Awe struck his features. Hooded eyes studied my face. Like what was happening to me was the most arresting thing he’d ever seen.
I found him more attractive at that moment. Carved jaw, sullen chin, lips too sensitive for a man. His features were hard, steadfast, but once the eternal trace of mourning broke through, what I thought to be, the unshakeable mask drawn onto his face, I felt him in the deepest parts of me.
Muscles tense, my body jerked in the palms of his eyes at the peak of the climax. Then my head fell back, the cool air rushing up my chest.
Stone was absolutely aroused, breathing hard, his brows slanted, teasing my orgasm as it died away. But before it left me completely, he withdrew his coated fingers and swiped my climax onto my tongue.
And, as he promised, I tasted myself.
I tastedmyself.
Winter and copper. Earth and wild musk.
Stone grabbed my throat, sweeping his tongue into my mouth, and his moan quivered through me. He kissed me slowly, passionately. And I melted.
I melted.
At some point, he lifted me out of the tub and pulled me into his lap.
I straddled him, soaking his clothes and burrowing myself into his chest.
My nipples were hard and pierced his thin shirt with every heaving breath. The cold slipping into the bathroom wrapped around us, and my body trembled in the wake of it all. “Stone?”
“Hm?” he hummed, his mouth dragging up the length of my neck, ten fingertips slowly grazing the sides of my breasts. When my head fell back, he kissed my throat. Gentle,gentle. A warm breath on every exhale as he slid his fingers down my sides and back up again. “What is it, Circe?”
And when he said this name, I closed my eyes to keep guilt from hitting my heart. If I told him my true name after all this time, how would he believe anything else?
I lowered my chin to look him in the eyes.
“I would believe you,” I said to him. “If you told me that we were supposed to live centuries apart, I would believe you.”
A dark gaze darted between my eyes as his hands paused.
That was when Stone leaned in.
And he whispered another secret in my ear.
His lips moved against my cheek, telling me that he was not of this year but from 1864.
This quiet bomb had my heart racing, raising every hair on my body.
His confession didn’t stop. It went on in a whispered mess. A voice that shook, dispersed sentences, and broken breaths. Yet, he still spoke with unyielding truths, from the night his mother poisoned him, through a century of repeating death at the bottom of the sea, then waking up with me in the cave.
As he spoke, he believed in what he said with everything he had.
And for that, I believed him, too.
I kept my eyes outside the window as he held me, whispering his secrets, the snow slicing and slashing and slanting from the wind. There was snow both in my mind and falling around me. How were we possible?
When he pulled away, his face was like a marble Renaissance statue staring back at me, waiting for the truth to settle, for my heart to calm.
Then, we stayed just like that, with his fingers sliding down my spine as we lost ourselves in each other.
Stone
Circe stayed.
I never told her about the men I saw but instead replaced all memories on her skin with ones of us, confident she was mine now. I knew the truth about how she felt. Her heart didn’t beat the same with them as it did with me.
