by A. M. Hudson
“Yeah.”
“Why didn't you demand I give your ring back?”
She frowned. “I didn't know that was an option.”
I scoffed. How was it not? “Ara, you never sit by and let things happen if you don't approve. If you wanted that ring, you’d have stomped your foot until I gave it to you. So, why didn't you?”
She stared at me, realizing it for the first time herself. She didn’t want it back. “You're reading into it too much.”
“Am I?” I grabbed the ring from my pocket and pressed it into her palm, folding her fingers around it. “Or are you just not telling me what you really think?”
She slipped the ring back on her finger and rolled away from me, hating herself for the truth she’d just admitted inside. “Go away, Jason. You don't know anything about me.”
But I did. I knew I shouldn’t have forced her to see that truth so soon. She wasn’t ready. “Oh, don't know anything about you, huh?” Luckily, I also knew how to cheer her up. I pulled the blanket away from her. “I know your ticklish spot.”
“No!” She squealed, jerking around as I dug my fingers into her ribs. “Stop!”
I laughed aloud, feeling pure joy for one of the first times in so long. It was the way she laughed—such a sweet little giggle, so honest and so unguarded. I could see why my brother loved it so much. She was just so beautifully innocent.
I didn’t want her to stop, so I kept tickling, gentle enough not to hurt her but firm enough to hold her down a little so she couldn’t get away. Not that she wanted to get away. She looked up and her heart burned with love for me. This was exactly where we both wanted to be, no matter what the consequence.
“See?” I pinned both hands beside her face and leaned right down, pretending to be puffed out, knowing how much she loved it when I played human. “I know more about you than anyone else in this world, Ara-Rose. And I know you didn’t ask me for that ring because you liked the fact that I had it. You liked knowing how it made me feel to carry it, as if I owned a part of you my brother never would.”
“What part?”
All of you. Your heart, soul, mind, body—future. “The truth.”
She went completely stiff under me. That was all I needed to say, and her mind would fill in the rest.
I tried not to laugh. As I moved to kneel back, the warmth off her body—from between her legs—brushed my knee. She was naked beneath this shirt. I knew I shouldn’t look, but my eyes slowly strayed down her waist, past her hips, stopping there where the shirt rose up past her belly button. She let me look. She laid there, legs slightly apart, me kneeling between them, and for that second, she let me look.
I held my breath. Everything in the room getting hotter, including Ara. She patterned it out in her thoughts; me and her, making love. The thought stayed small enough that she didn’t even know she thought it, but it was enough to send my heart and my blood into overdrive.
I quickly let go of her hand and pulled the shirt down, catching a glimpse of the horror she felt when she remembered Arthur being right where I was. “What happened down there tonight, Ara?”
“Where?”
“In the training hall. Why were you down there—practically naked?”
Although I already knew the truth, I just wanted her to tell me, but she wasn’t going to, until her thoughts did.
I swept her hair off her brow, frowning, pretending I didn’t already know. “Whoa. Ara, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“What?” She pretended, too—that she didn’t know what I’d just seen. The games we play.
“That’s what you were doing down there tonight? Arthur? Really?”
“I…” She blinked a few extra times, pretending again. But I could play this game as long as she wanted. “You saw that?”
“Sweet girl, I saw everything.” I rested back on my knees, placing my hand to her thigh, my thumb discreetly holding the shirt to cover her so it wouldn’t move if she did. “So that's what the dagger’s for—that’s what David wants it for?”
“And that’s why he hasn't been coming to see me.” She grabbed that damn locket and held it tight. “He can't bear it. He’s wanted to tell me so badly, but he knows I’ll fight him on it. He’s planning to just disappear.”
And the game was over. I might have known in her thoughts what she planned to do with my uncle, but this was the first time I’d seen that—seen the pain it caused her, seen the devastation she felt because she knew she couldn’t betray David that way and, in that, she would be sending him to his death. How was that possibly her fault?
