He wanted to make her smile. He wanted to pleasure her by every means he could imagine. He wanted to and hewould.
He loved her as he had never loved before.
Chev’s words came to him then.Pen was merely a safe object for his distant idolatry...
Had Chev been right?
Had Pen been easy to love only because he could never truly touch her heart? If so, was Hera, too, just a creation of his mind?
No.
He held in reverence Hera’s shining, spiral hair. Her tender touch. The inward, marvelous curve, hip to waist, as she stretched out beside him. But what he truly needed came from within her heart. A quality manifest in the careful, intent way she watched him when she thought he wasn’t looking, and the artless fascination she radiated when she gazed deep into his eyes.
Mostly, however, he loved her because of the way she’d unlocked everything he’d boxed up deep inside. The way she made him want again to be childlike—open and free.
At the sound of the first chime, he slipped out of his bedchamber. By the tenth, he was already in the armory.
She stood, back to him, gazing at the bed. Her dressing gown flowed in goddess-like folds to the ground. He threaded his arms around her waist, and she leaned back against his chest with a sigh.
She was no figment.
She was a flower, and she was opening to him in trust. Or, if not to him, to the moment, to their agreement.
Tell her.
Tell her how all his accumulated wealth melted to nothing whenever she was near. Tell her how, in her presence, the pain he carried within him dissipated. Tell her for the first time in his life, his waking thought wasn’t of the beam of electricity that had shot down from a dark night sky to steal his family, his happiness, and his security.
Instead, he said, “Anything can be taken away at any moment.”
She turned in his arms and lifted her face. Questions lurked behind her eyes.
Tell her!
He couldn’t. He tried, but, well, words that could capture that night, words that could explain the deep, thick fear-laden internal bog he carried around inside of him that was intimately connected to how much he needed her to love him...those words did not exist.
Instead, he simply whispered, “Marry me. You’ve never definitively answered, though I’ve already asked. Multiple times, I might add.”
Her gaze shuttered. “I am not the kind of woman you’d marry.”
“If that were true, I would not have asked you.”
“You’re just enthralled.” She stepped out of his arms. “When this is over, you’ll find a proper little thing who will hang on the wisdom of your vast experience?—"
“Hang?”
“—and thus harden beyond redemption every one of your worst flaws.”
He ignored the impulse to return her verbal punch.Eyes on the horizon. “Why do you do that? Why do you push me away?”
She was silent for some time. “Howdoyou think of me, Godric?”
“As someone that could, I suspect, show me the meaning of love.”
“Youknowhow to love.”
She sounded almost...bitter? He couldn’t be sure. She had turned away from him again and did not look back.
“You love the children,” she added in a lighter tone.
