Page 133 of Soulgazer

He shifts, and the mattress moves with him. “Aye, lass?”

I roll onto my side until our bodies nestle at the center. Reach a hand slowly toward his cheek. Faolan doesn’t flinch, eyes curiouseven in the half dark, but he doesn’t move forward either. Hands caught lightly in the sheets, waiting on me.

He doesn’t have to wait for long.

I kiss him and hope to the gods he can’t feel the turmoil in my lips like I feel the relief in his own. It starts off delicate—and ends too soon, my fingers vibrating with the need to touch him again.

Faolan strokes my hair back to study my face. “Lass?”

“You told me…” My voice shakes, and I force myself to swallow. Look into his eyes. “You told me when you fixed my hand to ask you again at a better time. So I’m asking.”

Silence stretches my nerves to a single thread before his fingers fall to the quilt covering my arm. Eyes hunting my face, too perceptive by half. “Asking what?”

My heart matches the force of the drums on the night we first met. I remember what it was like, to be touched for the first time by this man made of wild.

Before the legends.

Before the magic and danger and death.

“I’m asking you to show me…what it means for a man to worship a woman.”

Faolan stiffens, and I turn my face into the pillow.

Dammit.

He didn’t mean it. I misread everything—he doesn’t want me, he only wanted—

Faolan curls a hand over my shoulder, tugging until I’m on my back, our faces inches apart. “Saoirse, we talked about this. The consummation—”

“Has nothing to do with it, I swear. I want…” His mouth softens beneath the fingertip I’ve placed there, and I can’t help but trace the curve of his bottom lip. Swallow when he takes it into his mouth. “I want you, Faolan. I’ve never felt drawn to another personas I am to you. And I want—Ineed—to know what will happen if I give in.”

The lines of his face ease as he searches for a lie that isn’t there, because it’s one of the truest things I’ve said. I want to know what it is to drown in another person and come out newly alive on the other side—withhim. The Wolf of the Wild. I want the legend who haunted my dreams as a girl, and the man who haunts my days as a woman. It’s unfair, the way he’s tattooed himself on my heart so it sings just one name, over and over again.

Faolan. Faolan. Faolan.

Faolan murmurs a soft curse against my fingers and then drops his head to nuzzle my palm right after.

“Damn me to the shade’s realm if I have the power to resist that.” Smiling once, he sweeps my hair back and then draws his touch over my throat. Along the dip of my collarbone, down to the ties of my shift. He wavers at the laces for only a moment, then hooks the first and pulls it slowly free.

“I’ll show you this part, then. But if you don’t want the rest—”

“I want it.” I’m startled by the power in my voice, and it shocks a grin out of him as well.

“Aye, but if you suddenlydon’t, just tell me. I can’t peep into people’s minds like someone I know.”

I push onto my elbows, heedless of the way it draws the loosened fabric abruptly apart so it slips down my shoulders. “I can’t peep into minds! Only memories sometimes—”

His lips burn a path down my throat, and the words die on my tongue. A calloused finger sweeps one firm line down to my navel, dragging the rest of the laces free, and then his hand flattens between my breasts directly over the strike of my heart.

“D’you want to guess how long I’ve thought of you like this?”

I shiver when the brush of lips turns to a gentle bite just overthe bone, fisting the sheets in my fight to keep still. He shifts, hand sweeping over my bare ribs to drag my shift low over my arms as his kisses move lower.

Lower.

“Saoirse?”

I gasp, because his mouth’s found a new curve, drawing toward the peak, and I barely understand the movements of my own body—restless, with embers burning deep in my belly. But it doesn’t scare me as it did before the cabin, before the cove.