one’s there,” Steeler said. “I don’t sense any minds.”
I lowered my blockade to test that out for myself—
And heard the clicking of hundreds of little minds seconds before the creatures themselves came streaming through the crack under the door.
