“Where do you want me?” I asked.
He shifted back on the bed and patted the mattress in front of him. “Right here, with your back to me.”
I obeyed with a frown I couldn’t quite hide. “You’re very eager.”
“I want to spoil you,” he replied. “Is that such a terrible thing?”
I didn’t know how to answer him. My parents had spoiled me when I was a child, I supposed, but my memories of them from Ivyhill were patchy, hazy, and the thought of the Warden ever spoiling any of us Roses was laughable.
“No, I suppose not,” I answered, but I felt stupidly tense sitting there before him, waiting for him to begin, and when he first touched my hair, I actually flinched.
He stopped at once. “Are you all right? If you’re uncomfortable, I don’t have to do this.”
“I’m not uncomfortable,” I lied. “Just a little cold. Keep going.”
I steeled myself, determined to be the most unflappable person ever to have been spoiled by a librarian with a comb. Slowly, Gareth began untying my hair from its sloppy bun. After our long day of travel, then making love with him and sleeping smashed up against him, it was an absolute mess.
But Gareth was patient, and exceedingly gentle, and by the time my tangled hair hung loose down my back, I felt a little less like a cornered animal.
He pressed a kiss to my bare shoulder. “Can I keep going?”
I nodded, forcing myself to at least try and relax, which at first felt impossible. Even the soft strokes of the comb through the less tangled parts of my hair jarred me.
But then he encountered trickier knots, and instead of just yanking the comb through them until they cooperated—my personal strategy of choice—he grew even gentler. When the comb hit a knot thatneeded extra care, he tried instead to untangle it with his fingers.
It was then that I started wondering if somewhere in Gareth’s gods-blessed brain he possessed a trace of empathic powers and was using them to placate me, because surely no one could have such a delicate touch as this. He worked through every last one of my tangles with careful focus. Whenever his fingers brushed against my nape, he followed the caress with a soft kiss between my shoulder blades.
Soon I closed my eyes and let my chin droop. Once he saw to every tangle, he started drawing the comb down through my hair in long, slow strokes. I shivered, goose bumps erupting all over my body.
He kissed the crown of my head, a low sound of satisfaction rumbling in his chest. “I can’t describe how delighted I am to see you enjoying this.”
I mumbled some kind of agreement, which made him laugh, and once my hair felt like a smooth waterfall cascading down my back, he threaded his fingers through it and started massaging my scalp.
I let out a mortifyingly erotic cry, like he’d just put his head between my legs, not his fingers into my hair. But my embarrassment disappeared immediately, and all I could do was tilt my head back and lean into his touch. The slow circling pressure of his fingers completely unspooled me, melting away every bit of tension in my body. By the time he moved his hands down to my shoulders and started gently kneading them, I felt certain I was about to start crying.
“Are you all right?” Gareth murmured.
I shook my head helplessly. “I’ve never felt anything like this before. Nobody has ever…”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. It felt too sad for such a moment. Instead I gave myself up to the bliss of his hands until I could no longer bear the thought of keeping my back to him for even one more second.
When I turned around and took his face in my hands, he frowned alittle and brought his hands up to cover mine.
“You’re crying,” he said. “Do you want to talk—”
“No.” I smoothed my thumbs across his stubbled cheeks. He looked so dear in the firelight, so handsome and golden, and suddenly I needed him—on me, in me, beside me, all of it. All ofhim.
“I wantyou,” I whispered. Then I kissed him, and he slid his arms around me with a groan, and when he laid me back against the bed, I felt giddy, drunk, as warm and soft as I’d ever been. He kissed his way down my body and settled between my legs with a deep, contented sigh. The sound nearly finished me before he’d even begun. Then he buried his face between my thighs and put his mouth on me, slow and soft, as tender and thorough as he’d been with my hair. My eyelids fluttered shut. I threaded my fingers through his messy golden curls, arched up against him, and let him have me.
***
The Falkeron Cloisters sat atop seaside cliffs on the smallest of the Northern Isles. Every other settlement on these islands was a ramble of cozy stone cottages, weather-beaten piers, and crooked cobblestone roads strewn with sand and bits of seashells, but the Cloisters were all straight lines and orderly paths, not a stray weed or pebble to be found. Constructed of the dark gray stone native to the northern coastlines, the holy buildings loomed forbiddingly over the crashing waves below.
And even though it was entirely irrational, as the oar strokes of our hired sailor brought us closer and closer to the island and the severe square turrets of the Cloisters grew larger, I felt a twinge of unease deep in my gut.
There was no need for nerves. The Order enjoyed a comfortable relationship with the continent’s five monasteries. The Warden visited each of them at least once a year and called upon the FalkeronCloisters much more frequently than that.
The joke among us Roses was that the frigid, unfriendly climate of these harsh northern islands suited the Warden’s personality better than any other place in the world. Brigid’s and my private theory was that she had chosen the Blessed Abbot to father her child—the future leader of the Order—and that she frequented the Cloisters because of her and the abbot’s salacious trysts.
