Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
He comes inside me with a sound that is more animal than man, low and broken and almost a growl, and I feel him in me, the hot pulse of him deeper than anything has been in me in my life, his hand fisted in the bedpost above mine and his other hand at my hip hard enough to bruise.
He stays, riding it out, his pumps short and dragged out, his breath ragged, until he stops entirely.
He stays inside me for a long beat after.
His forehead drops against the back of my neck. He is breathing in a way I’d never heard from him before, hard, winded, undone.
The room is very quiet.
The rain is still pattering on the window, a little louder now.
He kisses the back of my neck. Once. Soft.
“Foxglove.”
“Yes.”
“I have you now.”
“You have me,” I say dreamily.
He withdraws from me slowly. He helps me unwrap my fingers from the post. They are stiff and hurt but who cares about pain right now when I have been so thoroughly ravaged. He turns me carefully and lays me down on the bed and the sheet is cool against my back while the rest of my skin is sweaty hot.
He goes to the basin and wets the cloth.
He comes back.
He cleans me with the same care he showed yesterday, slower this time, more reverent, sliding the warm wet cloth between my legs and over my hips and down the insides of my thighs. He cleans himself too, then sets the cloth aside.
He gets back into the bed beside me, and pulls the heavy quilt up over both of us.
He tucks me against his chest.
“Iris?” he whispers.
“Mmm?”
“Sleep.”
“Mm.”
He kisses my forehead.
I fall asleep against him.
I wake in the dark with the urge to pee.
The fire has gone down to embers. The candles on the mantel have burned out. The rain is hammering against the leaded glass, the sound of it filling the room in uneven lashings thanks to the wind. I have no idea what time it is. Somewhere in the small hours, probably, the deep middle of the night when the body knows the dawn is still a long way off.
The creepy hour, I sometimes think.
I turn my head on the pillow to look at Alasdair.
He is not asleep.
He’s sitting up against the headboard; his back against the dark wood. The quilt is pooled at his waist, his chest bare.
He’s watching me.
I blink.
His eyes…
For a beat, in the low light from the dying fire, his eyes are wrong.
They’re so terribly wrong.
They’re all black. No blue, no iris. Just black and it fills the whole of his eye, edge to edge, like a void.
I make a small sound. Not even a word.
He blinks.
His eyes are his eyes again.
The blue is rimmed with dark; the pupil is where the pupil should be, the whites are white.
He’s the man I fell asleep against hours ago.
He smiles. A small, careful smile.
“Hush, foxglove. Sleep. I’ll be here.”
I automatically close my eyes.
I tell myself I imagined it. I tell myself it was the dying fire on his face and my eyes still adjusting from the dark and the wine still in me from dinner. I tell myself a lot of things these days.
And I’m too tired to think about it.
I fall back asleep with the rain on the window, and the last thing I’m aware of is that he is mine now, and I am his, too.
I don’t know yet what that’s going to cost me.
Chapter
Eighteen
Iwake to grey light and a familiar ceiling.
Except…it’s the wrong kind of familiar. I’m staring at the low, whitewashed plaster of my own bedroom, the slope of the wall where Effie’s wardrobe stands shadowed in the corner, the gauzy curtains pulled across the window facing the bay. It’s the ceiling I’ve been waking up to for almost a month, and this morning it’s all sorts of backwards because…
Didn’t I fall asleep at Alasdair’s castle last night?
I lie still under the quilt and try to put last night back together. I remember the roaring fire, the Spanish wine. The dining hall, and the tapestries with their blue-dressed women watching me eat his fish. His mouth at my throat. The four-poster bed. The post under my forehead. I have you now. I remember falling asleep against him. I remember the rain hammering the windows.
I remember the flash of his eyes in the middle of the night.
But I don’t remember leaving.
The pillow under my cheek smells like the lavender sachet I tucked into the linen drawer last week. The quilt is Effie’s. But I think I’m wearing one of Alasdair’s shirts? It’s a man’s shirt, far too big, soft old cotton, the cuffs frayed…
And I’m wearing nothing else. My hair’s dried in damp tangles. From the rain, maybe? From whatever the fuck happened between the bed I fell asleep in, and the bed I woke up in? There’s a low ache between my legs from him, but at least I do remember how I got that.