Page 40 of Darkest at Dusk (Revenant Roses)

He entered her the way he had first kissed her, his thrust gentler than she expected. The stretch burned, stung. He took his time, slowly, slowly.

She gasped as he pushed fully inside her, quick, sharp, and then he went still, his mouth on her temple, his breath a broken prayer, their bodies joined, pain blossoming at her centre.

For a handful of heartbeats, they didn’t move at all, and in that stillness, she felt every place they touched as if it had been set alight. The burn eased.

He moved, just a little. Then more. The ache reshaped itself into something that made her toes curl.

His rhythm cautious, he thrust, slow and shallow. The feeling of being filled by him was like grief untying inside her. And as he moved faster, deeper, his thrusts filling her completely, pleasure rode her, leaving her mindless, writhing, needing .

There was nothing tidy in the way he pressed his forehead to hers, as if he needed her breath to remember how to take his own, nothing gentle in the way each thrust filled her and dragged her closer to an edge she could not name.

She wrapped her legs about his waist, a shameless, greedy clasp that made him groan against her throat.

“You are so beautiful, so perfect,” he said, and he thrust deeper.

In that instant, she felt beautiful, perfect. He made a sound, low and rough, unlike anything she had ever heard from any man.

They found a rhythm. They gasped and missed and found again. They clutched and fumbled. They knocked the sheet to the floor and did not notice.

He spoke to her in fragments—praise, her name, a strangled curse. She whispered things, pleases and yeses and his name in a dozen registers.

Pleasure gathered at her core, a coil drawn tight. He swore softly into her hair, his hand sliding between them again, clever, unerring, finding a place that made the pleasure so keen it was almost pain.

She cried out as the world went bright and then brighter still, until she could not hold it. She broke with a yell, unguarded, grateful, and for a long moment she was nothing but sensation riding the heavens.

Then she was herself again, wrapped in him, gasping.

He held himself still, shaking, teeth clenched as if in pain. She realized with a rush of surprised tenderness that he had been holding back, waiting for her to catch him. Now it was his turn to catch her.

Cupping his face with both hands, she pulled him down to kiss her, then whispered against his lips, “Let me give you the joy you just gave me.”

His control failed beautifully. He drove into her once, twice, the sounds he made rough with relief, and she felt the shudder rip through him, felt the tremor as he buried his face against her throat and found his release.

She held him as if they stood on a cliff and the wind had tried to take them both. She held him as he had held her.

After, the quiet felt earned.

Rolling to his side, he brought her with him, keeping her gathered in against him. She pillowed her cheek on his shoulder and listened to his heart pound, then slow. Her own heart answered, a softened echo.

She realized she was trembling. Not from cold. From the violence of wanting, from the shattering grace of having it given, of being seen and desired. Wanted. He noticed, of course he did. He pulled the sheet up and tucked it around her shoulder with a tenderness that made her eyes sting.

“Are you—” he began and could not seem to find the rest of the sentence.

She smiled against his throat. “Yes,” she said softly. “I am.”

“Good,” he said, and the word came out rough. “God, Isabella…”

He went quiet, his fingers tracing idle patterns along her shoulder, absurdly gentle. She pressed a kiss to the side of his throat where his pulse lived. He made a quiet sound that might have meant thank you.

In the silence, she heard the promises neither could make.

Promises of forever. Even promises of tomorrow.

No vows, only breath. No guarantees, only the heat of their bodies and the thud of their hearts.

If dawn brought the return of the wraith’s hunger, then let tonight be theirs.

Tonight, they had taken something back that grief had stolen, a human thing, a tender thing.

Rhys lay on his back, Isabella’s warmth pressed to his side, his breath yet uneven, his fingers tracing idle circles on her shoulder. He could not seem to stop touching her. Her hair spilled over his chest, smelling faintly of lavender.

He had not intended for it to be like this. He had intended for her to help him, to stand beside him and open the gate. He had never intended to be undone, stripped down to the quick, not by this woman’s mouth and hands, not by her trust.

“Rhys,” she said, her voice quiet but steady. “You have told me the worst of it. Catrin. The murders. The way you barred the door. But I have questions about Hargreaves. About Papa.”

Of course she would ask. And she deserved the truth, though it painted him in poor light. That thought brought a wry twist to his lips. As if her image of him could be tarnished worse than by the truth already laid bare, that he was a murderer, marked and damned.

