But he let me touch him today and now I am aflame.
ChapterEighteen
Josephine walked through a haze,her mind adrift.
She didn’t hear her father’s mutterings over dinner, nor her mother’s high-pitched censure. She didn’t feel the weight of her clothes on her skin. She didn’t taste the food their long-time cook made with the unpalatable ingredients supplied by her father’s benefactors. She didn’t even notice the way Harrod’s eyes tracked her from across the table.
All she smelled was the shifter’s wild, musky scent. All she felt was his skin under her hands. All she heard was his baritone, whispering sweet things to her.
Josephine usually left the cells drained and heartsick, but after six hours with the shifter, she was full of restless energy such that when she was excused to her room, the bolt locked tight, she couldn’t get ready for bed.
He consumed her thoughts, and with every one of them, her stomach fluttered. The roof of her mouth ached fiercely, too. When she ran her tongue over the gland there, it felt inflamed in a way that was entirely new.
It was alarming, to be sure, but Josephine was too overwrought to give the development proper attention. She could not stop thinking about how she dozed against his back, listening to the steady sounds of his heart, his breathing, his delicious purr. She recalled how, when she woke some time later, he did not complain about her heaviness, but rather seemed immensely proud that she’d trusted him enough to sleep.
Josephine didn’t explain to him that she’d slept fitfully since her father began his experiments on her, nor that his body heat had acted as a drug to her senses, lulling her into a place of pure bliss. She didn’t need to. Even without seeing his face, she could tell that he knew.
And he hadn’t asked her to stop. When lunch came — the usual grim fare of hardtack, mash, beans, and canned peas — she worked up the courage to sit beside him, their legs touching, though she didn’t dare meet his gaze.
He gave me his peas,she thought, heart racing and aching all at once. He noticed that she ate them first, as they were her favorites, and had silently scooped his portion onto her plate.
When they were done, he gave her his back again. They’d spent the rest of the day speaking quietly, with Josephine telling him all she knew as she rubbed her cheek against the hot, tanned skin of his shoulder, her hands roaming with ever-more greediness.
While she traced sloping muscle and gnarled scars, she explained what her father had done to her, how he’d tampered with the lyssa-infected vampire venom to make her, how it did not do as he expected it would after she woke up from three days of feverish delirium and agony. She even confessed to how she lost her mind each month, when the beast took over her body to rage and howl. He listened quietly, asking questions only when absolutely necessary, as he arched into her hands.
The truths spilled from her easily, like rotten blood from an old wound. When she touched him, breathed him, listened to his crooning voice, the poison of her misery simply… slipped away from her.
It was not only the tactile pleasure that made her beast keen with delight, but the way her hands seemed tolearnhim. The more she touched him, the more she felt her comprehension of his form grow.
Previously, she’d only known the human form through anatomical drawings and the nightmarish days of contact in the cells. She’d never had the chance to observe the form in person without duress.
But after six hours in the cell with the shifter, mapping his body with her hands, she felt her artist’s mind had expanded.
Attempting to channel all her restless energy and block out the way the beast howled to return to the barn, Josephine got onto her knees to haul her trunk out from below her bed. In it were all her worldly possessions, which mostly consisted of art supplies and her journal.
After writing a frantic, truncated summary of the day in her diary, she stored it again and retrieved her sketchpad and charcoal.
She picked the softest willow sticks, precious in their rarity now that they weren’t being made in the territories. It was thinner than a pencil and three times as delicate. Holding it with a practiced grip, she began to commit all she’d learned to paper.
Beautiful,she thought, smudging a smoky line with her thumb to create a shadow beneath the curve of his left shoulder.So beautiful.
When her stick snapped under the force of her enthusiasm, Josephine laid the pad on the floor and used the bits with increasingly frenetic swipes — long drags of her arm over the page, short, sharp strikes, accompanied by the rush of taking her palm to that sketched form to smear it all into ghostly ash. Fishing out a tiny lump of what was once a proud conté crayon, she went over the smoky images again, carving out form and movement with elegant, spare lines.
By the time her lamp burned out, her floor was covered in drawings of the shifter. She loved and loathed them all. They lacked his vitality, hislife.How could she hope to capture it when she had only studied him for a day? The flaws in her drawings bothered her artist’s eye even as the woman, thebeaststared at them with growing hunger.
Frustrated, exhilarated, as well as exhausted, Josephine at last surrendered to sleep when there was no longer any light by which she might work. Her hands were blackened; a corner of her skirt was similarly stained, as she’d used it to wipe away tone, creating the illusion of light on his magnificent form.
Gathering her drawings with clumsy fingers, she hastily stuffed them into her trunk before she made her way over to her wash basin, where she scrubbed her hands with abrasive lye soap.
Even it would not cleanse her completely. Charcoal had a way of getting everywhere and staying there. Its grit was so fine that she often didn’t feel it rubbing against her fingers as she smudged and smeared. Only when she could no longer discern her fingerprints on her most used fingers did she realize how even the silky-soft powder had tooth to it.
Donning her nightgown, Josephine reluctantly crawled into bed and pulled her blankets up to her chin. Was her bed colder than the night before? Perhaps it was the temperature changing, but she couldn’t help but feel it was more than that.
She’d known the shifter’s warmth for so little time, but already it felt unnatural to be without it.
Curling up on her side to conserve warmth, she looked out her window to see a sliver of the barn’s turf roof.
Is he cold?Josephine’s heart lurched.Papa doesn’t give them blankets anymore. It must be so cold in there for him, chained as he is to that awful wall.