I landed on top of her, our noses in line. “No.”
“No, what?”
I just didn’t know what to say. No, I won’t let you suffer. No, I won’t let you blame yourself. No, I will not, over my dead body, see you sleep with my uncle to save David. I would rather die. I would rather be tortured at my brother’s hands for eternity. “No. I won't let this happen.”
“What?”
“I'm not letting you do this to yourself.” I knew what I had to do. I knew she knew it too. Without even thinking, I reached down and unfastened her buttons—my uncle’s buttons. I needed her out of this shirt, his scent off her beautiful body. It was almost enough to make me gag. “I won't see you suffer my uncle’s touch then hate yourself for the rest of eternity.”
“I have to.” She stopped me. “I can't lose David.”
“But you can lose me,” I said, and rolled the shirt off her shoulder, seeing her perfect white skin in a completely different light to ever before. I couldn’t think about the fact that she was okay with that—that, as I said it, she realised what I was going to do and accepted it, because she could accept my death before she could accept David’s. I pushed the thought aside, breaking to tears beneath the external strength. I owed her this. I owed her my pain—knew how it would feel to know that, as I laid between her legs, she wouldn’t be making love to me, but fighting for him.
“Jase—” She saw it, though. She saw the hurt in my eyes. Her hand slowly came up along my face, and I just wanted to fold into her, cry, tell her I love her, tell her to let him die. Let him go. And you and I will be happy forever. Together. “If you father the heir, you’ll be going to your death.”
I laughed. “Precisely.”
“Why would you want that?”
“You don't know?”
She shook her head.
“You really have no idea what you are to me, Ara, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I…” So she knew I loved her, but that was it. She couldn’t fathom the depths I would go to for her. And I just didn’t know how to explain it, how to make her see that I would burn in a fire, drown myself in acid, peel my skin back and suffer for eternity to save her from one tear. “It would take a lifetime for me to show you how I feel. There are no words I could find to say it in one breath, and I love you just doesn’t hold enough weight for the feeling I have in my soul that you are everything. You are my life, my breath, my reason to get up, to smile, to live each day. I will never let you go.” I touched her soft, rose-petal skin for what might be the last time. “Don't you see? One day my brother will come back here, and I won't get to be with you anymore and, eventually, that will kill me anyway.”
“But, Jase.” Her pretty lip quivered. “How can I live in a world without you?”
She knew the answer to that. She didn’t need to ask. I tore the shirt gently away from her body and tossed it as far from here as it would fly out that balcony door. She was waiting for me to answer, unaware or uncaring that she was completely and finally naked beneath me. She stared up, her eyes so full of questions; so blue with sadness that I knew I had to answer her. “Better than you can live in a world without David.”
And she broke. She may have known it before, but she only admitted it then, in that second, and she cried. It was only for a moment—only a few sobs before she stopped and looked up at me, seeing my shirt come away, and pressed her hand to
my stomach. “Wait.”
I looked down at this fragile, sweet girl below me, her milk white skin against the cream sheets, her dark hair, like silk ribbons, spilling out around her face and over the pillow. Her eyes, like sapphires, the pupils so dark and so large with the heat of desire, forced an intake of breath in me—a pause to make this a memory—hold it in my heart for just a while longer.
“Will David really hate me if I have a baby to stop him from dying?”
“He’ll get over it.” I ditched my shirt to the end of the bed and fell on my hands over her body, keeping mine off hers enough that I could maintain control of my emotions. “Think of the agony he's been going through these past few months, probably worrying whose hands he’d be leaving you in once he’s dead.” Like mine. It was better this way. He would, eventually, forgive me, and her. I grabbed her hips and slid her down under me so she was in perfect line. “He knows this will happen, he just believes it’ll be when he's gone, cold in the ground. But it doesn't have to be that way.”
Her mind went white with surprise; she thought I’d rather see her suffer the pain of losing him so I could have her for myself. She was dead wrong.
