“I’ve been staying down here in the lower levels listening to what’s happening above. I can hear everything a few floors up or down if I focus on it. It took a few nights to get the flow of things and make a plan.”
“You’ve been here for multiple nights?!”
“Yes.”
I give him a moment to elaborate and no longer, instantly impatient. “Why didn’t you come for me?”
“I checked in on you.Constantly,” he adds, as though his ability to listen in on every conversation or the frequency with which he hacked into Kelter’s brain makes a difference.
It doesn’t. Not when it’s his touch I crave, not when I’m about to implode with arousal so powerful it’s toxic. “I needed you!”
He finishes stuffing his socks inside his boots and turns to me, one brow rising. “Because you didn’t want to fuck him?”
I huff. “Not only because of that.”
Eli stands up and lifts his shirt over his head, revealing ripples of abs and endless amber brown skin, his fresh bruises barely visible in the faint light. “He wanted you. The jerk could only think of that no matter how hard he tried not to.”
“He didn’t really want me.”
“No. He would have settled for anything with legs.” He sighs. “But I heard every thought he had of you.”
“I don’t—”
“And I could feel your heart go crazy when he got close, like it is now.” He tucks his thumbs under his waistband and shoves his pants down.
I set sight on his crotch, the bulge tenting his black boxers. “I can’t help that my body wants to fuck everything in sight.” I seal my lips, trying to stop myself from saying more. I don’t have to explain myself to him. He doesn’t want anything more than my body. I say it anyway. “But the rest of me only wants you.”
Those boxers land at his feet. He kicks them aside. I blink. I’ve never seen him completely naked. It’s debilitating. And intimate to the point of discomfort.
So I make it worse, my breaths unstable. My mind too. “You’re naked.”
Like instinct, he grabs himself and runs his hand down his length. “You could link with every godsdamn Vaile in the realm, and you’ll still only be mine.”
“You know.”
“Of course.” He slides into the water, lost beneath the crystal surface from his waist down. “I feel everything he feels.” Brown clouds form around him, the mud washing away. He dips underwater and scrubs his head before popping back up, curls flattened to his face.
I hadn’t considered how Kelter linking would affect Eli. Did he give in with the first woman he saw when he felt the urges? Why does the thought make me want to chainhimup and carve my name into his forehead?
“Your turn.” He walks through the water to the side of the spring and reaches for my shirt.
I shiver, not from his cold touch in the heated room, but from the scrape of his fingers up my back as he lifts my shirt over my head. Then he stares.
I reach for my chest, but I can’t hide the impression covering half of it. His hand arrives first, landing on the broken loops down my center.
“It’s only half an impression,” he says, dragging his fingers over the black marks, following the circles. “Kelter hid this from me too.”
His touch feels forbidden, as if that part of me wasn’t meant for him. I put my hand over his, over my chest, moving with my nervous breaths. “Maybe the other side will show up soon.”
“Maybe.” He slips free and wraps his arms around my waist, pulling me closer. And closer. Until I’m sitting on the edge. I freeze, desire terrorizing my insides.
Then, as if he knows I’m too stubborn to make the final move, he grabs my ear and pulls me off the ledge and into his arms. I toss my necklace onto my discarded clothes on the off chance Ametrine can actually feel my arousal through it. My thumbs dig into the solid muscles of his biceps, and I want to hold on forever. The hot water is strangely slippery. It envelopes me, darkening ten shades as I shed my layers of dirt.
But the filth isn’t the only thing that falls away. The minerals cling to my skin, invisible, but I feel them aggregating. And vibrating. They seek out my damaged flesh and mend every inch of my body that touches the water. The pain is ushered away as fast as it started—not eliminated, but reduced to a more tolerable level. Even the hunger pangs lessen.
Looking at me as though he might combust, Eli reaches behind my back and unclasps my bra without a struggle, and I recall it’s not the first time he’s seen—or removed—a Calderan bra. He moves unreasonably fast to catch my treasures as my bra falls into the bubbling water, leaving my breasts exposed. He holds the cork up between two fingers, his eyes sparkling with mischief. “I know where to put this.”
I snatch it and smash it down next to our clothes, then rescue my bra, my cheeks heating. He smiles at my reaction and places the guitar pick next to the cork with an intentional mildness that cracks my composure. Softness is excruciating when it comes from him. It onlylasts so long before he succumbs to his own strength. And it gets me every time.
