“You make my life so fucking…perfect, Olympia Aberdeen,” he gritted out through his teeth and held my gaze with his own fiery dark gaze. He grabbed each of my ankles and held them together around his neck, angling himself deeper inside me.
“On my worst days, I think I hate you,” he gasped, teeth sinking into the flesh of my breast. “You’re the only one who’s ever made me feel this way.” He followed his bite with a pass of his tender tongue. “I love you so much it makes me fucking mad.” He punctuated each word with another deep thrust. He drove me to utter ruin, and I would have begged him to do it again and again.
I clenched my hand around his forearm, and my nails dug into his flesh.
“We did this. It’s our fault he left, our fault if anything happens to him. He was too good for us. You and I are alike—for all the darkness that lives inside us, he was good. I can’t bear to lose someone else I love. I can’t be who you want me to be. You deserve the world, and it kills me that it isn’t I who can give it to you.”
“Alaric, I…” I groaned in pleasure, his words spurring me on.
He thrust so harshly and fast, it stole my breath, my release ripped through my body, searing-hot pleasure spiking through my system as I felt him empty inside me. My head fell against his shoulder, and I inhaled his scent, woodsmoke and leather and whisky. I would sear his scent into my senses forever. With a soft shudder and serrated groan, Alaric twisted his face into a look of regret as he pulled himself from me. His chest heaved as he released both of my legs and collapsed between my thighs. I relished the feel of his heavy protection against my form; I felt so small and so comfortable beside him. Like a perfect fit. Cradling his body in mine, I lifted his chin to match our gazes, and I was blindsided by the look of destruction crossing his otherwise measured features.
Alaric was known for his mood swings, but he looked more devastated than ever.
“I’m sorry, Olympia.” He pulled up his pants and backed away from me. “I’m so sorry.”
“What? Alaric, no—”
“Spare me the pity. I’m sorry I took advantage of you. I will never forgive myself. I—” His eyes turned dark, as if the sound of my voice tortured him. “I lost myself in you for a moment, but it won’t happen again.”
I sat perched on the boulder overlooking the fairy pools with my dress gathered in my arms and feeling utterly abandoned, even though I’d just been abused in the most wonderful of ways by the man I loved. He turned, and I watched his back as he ran one hand through his hair. The beautiful, tortured other half of my soul.
Tears sprang to my eyes, and I wiped them away. I slid off the boulder and smoothed my dress back into place. “I’m sorry too.” Only, I wasn’t sorry. I simply wanted to hurt him for making me feel like a spoiled little girl he’d taken advantage of. I was a woman. He may have been a few years older than me, but I felt all the things he’d said he’d felt about us too.
I thought I’d finally broken through; I thought we’d had a moment and there would be no turning back for us. He’d exposed himself—all of the messy, raw emotions he’d spent a lifetime hiding, he’d finally shown to me. But that man was gone, and in his place was the calm and reserved mask he usually wore for the world.
He nodded once and then turned to head back toward the hills that separated us from Leith Hall. My tender, tortured lover. I knew then I’d never save him. The realization that I’d wanted to all this time was likebarbed wire pricking at my fractured soul.
I waited for long moments until his broad form was far enough ahead of me on the path that he was out of earshot. I wiped at my stubborn tears and then hurried up the path, trying to give him distance so he wouldn’t hear my angry sobs. I was so lost in my own feelings, though, I failed to register that he’d stopped on the path ahead of me. I didn’t stop until I’d almost run into his leather boots. “Oh shit. It’s Mother.”
I peered around Alaric’s shoulder to see the baroness stopped at the top of the hill and waving both of her hands at us.
“It’s the curse!” she shrieked into the wind.
Alaric’s eyes widened. “The curse.”
“A curse?” I repeated, but Alaric was already shuttling himself up the hill to reach his mother. I climbed up after him, scrambling in my slippery boots. I was breathing hard when I reached the top of the hill. “What curse?”
“The Salt Witch of Skye cast a curse on my father and every generation of this family because he owed a moral debt which she claims canny be repaid,” Alaric uttered. “Mother, what’s going on?”
“Your brother—” she wiped at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief “—was killed.”
Alaric clenched his fists at his sides. “Who?”
“I-I don’t know. Your father has put out word to a commander friend of his, but that will take weeks at least to hear back.”
“I’ll avenge whoever took my brother’s life, and so help me, if anyone gets in my way, I’ll send them to their grave too.”
“Alaric, no—” His mother tried to grab his coattails. “I don’t think he’d even reached the battlefield. I think it was friendly fire.”
Alaric’s face crumpled, anger clenching his jaw before he sucked in a breath and screamed, “Then it is Father who deserves my retribution for sending him away!”
“Alaric, no,” she begged again, then dropped to her knees in the heather and prayed.
“An eye for an eye, Mother, you know the rules. Father is only half my blood. My brother is all of me, and I am him.”
His mother continued to pray, tears streaking her face.
Alaric stalked down the footpath to Leith, spine straight like a board.
