He sighed, leaning in until his breath touched my cheek. True to his word, he didn’t touch me, keeping a thin layer of distance between us as I turned my head to look at him. My hair slipped out of his hands, my lips hovering so close to his, if I moved in the wrong way, they would touch.
Caelum’s stare drifted down to my mouth, lingering there before those piercing dark eyes lifted back to mine. “It was as bad as you can imagine.” His words hovered on the air between us as a wall cracked inside my heart.
Not all scars were visible.
“But it taught me one thing,” he said, reaching out to tuck my hair behind my ear and smooth the tangles on the side of my head. “No matter what my future looks like, nothing will keep me away from the woman I love. Not even death will keep me from her.”
I cleared my throat, suddenly overcome with the need to retreat from the intensity of his words. Even barely knowing him, the thought of him one day having that with someone else filled my chest with lead.
With heartache I hadn’t earned.
What difference did it make to me if he touched another woman with those gentle fingers that so often stroked my skin? If his breath washed over another woman’s cheek while he murmured in her ear? If he tore another woman in two with his monumental cock?
It didn’t. It couldn’t.
“She’ll be a lucky woman,” I said, running my hand through my hair as he finished with the tangles. My fingers were pruney, my toes tender as they scraped the bottom of the hot spring.
“I hope she sees it that way,” he said, shrugging his shoulders with a smile. As if he knew he was both impossible to deny and impossible to tolerate, all in the same breath.
“I should get out. Do you mind?” I asked, smiling sheepishly as he stepped away. He turned his back to me where he stood in the middle of the pool, leaving me to heave myself out of the water and onto the edge of the spring.
The sudden burst of cool breeze pebbled my skin, everything in my body going still in response. I turned to look over my shoulder, finding Caelum’s tense face staring back at me. His gaze wasn’t on mine, instead fixated on my naked flesh and the scars covering my back in thick white lines.
When his eyes raised to mine finally, the menace in them stole the breath from my lungs. His jaw clenched, his nostrils flaring, as he took that first step toward me. Water sloshed at his sides as he prowled through the hot spring with a look of pure rage etched into his handsome features. I scrambled, gathering my dress in my hands and covering my body with it as I spun to face him, tearing the sight of my scars away from him and hoping I could somehow defuse the situation and calm the monster that seemed to rattle at the cage of Caelum’s skin.
He placed his hands on the stone edge of the spring and, with an animalistic grace I would never hope to achieve lifted his nude body out of the water and unfolded to his full height. Through the steam, his dark eyes glimmered with the promise of violence and retribution. “What the fuck are those?” he growled, something darker echoing in his voice.
As if he was truly part beast, his rage made him vibrate as he stalked toward me. The Fae Mark on his neck glowed with his anger, the black and white swirls of ink pulsing in time with his steps.
I wondered if the Mark stole our humanity, if it made us more feral, like the Fae who claimed us.
“It’s nothing,” I said, swallowing and forcing a lame smile to my face. Shame heated my cheeks, leaving me wanting nothing more than to pretend the last few moments had never happened. That he’d never seen the consequences for my disobedience as a girl.
“That is not nothing.” He crossed the remaining distance between us, his eyes gleaming with a predatory light. All thoughts of his promise not to touch me until I begged for it forgotten, I backed away from him in a panic. Clutching my dress to my body, I shielded myself from his view when he was lost to the anger that danced in his face.
My back struck the rock carvings on the side of the mountain, the stone figures of the Old Gods digging into my spine as Caelum pressed his body flush against the front of mine. His forearm curved above my head, resting against the rock above me as he leaned down and surrounded me.
“Caelum,” I whispered, watching as the first snow of the season fell behind him as white flecks against the fading light of the evening sky.
“Who the fuck hurt you?” he growled, his chest rumbling in front of my face as I stared up into his obsidian eyes. Something shifted on his face, a rage like I’d never seen taking over as he gritted his teeth when I didn’t give him the answer he demanded. “Who?”
“I was a difficult child,” I said, shaking my head to try to justify what I knew now had been just another way of the lord grooming me to become what he wanted. “Always getting into trouble. Playing with the boys instead of sewing with the girls. Lord Byron thought it would force me to behave more appropriately for a young lady.”
“Is he still breathing?” Caelum asked, tilting his head to the side slightly as he stared down at me.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, swallowing against the dread threatening to close my airway. “I fled Mistfell when the Veil shattered. It was the only way to survive.”
Caelum grasped my chin between two fingers and tipped my head up, dropping his face lower until his mouth was only a breath away from mine when he spoke the vow I didn’t doubt he had every intention of keeping. “He won’t be for long.”
I swallowed, unable to come up with any kind of response in the face of his wrath. No one in their right mind would threaten to kill a Lord for disciplining a girl.
“He will suffer for every mark on your skin, every moment he frightened you, every tear you shed, before I finally put him out of his misery.” He leaned forward, brushing his lips against the corner of my mouth. Not quite a kiss, not quite not. Everything in me tightened, the fear of the moment dissipating as I shifted with sudden desire to feel that full mouth on mine.
He stared down, as if he knew exactly what pulsed through my mind, how the thought of him murdering my tormentor turned me on just as much of the feel of him hard against my belly.
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