Page 69

Patrick had never understood the possessive tendencies of men in love.

Possession was for gold, land, idium. But something primitive and marrow deep lashed against his rib cage when Nina looked at him, and he thought, though he knew it was brutish, that he wished to claim her.

He took every measure to delay the moment they would have to leave that room.

He had food brought to them, fruit and toast and pastries, and he watched every crumb disappear into her mouth.

As soon as it seemed she was done, he pushed the tray aside and lifted her into his lap while she laughed at his impatience.

He claimed all of her that he could, while he could, in this six-by-nine-foot realm of theirs.

Eventually, the world beyond would come flooding in.

The moment wouldn’t keep. He had a town to tend to. It seemed an unbearable task.

How quickly he had become addicted to hearing her breathe his name, the sounds of her climax, the pinch of her nails digging into his back.

He took her again, then again, marveling at the many curves and valleys of her.

He wondered if he’d ever feel fully satiated, or if he would always walk around with this yearning now, this knowledge of her entire body and the way it felt.

And if so, whether it was possible to accomplish anything ever again, or if she had ruined him.

The rest of the day’s intentions had been laid to waste. Twice, Donny had come knocking at the door asking for Patrick, and twice Patrick and Nina had ignored him. “Brother, if you need me to break down this door and save you, just use the safe word. Has the Charmer bested you?”

“Fuck off, Donny,” Patrick had called, and Donny had snickered on the other side of the doorframe.

Nina lay naked against him, one leg entangled with his, her stomach pressed to his hip. She had her eyes closed but didn’t sleep. She smiled as Donny’s footsteps receded.

One of Nina’s fingers drew patterns on Patrick’s chest. Swirls. Mazes, perhaps. He’d never felt quite so peaceful.

“I wish I could draw you,” she murmured sleepily. “I’d be able to get it right this time.”

He frowned. “You must miss it,” he said. “Art, I mean.”

A pause. “A little.”

“I’ll find you some supplies,” he said immediately. “You can paint and draw until your fingers fall off.”

“Awfully generous of you.”

“I have a mind to keep you here by any means,” he murmured, following the underside of her breast with his fingers. She shuddered. “Bribery included.”

He felt her body surge slightly beneath his touch.

He was quickly learning all the ways to make it respond to him.

It was the most enthralling puzzle he’d ever encountered.

A kiss beneath her jaw tipped her head back, her hips were ticklish, her inner thighs especially sensitive—she gasped every time.

He suspected she was marking him just as quickly. It seemed every place her fingers traveled set him on fire.

With nothing to stop him, he lowered his mouth to one pert nipple, delectably pink. His groin tightened painfully at the sound of the moan she emitted. Truly, if he had his way, he might hold her hostage in this bed forever, so he could elicit these songs from her at any moment.

Her chest flushed, her stomach dipped and rose with need. She tried to pull his face to hers but instead, he resisted. He traveled lower, skating down the length of her body until her legs rose on either side of his head, and his tongue parted her.

“Patrick,” she whimpered, again and again, eyelids fluttering. It was his favorite picture of her, he’d decided. Lips wet and glistening, throat exposed with her head back, cheeks pinkened. Those fall-colored eyes becoming uncontrolled.

He brought her to the very cusp, where it seemed the fall into blissful oblivion were inevitable, then watched her lunge for him, pushing him upright.

She wrapped her legs around his waist and lowered herself onto the hard length of him, immediately picking up a rhythm that had already become intuitive to them both.

He relished the way her body slid up and down his, how her stuttered whimpers collected in his mouth.

He braced his arm around the small of her back and angled up into her, pulling her down as tightly as he could, as close as he could, and watched her rapture cascade.

He followed soon after, groaning her name into the hollow of her throat, tangling his fist into her hair. If there were pleasures greater than this, he’d never heard them told. He descended back into himself with languid reluctance and found her still here, wrapped around him.

They fell in a tangle onto their sides.

It was peaceful enough here that he thought he might be able to sleep. He closed his eyes. “Tell me a story,” he whispered into her ear.

She stirred lazily, half-dazed. “What kind of story?”

“A story about you. Before we met. In Scurry.”

Her eyes opened, a line appearing between her brows. “Wouldn’t you prefer a happier story?”

He shook his head slowly, dropped a soft kiss to her throat. “I want a real one.”

“If you insist on touching me like that, I shouldn’t be expected to speak.”

He noted her hesitancy and was unsurprised.

In the brink, childhood was a balled-up wad of troublesome things.

Watery dinners and long winters and red-raw palms. Policemen with swinging batons.

Mothers who cried. Fathers who shouted and split their knuckles against the wall.

From the little Patrick had gathered, Nina’s upbringing had been no different.

She stalled at first, and Patrick wondered if he’d accidentally broken the spell they’d cast. But she didn’t withdraw, didn’t turn her face. She closed her eyes, and through their touching flesh, he felt her heart race.

“There was a river behind our house,” she said.

“My mother used to take me swimming in it. Taught me to pick the mint leaves along its edge and make tea with them. We watched the narrow boats and she tried to teach me to sketch or paint them. She told me the boats were headed for Belavere City. She promised we’d go there together one day. ”

Patrick stayed very quiet. He sensed pain laced into the words. A pain that wrenched at her even now.

“One day, I woke up at dawn and she wasn’t in her bed.

She wasn’t in the kitchen, either. And somehow, I knew.

I knew she was on one of those boats headed for the city.

I ran to the river just as she was passing.

I chased it for a mile at least, screaming for her, all the other passengers staring at me.

All except for her. She didn’t even have the courage to look at me one last time.

She hid her face beneath her hat and turned her head away. ”

Patrick’s fingers had become clamps. He swallowed the knot caught in his throat.

“I still wonder sometimes how she could do that. How could someone leave their child without a word? Without a single glance? I know now that she wanted to give me a chance. Another kind of life. But she didn’t look back.

“I stood on that bank until sunset. Then I went back out the next morning, and the next. For the longest time, I was sure she would come back. That’s the cruelest part of childhood, I think. You don’t know how to stop hoping.”

There was no tension in Nina’s body as she spoke, no severity in her tone. Only acceptance. She spoke as though the story belonged to someone else.

Patrick thought of that small girl on the Scurry riverbank, waiting for her mother to return, and was incensed. The troubles he’d traversed as a child paled compared to this.

Patrick looked at Nina, at her blond curls and rose-stained lips, and imagined her as a girl, the breaking of her heart a gradual progression. He wondered whether, if it were possible to go back in time and hold her hand, it would have made any difference.

Patrick drew Nina closer until she was curved perfectly around him. He kissed her shoulder, her jaw, the space between her eyes. He muttered, “She was a fool,” and, “I’m sorry,” and, “Thank you.”

“For what?” she asked, her lips a hairsbreadth from his.

“For giving me that piece of yourself,” he said. “I swear to you, I’ll look after it.”

And then he kissed her endlessly. Until it seemed she’d forgotten the river and its bank. Until she’d forgotten anything but this small world. Patrick Colson and Nina Harrow, succumbing to that which had simmered and seethed between them like a growing tidal wave.