“No,” I said, answering that thought, even though I knew she hated it when I did that. “Not sad—not eternally grieving him, Ara. If you really do love him more than me, then you will not ever be happy again if he dies.” I reached down and unzipped my jeans. “We’re doing this. I'm giving you my child, and I will die happy, knowing that I at least left a part of myself behind—in you.”
She didn’t have anything to say. I waited for a second to see if she wanted to back out. But she didn’t. She wanted this.
She wanted my death.
She wanted him.
I pulled my jeans past my hips, floating off the bed for a second while I yanked them away with my boots and socks inside the legs, and as the air touched my skin, my knees, my thighs, it came with the warmth off her beautiful body. I felt as if our skin was touching before I even fell back down between her legs. And as I laid myself there, where only my brother should be, her thoughts changed. I expected her to be tense, unwilling, maybe even push me away, but she looked up, and her heart beat once, steadying itself, her soul crying out inside her for this to happen, making her eyes electric blue—the static in her fingers charge everything with energy. She wanted me. Not him. Not Mike. Me.
And I was going to take full advantage of that. She would be the last girl I ever loved before I died, and I wanted to enjoy her as if she was mine. So many things I always dreamed of doing to her—so many things I had one last chance to do. “I'm sorry, but …while I have you completely naked, I'm gonna do something I've wanted to do for a long time.”
Her eyes went to my lips, as if she knew what I was thinking. “What’s that?”
I sent her an image of my plan, raising my brows. “Kiss you somewhere naughty.”
Her mouth popped open in obvious shock, and I laughed as I moved down on the bed, tracing every one of her perfect curves with my lips on the way. I stopped above her ribs, where the cursive line of her Promise remained from her Walk of Faith. “This,” I said, kissing the Mark, “looks incredibly sexy on you.”
“I'm not sure I fit in a sentence with the word sexy,” she scoffed.
“Tell that to my body.”
Her cheeks flushed with the idea of what she might make me feel—little, plain, ordinary, unattractive Ara—her too-thin body under this man who was cute and carefree, with a sexy tattoo around his firm arm and a tanned chest bigger than her husband’s. She compared herself to Emily in that breath, wondering if I thought Emily had a better body, or if I even compared them—or if I’d ever even slept with Emily. I hadn’t.
I wanted to laugh. She just had no idea—could not conceive the depth of my want for her—how I loved her, needed her, purely because she was my Ara. Fat, thin, short hair, no hair, zits or warts or scars. I loved her. I wanted her flat against me so badly I couldn’t exhale the tightness in my chest away.
She could feel the heat coming off me, but she couldn’t feel the intensity—the way the lust burned through me worse than the fire that melted my skin in my 1942 plane crash. I was harder than I’d ever been, more wanting than I ever wanted to be again, and as my lips went past that permanent tan line above her absent undies and onto the soft patch of hair between her legs, she flooded, too: heat and moisture spilling against my lips like melting chocolate. My brother clearly had never done this to her before, and as my tongue slipped inside, like she was some soft, ripe fruit, tasting the milky smooth sweetness of this girl I’d loved for so, so long, she moaned, crying out my name. My name. I’d brought her heartache and pain. I’d damaged her body, her soul, but as I gently slipped my finger inside, reaching up to where the muscles tightened, I was finally the one bringing her pleasure.
Her spine arched, pushing her closer to my mouth, and I worried for a second that the stubble on my chin might scratch her, but as I checked her thoughts, she clearly didn’t mind. Her legs parted further and she held her breath, trying to be quiet but not really succeeding, and each time I rubbed that delicate spot then kissed her gently after, she wanted to shake inside, not sure whether to laugh, cry, squirm or run.
I saw a flash of blue spark her fingertips as I looked up for second, but she pinned her hands under her pillow, hiding it. And my mind raced with questions. For some reason, that spark caused no pain, no shock when it flared in this situation. I felt it warm her toes against the bottoms of my legs, but it didn’t hurt—not one bit.
