I dropped everything I’d retrieved as I devoured the sight of her.
Relief lit her face, but I could still see the worry in her eyes. Worry that I was still enraged at learning my old life was lost to Stig. She would be right about that. The rage had not fled from me on that point. It still simmered and seethed within me, but it had merged with my hunger for her.
“You’re back.” It was one of those unnecessary things people said, but I still was so very gratified to hearhersay it, to see her eyes sparkle at the sight of me, gratified to know she craved me as much as I craved her. Had anyone ever looked at me the way she was looking at me now?
She pushed back from the rock wall and glided forward, her gaze skimming over me, missing nothing, especially not my cock. Her amber-gold eyes went wide and then turned molten as I grew even larger beneath her avid gaze.
I slipped into the water with hardly a splash and gathered her in my arms. This. This was what home felt like, what it would feel like when I reclaimed my place in the Borderlands, when I slept again in my chamber, in my bed in the Borg, Tamsyn beside me. It was the antithesis of my life for the last year. In her arms I felt … rescued. Whole again. “I said I would come back.”
“Can you blame me for wondering?” Her smile dimmed a bit, and it was my turn to frown. “You looked so angry. Angry with me.”
“I was angry … Iam,” I admitted, sliding a palm against the side of her face and holding it there. “But not at you.” I felt a stab of guilt that I had made her feel that way.
Regret lived in me. It had chased me through the last year—at least in mywakingmoments, before I’d descended into the void and the misty fog had turned on me—before my magic, with nowhere else to go, had turned inward and begun to devour me.
In the absence of air, I had breathed in the sour, fetid taste, inhaling regret right along with my thirst for revenge.
I should have never trusted my newfound brother. I thought I knew what I was doing—that I was warrior enough, that my experience as the Beast of the Borderlands equipped me to handle anything and I could just slide into the Crags and the pride aseasily as any other dangerous and precarious situation. If I’d been wiser and more discerning, the Borderlands would not be suffering the Terror right now. I had to live with that. That guilt was mine alone.
“I was wrong,” I said.
She blinked spiky wet lashes, her arms circling my shoulders, hands moving, brushing, smoothing over my skin, as though she could not help herself. As though she had to feel me, touch me, pet me like something treasured. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I left you … and—” I blew out a curse and claimed her lips as though kissing her would make everything right.
Buoyed in the water, she wrapped her legs around me. We moved in slow languorous circles in the pool.
It was an easy matter to dip my fingers between us and find her, ready and eager—to trace her, to slide inside her slippery flesh. Her inner muscles clamped tightly around my fingers, her thighs tightening around my hand.
She dropped her face into my neck, clinging tightly, moaning and panting as I fucked her with my hand. First one finger. Then two. I curled them inside her, stroking deep, setting a relentless tempo, watching her face as rapture took her.
She worked herself against the thrust of my fingers, dropping her head and sucking on the pulse point at my throat as she chased her pleasure and claimed it, clenching, seizing hard all around me. Only as she came apart, ripples shuddering throughout her body, eddying into me, did I slip my fingers free from her and replace them with my cock.
Seated fully and gloriously inside her, I moved, stroking into her again and again until she was wound up once more, her body tossing and arching …
We operated as one, maneuvering together, our flesh pushing and pulling, straining toward that sweet release, water sloshing all around us as I let myself go, as I released my anger in the carnal act.
Her body hummed and vibrated against me, the hot clench of her sex clamping around me. We came hard and fast together. Igripped her shoulders, holding tight as we both flew apart simultaneously, brilliantly bound, linked. Her shattering release was mine and vice versa.
Gasping, I backed her against the pool’s edge, both of us relaxed, limp and boneless. Turning, still holding her tightly against my side, I draped an arm along the lip of the pool and wrapped another arm around her waist, keeping her close.
We were quiet for several moments, content and satiated in the aftermath, the only sounds that of our heaving breaths and the gentle lap of water. Once my breathing had evened, I finally said, “Tell me you’ve been treated well.” My fingers drew small circles over her silken shoulder. “Tell me you weren’t harmed.”
There had been times, in the early days before the void, trapped in my tomb, when I had sensed her suffering, and it had only added to my own. Her pain. Mine. It was a confusing jumble. Often indistinguishable. But the sticking point? The thing that crushed me even now? I had not been there for her. Not only had I been powerless and unable to help myself, but I had been unable to help Tamsyn and I would carry that failure with me as deep as any wound—forever.
Protecting her had been the one thing I vowed to her following our wedding and bedding, during the crossing when we had both been such different people, warily circling each other as strangers do … forced together, drawn together, not knowing yet who we would be to each other.
She held motionless, not moving a breath for a long moment before nodding. “I have no complaints. They treated me … fine. They indoctrinated me, schooling me on all things related to dragonkind. It was … useful. I was fed and clothed and they trained me as though I was one of them.”
Fine.
I nodded slowly, mulling over that word as I rolled my head against the lip of the pool to stare at her through tendrils of steam. “That is good,” I said carefully. “You can teach me all you learned.” I smiled at her even as I had a flash of doubt.
My brother may have betrayed me, but apparently she had been safe and well cared for with him. As much as it pained me to admit it, perhaps the pride had been the best place for her all these months. Clearly, Penterra would have been less than right for her with the fucking Terror at the helm.
An uncomfortable thought entered my head.
Perhaps I was doing her an unfairness by taking her away, by bringing her back where the one who sought to destroy her held sway. Did she even want to go with me or was I making an assumption on her behalf?
