He holds the coin up between us, inspecting both sides, then rolls the edge down the center of my chest along the line of my impression, straight through my birthmark. The targeted touch diffuses outward, affecting far more of me than I expect. His cold fingers brush over my skin, his breathing rough, eyes stuck on me.
I search for words, something to dissipate the heaviness between us, but nothing comes to mind except things I shouldn’t think, much less say.
He pulls the coin away with no warning and sets it aside. “Do you need to eat?” His question is awkward and forced, as if he’s not sure he said the right thing. Or never wanted to say it to begin with.
I try to calm my firing nerves, failing with every cell in my body. “I only need you.”
He shoots me a playful smile and lowers his head beneath the surface. And down. To my belly button. He kisses it before he surfaces, then wiggles my pants and underwear down my legs, pulling each pant leg off my feet with ease under the slick water.
“Eli.” I don’t know how to exist within this moment. I’m not sure I even can.
“Never.” His tone is a tease as he takes me in his arms. Then forces me below the surface. I fight immediately, panicking at the memory of being held underwater by a guard. He puts a firm arm around me, tucking it tight under my breasts, and lifts me up again.
My hair hangs in my face, water raining down. I shove it aside and look up at him. “What the fuck was that?”
He kisses the top of my head and dunks me again, rubbing his hands through my hair while I’m under, then smoothing them over my shoulders and chest. His touch is electrifying. I stop fighting.A little farther down, please.I don’t need to breathe. But instead of the continued downward path of his hands, caressing my ribs and stomach, and lower, he inserts his fingers in my ears and twists. I shout at the sensation, releasing a jet of bubbles as I try to escape.
He pulls me up and out of the water, setting me on the side of the spring and soaking our discarded clothes. I succumb to goosebumps, the air like ice. I suck it in and smack my hands over my ears.
He pries them away, tugging at my wrists and smiling. “Just getting the dirt out so they’re ready for my tongue.”
I rip my arms out of his grasp. “I’m stark naked, and your focus is on my ears?”
He laughs as he climbs out next to me, a thigh-clenching sight of darkness and muscles in places I didn’t know were possible. With his height, I can’t even tell that I’ve grown taller. And it’s impossible not to look at his cock sticking straight up, even more impossible not to imagine climbing onto his lap and lowering myself over him, how he’d fill me until I ached.
He slings an arm around my back and the other under my legs and scoops me up. “We’re moving. It’ll take at least an hour for the dirt to filter out of the spring.”
I snuggle against his frosty skin, shivers climbing up and down my spine. It only lasts seconds, then he crouches at the edge of another spring, nearly identical, and glides me into the water. I gasp at the sudden return of heat, inside and out. He follows with a splash, then pulls me into him. Our bodies meld together, fitting like two halves of a torn map reunited, all the lines and shapes connecting. My head rests against his chest.
But without the distraction of pain, I’m left wide open to feelings… and urges. But wanting to be taken so deep and hard that the world crumbles around me doesn’t quite align with the unchecked emotions that slap me around, the doubt.
He leans his back against the spring wall, still holding me firm in his grasp, water up to his hip, up to my ribs. Time falls into an unknown rhythm.
Without lifting my head or even a finger from his body, I form a weak fist on his chest and speak into his skin, my nose flattened against him. “You let me go.”
Chapter 33
EVER
You left again,” Eli says.
I pull my head away and look up at him. Always bruised. Always a puzzle. It’s unfair to blame him when it’s myself I want to knock some sense into, but I’m running on only remnants of sanity. Terror still drones in my bones. So I roll with my panicked accusation as if it held a shred of validity. “You slept through me walking right out the door. I thought you had good hearing. I thought—”
“I wasn’t sleeping.” He exhales a rapid breath of disbelief through his nose. “I haven’t since my father died.”
I don’t know which part to respond to first. Or how. Shock? Anger? Sympathy? Hurt wins, pushing through with a soft whisper. “You really did let me go.”
“I went after you.”
I can’t process his words with the painful spiral my heart is stuck in. “You said you’d never let me go.”
His grip on me grows painful, the control of his strength slipping. “And I won’t!”
I startle at his outburst and hold him tighter, my body reacting to the forcefulness of his touch in ways that make me want more. Every drop of my blood battles with the rest beneath my skin, the effects of linking so strong I can hardly think. The rest of the cave is blurry and far away.
“I can’t,” he whispers. Tattered breaths rip through his lungs. In and out. He leans down, forehead pressed to mine. “My heart would give up without you . But I couldn’t keep you from your link. Even though it’sfuckingKelter. It would have killed you to be far apart from him while linking.”
I take his face in my hands, days of stubble beneath my fingers, and tilt my head back to look him in the eyes, even at the risk of never being able to look away. “Show me you’re real.”
