Kieran’s hand curves around my neck, a light pressure that sends my pulse skittering. His thumb strokes the hollow of my throat before he moves to my drenched garments and begins the slow, steady task of unbuttoning my frock.
“I’ve dreamed of seeing you naked since that night in the ballroom. I’ve wanted to map every change in your body, to feel you writhe beneath my touch.”
I feel a tumult of emotions as his warm hands glide down the row of buttons, slowly revealing my corset and the shift underneath. Once he’s undone the dress, he lifts me with a reverence I’m not sure I deserve, then tosses the wet garment aside, where it lands with a soft slap against the carpet.
He shifts to his knees and offers me a hand, guiding me upright before turning me so he has better access to the corset strings. “Yesterday I was far too tempted to strip you of your corset, just so I could properly admire your breasts.”
I give him a small smile. “Are they that changed?”
His eyebrow arches as he loosens my stays, letting the corset fall to the floor and exposing my shift. I lift my arms silently as he pulls it over my head with a kind of awed hunger that leaves me breathless.
“You’re perfect, Gen. I thought you were then, but now? There is no equal to your beauty.”
I ease back, letting him take in my nearly naked body. All that remains are the stockings that reach just above my knees. Kieran liftsmy foot, drawing the stocking off in slow, reverent kisses along my inner leg before repeating the action on the other until I’m fully bared to him. He leans in, taking one of my full breasts in his hand and giving it a teasing squeeze. “I should have known, I should have fought for you.”
I meet his eyes and reach out, touching his wet chest. “No, I should have known my mother was involved somehow. She was against our relationship—even against our friendship. But that never stopped us, did it? She must have been irate when I still chose you over all the other boys at her ball.”
He grunts and shakes his head. “We can talk about her later. I have far more important things to do than discuss Penelope Ashcroft’s venomous disposition.”
He’s right, of course. Despite everything that’s happened between us, I don’t want my mother’s role to tarnish this moment.
I let my nails trail down the wet fabric of his shirt, finding the place where it bunches at his waist, and lift it up. He doesn’t resist as I tug it over his head and let it fall beside my discarded dress. He’s nothing like the boy he was all those years ago. Once a tall, skinny gardener’s son, Kieran is now solid with muscle—muscles earned through backbreaking labor. And that labor is my fault. He suffered because I didn’t fight for him, and the truth of that lances through me. I trace my fingers across raised scars and rigid cords of muscle until I reach the fastenings of his trousers. My breath catches before I begin to undo them. His gaze never wavers as I remove the final remaining vestiges between us. There’s something so vulnerable in the way he looks at me, as though I’m seeing a part of him he’s kept hidden for so, so long.
I don’t think he’s ever looked at me with such vulnerability, such softness—and certainly not since he’s returned to my life. It comforts me and unnerves me at the same time. There’s so much to read in hisgaze: so much history, so much hurt, and yet beneath it all, there’s hope.
That’s what I choose to cling to as our bodies press together again, chest to chest for the first time in nine years.
Kieran lets out a low groan as my hands sweep down to his heavily muscled thighs, the textures of his masculine form so deliciously enticing.
“Gen, you don’t know what you do to me,” he murmurs, his lips brushing my ear.
I want to tease him, to point to his obvious erection. I want to quip that I know exactly what I do to him, to keep fighting this cataclysmic revelation that neither of us ever stopped desiring the other.
Maybe we’ve never stopped loving each other either—and that is the most frightening, the most vulnerable truth. Knowing there’s always been love between us, a yearning that never truly ceased for either of us.
I don’t give in to the temptation to cut into him anymore, because the truth is that I want to let go of the walls I’ve built around myself. Kieran is the only person I could ever set aside that hardness for—the only one I trust to see what lies beneath. So I choose to leap. I choose to accept that whatever this is between us, it’s a lasting river of desire, of love, and I want nothing more than to submerge myself in it and never come up again.
“You do the same to me, Kieran.” His heart beats like a butterfly’s wings against my chest, all desperate energy as he begins to explore my body, his hands kneading and pressing into my flesh. I trace the changes in his own body in return—mapping every hard-earned line and ridge, all the ways he’s no longer the same man I once gave my heart and body to.
“I want to know you as you are now,” I whisper as I lean down and let my tongue brush his flat nipple. His skin pebbles under my touch, and I continue my exploration of his body with my lips, teeth, and tongue.
It’s all so new, and yet familiar too. My tongue glides over the small scar on his hip—the one he’s had since he was twelve and he sliced himself on a fence while helping his father patch my garden. I still remember the blood soaking through his shirt and how I insisted on tending the wound myself, even though I had no idea what I was doing.
Just above that childhood mark is a newer scar, and I skim my fingertips over it. “How did you get this?” I ask.
“Fell off the bed in the barracks during a particularly strong night terror. I was late choosing a bunk that night, working on smelting the ore, and had to take a top bunk.”
I shudder, thinking of all the nights he’s endured those terrors alone. Did coming to my room while I slept bring him comfort?
As I explore him, his hands move through my hair, down my back, circling my hips. I can tell by the way he touches me that he’s memorizing the differences too. He follows the lines of my freckles, kissing a path along the new ones, and his fingers linger over the old marks he knows as well as I do.
He reaches a small scar on my soft belly. “What was this from?” he asks.
I shake my head, unsure if he truly wants to know it came from broken glass and a man drunk on my gift—how the sight of my blue-tinted blood on the sheets had been enough to break the curse’s hold long enough to help clean me up before he apologized and left me with nothing but bloodied linens and a hollow sense of despair.
“How?” he asks again, tracing the raised skin slowly. “It wasn’t because of your gift, was it?”
I give a tiny nod. “He didn’t mean to harm me, and he helped me clean the wound. Nothing happened between us after that. It was the moment I realized I could never find love with my gift.”