“What’s funny?” I asked when she giggled.
“That kind of tickles.”
I laughed, pressing my wet lips into her belly, moving firm kisses over each rib, all the way up to her breasts. They were so soft, so full, fit so perfectly into my hands, and I wanted to tell her that I’d never seen such purity in a girl—the pale pink of her nipple, the way it set so softly into her milk-white skin, like she was some kind of angel or white blossom I had plucked from the Garden of Eden. I traced a gentle line around it and let my tongue follow, drawing the fullness into my mouth for one sweet kiss before burying my face in her jaw, coming finally to rest my open mouth on hers.
It was too much for her. She’d wanted this for too long.
She reached down and I jumped as her small hands touched me, slid me closer to the Threshold of No Return.
“Not yet.” I grabbed her hand.
“Argh! You’re killing me!”
I laughed against her mouth, too afraid to move away in case the kiss ended. It was perfect this way, as if my heart was finally filled with the blood it needed to survive. And our lips wanted nothing more than to stay together—comfortable, warm, and familiar. I’d kissed many girls before, and none of them felt this right. I just wanted to hold on and never let her go. I loved her. And it was as simple as that. No matter what I’d done or would ever do to hurt her, I loved her.
She moved her knees, lifting them up, wrapping her legs around me, and I could no longer bear it. I slipped my hand between her legs and guided myself inside her, thrusting a little harder than I meant to. But she cried only with pleasure, her heart feeling what mine did: free, complete. I could see it in her thoughts.
She tangled her fingers in my hair, using all her strength to hold me close.
“You okay?” I asked, laughing into the curve of her neck.
“I just…” David was never that passionate. “I'm okay.”
So she liked it a little rougher. I looked down at her, smiling as I moved my hips against hers with a little more force, hearing our flesh clap each time it met. I needed to be closer, but I couldn’t pump that way if our chests were touching, so I slowed things down and laid my body atop hers, resting my jaw on her brow, feeling her soft breath warm against my throat.
There was a kind of energy between us, surrounding us, that felt solid, like we were grounded by a force outside our awareness. She leaned down and kissed the Mark on my arm softly, closing
her eyes as she remembered the first time she saw it by the lake that day—how much she loved me even then.
“Jase?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
I stopped and drew back to look down at her, dead shocked. I never ever thought she’d have the strength to admit that to me—not in a million years. “I love you, too, Ara. For forever,” I said, then quickly kissed her mouth. “And I will die loving you.”
She rolled back, closing her eyes for a second as my words entered her heart and soul, killing her a little. I couldn’t look. I didn’t want to see her suffer for my death, then reason that it was better than losing David. Then again, maybe I deserved to see it.
I looked down to where our bodies connected, watching myself go inside her, the gentle curve of her waist and the soft white flesh on her belly colouring my peripheral. She was so petite; hips small enough to wrap my hands around, her thighs almost too bony, the joints showing where her legs parted—only a soft, small handful of flesh covering it, quivering each time I brushed against her. I wanted to bite her there—could almost taste the memory in the back of my throat; could still see remnants of the scar I left on the night I tried to turn her. But she wasn’t thinking about that. She was ready. Her body getting hotter and wetter. I wasn’t sure if she’d felt an orgasm before, but I was hell-bent on making sure this was one she’d never forget.
I leaned back a little and licked my thumb before pressing it to the most sensitive spot a guy can ever touch a girl. And she swore, her body almost freezing with shock. Clearly, David had never ventured to this realm, either.
“What is that?” she said, way too loud.
I looked over at her door, smiling. “Clitoral stimulation.”
“Oh.”
I laughed. Such a sweet innocent thing she was.
Her eyes met mine, and past the obvious pleasure she was feeling, I saw curiosity. She wondered why I was smiling that way, what I found so funny. But it wasn’t amusement, not at her expense anyway. I was just happy. Happy to be here, with her, feeling her this way.