He brushed a kiss across her brow, selfish in the taking. “Ask, and I will answer.”

“Why did you seek out Papa? Why him?”

“When I was at St. Jude’s,” he began, his voice rough.

“Hargreaves told me he had once before encountered a case like mine. A girl who believed she heard things…saw things. He called it disappointment when her father refused treatment. I saw the truth in him. It was not disappointment. It was rage that he had been denied a specimen.”

Her body went still, a knot of remembered terror drawing her taut against him.

He knew that terror. The memory of iron locks and echoing corridors pressed against his ribs like a weight.

Tightening his arm around her, he pressed his lips to her hair until the tremor left her shoulders.

God, if he could take that memory from her and let it rot in his own bones, he would.

“I wondered about her,” he went on. “The girl he spoke of.

I wondered if she truly heard the noise, always buzzing at the edge of my thoughts.

If she saw the wraiths. I dared not ask him about her, knowing that he would see it as more proof of the instability of my mind.

So, I sopped up the dribbles he offered, not her name, not her location, only her existence.

“When my time behind those bars was done and I had convinced him that he had done a wonderful thing, that he had cured me, I left believing that somewhere out there was another soul walking masked, pretending. Not mad. Not alone.”

She made a choked sound, and he suspected she understood what he had felt. The hope he had harbored.

“When I returned to Harrowgate, the house pressed in on me. My brothers begged. My mother sobbed. But only I heard them.” His grief swelled, and he swallowed it back, raw and bitter.

“And then my father died and I had money. I had rage. I salted Hargreaves’s reputation until it rotted.

When he was desperate enough, I dangled a post in Marlow.

He came, and he drank himself to death. And then I took his ledgers, his notes. ”

He met her gaze, unflinching. “He had some notes about the girl I sought. Her name. It was a place to start. And he had listed books, tracts and treatises he considered ‘germane to spectral delusion.’ He believed the authors were all subject to delusion.

“I searched out sellers. Paternoster Row first. Then a secondhand man off Maiden Lane. From him to Mr. Fenwick in Holborn?—”

“I know them all,” Isabella said.

“It was Fenwick who told me of a gentleman, an antiquarian who collected items pertaining to ‘phenomena at the edge of seeing.”

“Papa,” she said softly.

“Your father,” he agreed.

“You hunted him. You hunted me .” Her tone was flat, her eyes searching as she studied him.

“I did,” he said simply. “You and…” He hesitated, then revealed the last bit of it.

“You and a book I believed to be in your father’s possession.

To free those I love.” The words came harsher than he meant.

He forced himself to soften. “Even when I stood in the street, and you in the window above, you steadied me. You made the voices quieten.”

“Do you think I could hate you for this? For any of it?” she asked, her dark eyes wide and searching.

Almost did he say yes. Almost did he tell her to hate him now, before it grew more difficult later.

But she whispered, “I dislike the snare. I dislike the darkness you walked in order to reach me. But I do not, I cannot hate you. Only… No more tricks. No more lures. No more boxes laid out to tempt me. Only ask me as I have asked you.”

He buried his nose in her dark hair, soft and thick and fragrant, and he said, “No more snares. I will ask.”

He had not intended for it to be like this. He had intended for her to help him, to stand beside him and open the gate. The plan had been clean, cold, brutal: Survive the house. Free his family. Keep Catrin from devouring what little remained. Nothing more. Nothing tender. Certainly not this.

He didn’t deserve this.

And yet here she was, pressed against him, her breath a soft rhythm against his skin, her hand resting on his heart.

He had thought himself emptied years ago, believed that grief had burned away the part of him that dared to want.

But with her quiet strength, her refusal to flinch, her defiant compassion, Isabella had slipped past to fill him again. And that fullness brought fear.

The scent of lavender threaded with the faint salt of her skin teased his senses, and he realizes he was memorizing it, hoarding it as a man does water in a drought.

Everyone he had ever loved was buried or burned. To love this woman was to gamble with ruin. If the house took her, if Catrin tore her from him, the wound she left behind would be worse than the wailing of a thousand ghosts.

Something gave way inside him, a fracture running through the stone he had carried for years. He had lost everyone he had ever loved. He could not lose her, too.

And yet, if he tried to keep her safe by sending her away, he would strip her of choice. She was not a child. Not a possession. She was a woman with a right to choose her own path. He would not take that from her.

He would let her decide to choose him—or not.