Page 77 of Edge of Oblivion (Night Prowler 2)
Half moan, half sob, and she was over the edge, shuddering and shattering and staring down into his face, alarmed at the moisture swimming in her eyes, helpless to stop it.
“Yes, baby, yes,” he whispered, reverent, as her body clenched around his.
He was so beautiful to her then, rapt and wide-eyed at the pleasure he was witnessing—the pleasure he was giving her—that it hurt—it hurt. It burned like acid in her throat.
She started to cry.
“Goddammit,” she sobbed, burying her face in his shoulder.
He stilled, tightened his arms around her. “It’s okay,” he whispered, stroking her hair. “It’s going to be okay.”
“No, it’s not,” she said, sobbing harder. “It’s not going to be okay! Don’t say that! Don’t lie to me!”
“Shhh.”
He cradled her, he rocked her, he stroked his hands down her back and smoothed her hair. All she could do was hide her face and shake in his arms. He was still inside her, still throbbing hot, unrelieved, and though she wanted to run away and hide he was so warm and so strong and so...damn...wonderful.
God, he was wonderful.
“I h-hate you,” she sobbed against his shoulder.
“I know,” he murmured, stroking her. He pressed a kiss to her hair. “I know.”
He let her calm down, let the crying slow, then stop. He eased her down onto the mattress and settled beside her, brushed her tears away with his knuckles, kissed her hot cheeks. He gazed deep into her eyes and softly said, “I hate you, too, beautiful girl. So much.” He brushed his lips against hers, barely stroking, tender. “So much.”
She bit her lip, turned away. She couldn’t take it—the emotion was too crushing, too terrible, too much. His hand stroked her face, he turned her back to him with gentle fingers beneath her chin.
“Don’t hide from me. You don’t ever have to hide when you’re with me.”
That horrible tightness in her chest again, the welling in her eyes. He kissed the tear that slid over her cheek, caught another with his fingertip and brushed it away. She wanted to turn away again but didn’t, and he saw it, and then there was moisture in his eyes, too.
“Tu és o amor da minha vida,” he murmured, his voice breaking. He kissed her with a desperation that took her breath away, a desperation that was matched only by her own. She clung to him, and he moved between her legs and pushed inside her.
“Say it again,” she begged, not knowing what he’d said but knowing, feeling as if she would drown. “Say everything. Tell me everything, Xander, tell me now, before it’s too late.”
And he did. His lips on hers, his body moving inside hers, his heartbeat thudding strong and erratic against her chest, he let the words pour out. Soft and broken and in a language she did not understand, it poured out of him and over her and burned her soul to cinders.
Later, much later, as dawn crept pink and lavender over the hills of the Aventine, Xander woke alone.
27
Once upon a time, when she was a little girl no taller than the weathered brick lip of the Drowning Well, Morgan’s mother had told her a story.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” she announced with that faraway look in her eye that sometimes made Morgan slightly afraid for a reason she didn’t understand. The song she’d been singing died on her lips as if the wood fairies had snatched it right out of her mouth.
They were walking hand in hand through hazy morning sunshine, knee-deep in the drifts of wild heather that grew like weeds on the brink of the New Forest, watching tiny white butterflies flit with bumpy grace around bluebells and buttercups, listening to the sweet symphony of birdsong and breezes whisper through pines.
“A thtory,” Morgan whispered, enthralled, with the baby-girl lisp she hadn’t shed until she was six, watching her mother’s coffin being lowered into a rime of hard winter ground. She looked up at her mother—alive still on that verdant spring morning—and saw what she always saw: a fairy-tale princess with skin white as milk and a bittersweet smile and a galaxy of sorrow in her leaf-green eyes.
Even as a small child, Morgan recognized that her mother was beautiful, and very, very sad.
“There once lived a girl named Kalamazoo,” her mother began, and here Morgan giggled, liking the sound of the name. Her mother’s pale gaze slanted down to hers, and she began again, her lips tilted up at the corners. “Kalamazoo,” she said, “was a headstrong girl, ahead of her time, very smart and strong and independent. She was pretty, too—some even said she was blessed by angels on the day she was born, so pretty she was—and curious, and kind.”
Her mother’s voice took on a darker tone. As if the sky itself knew what was coming, a cloud passed over the sun. “But Kalamazoo had one...fatal...flaw.”
They slowed and then stopped beside the huge, rotting trunk of an ancient pine, overgrown with lichen and ivy, felled by some long-ago storm. Her mother lifted her up, set her teetering on its edge so they were almost at eye level with one another, held her hands around her waist to steady her until her little bare feet found their balance over the rough bark. Her mother’s feet were bare too; none of them ever wore shoes in the woods.
“She wanted,” her mother said with deep solemnity, gazing into Morgan’s eyes. “She had everything, but she wanted other things, anything she didn’t have. Her hair was dark and she wanted it to be gold, the sky was clear and she wanted it to rain, her home was in the woods and she wanted—
