“Pack her things,” he commanded Yoslyn as he slammed my door shut. Then he turned back to me. “Your father has been summoned. It will take a couple of days for him to receive the correspondence, and a couple more, at best, to come retrieve you. You will stay with me until then. They cannot deny me that now.”
For the rest of the day, I drifted in and out of sleep in Desmond’s bed, and every time I woke, I remembered Wilder’s death with a fresh pain like a blade plunged straight into my gut. Each waking wound cast me into a paroxysm of grief—and guilt-fueled weeping, leaving me curled into a limp form in the center of the wool mattress.
Desmond offered me tea to calm my tears, but the third time, when I was inconsolable, he climbed into the bed and lay behind me, holding me close with one hand around my waist, his head sharing my pillow.
As I drifted into a teary sleep, I could swear I felt him shaking at my back. Silently sobbing. And I realized with no small amount of shame that I had thoughtlessly let him care for me while he was still mired in his own grief.
I’d lost far more than a friend, in Wilder. But Desmond had lost his brother.
When I next woke, the sun had set. Desmond’s chest was still pressed against my back, his breathing as steady and calming as the ocean waves outside my own bedchamber window.
I rolled onto my back, and though he shifted a bit, he did not rouse, and I wondered at his unconscious comfort. At the fact that he was not startled awake by my presence.
I turned carefully to face him and found myself captivated by his sleeping expression. By the relaxed cast of his features, which were so often sternly set in his waking moments. In his sleep, he seemed like another person.
Or…maybe he was only vexed in my presence.
I should have been grateful that he’d found peace, however temporary, in rest. Yet something tugged painfully at my bruised heart while I watched him.
As I ran one finger gently down the bridge of his nose, then over the generous bow of his lips, it finally occurred to me that in his sleep, he looked uncannily like Wilder, who’d rarely, in his entire life, worn a frown.
Fresh tears slid down my face as I stretched forward to press my mouth against his, beset by an irrepressible urge.
Desmond’s eyes flew open. “Amber?” he whispered, and I burst into sobs.
His eyes widened, his forehead crinkling in a helpless expression. Then he kissed me. Quickly and desperately, as if he could think of no other solution and yet understood that this was not it.
Surprised, I gasped, stealing the breath straight from his throat.
Desmond slid one hand over my jaw, plunging strong fingers into my hair, loose and free from its typical braids, and instead of giving me space, he closed the scant inch between us and fed from my mouth as if I were the source of all life. As if I were the sustenance of his very soul.
I fell into his touch as if he were the earth itself, pulling me toward his center with a force I could not see, yet could not fight. I could feel him—every single part of him—even where we were not touching. He broke free from my lips and kissed away my tears. His hands roamed over me slowly, both a comfort and a slow, hot torment.
A reminder of our grief and a blistering, bruising way through it.
Desmond removed my thin nightdress without a word, though his eyes seemed to speak volumes in the weak flicker of a low- burning candle. I clutched at him, starving for comfort and solidarity. For warmth and for touch. For any sensation with the power to obliterate thought. Memory.
After weeks of desperately trying to remember what I’d lost, I wanted nothing in that moment but to forget.
I touched every inch of him I could reach as he stripped off his own clothing, then I pulled him down over me, seeking to block out the entire world with his body. With his touch and the very force of his presence, like a shield brandished against all of existence.
I sank my teeth into his earlobe, and Desmond groaned. He parted my thighs and slid fully inside me with no preamble, urgency drawing a cry from deep in his throat.
My body tightened against him, holding him for a moment. He murmured senseless syllables into my ear, breath hot against my neck, and I arched upward, drawing him deeper, captive to my own desperate need.
He moved inside me wordlessly, slowly at first, then faster when I tucked my ankles at his back. When I dug my fingernails into his arms, demanding more. Faster. Deeper.
We moved in a frantic rhythm, trying to outpace grief and memory, and something deep inside me began to loosen—to unwind—even as that intimate tension steadily built.
Finally, Desmond drove himself into me frantically, and his need pushed me toward a blistering edge.
Fresh tears slid down my cheeks as release washed over me, and I clung to him with my arms, and my legs, and all of my very being. I could not let go, even when he brushed hair back from my damp face and tried to withdraw. When I refused to release him, he rolled us onto our sides and tucked my leg over his hip.
We held each other, my face buried in his shoulder, and I pretended I could neither interpret his rough sniffles nor feel the warmth of his tears as they soaked into the pillow.
Sleep claimed us both, and I clung to that release as well.
It was still dark when I woke again. Desmond was dressed, scribbling haltingly on a sheet of parchment with his back to me, but he turned the very moment I opened my eyes, as if he’d sensed my waking.
