She stops at the bench in the small clearing before the trees open out to the lake. Her eyes are dark and serious.
"Can I say something honest?" she asks.
"I'd prefer it."
"We're getting married tomorrow." She says it like she's testing the words, turning them over. "And I'm not nervous about the wedding. I'm not nervous about the Baron, or the Council, or Diomid, or any of the politics. You know what I'm nervous about?"
"What?"
"The fact that we haven't kissed." She lets out a small, almost incredulous laugh. "We haven't even kissed, Connor. I'm about to stand at an altar with a man I've been living under the same roof with for four days, and I don't know what his mouth feels like. I don't know if we have... something." She gestures between us. "I feel it. I hope you feel it too. But we haven't tested it, and tomorrow I'm walking toward you, and I just..." She trails off. Shakes her head. "It's weird. That's all."
My heart is hammering. I can feel the pulse in my throat, in my wrists, behind my ruined eye. She's standing beside me, and she just told me she wants to kiss me, and I'm frozen. Because the voice in my head, the one that's been whispering for years, is sayingshe wants to kiss the man who saved her, not the man with the scar, and those aren't the same person.
"Anya..."
"If you don't want to, that's okay." Her voice is steady but I can hear the vulnerability underneath it, the bravery it took to say this out loud. "I just thought one of us should say it."
She waits. I don't move. And then she steps forward, closes the distance between us, and kisses me.
It's soft. Tentative. Her lips brush mine like a question, light and warm, her hand coming up to rest against my chest. She tastes like red wine and dessert, and she's trembling, just barely, a fine vibration I can feel through her fingertips where they press against my shirt.
She pulls back an inch. Looks at me. Searching.
Something breaks open inside my chest. Wide enough to let the light through. Wide enough for me to see her standing in front of me, shaking and brave and waiting to find out if I'm going to kiss her back.
I catch her face in my hands and press my mouth back to hers.
This one isn't soft. This one is every cold shower, every clenched fist, every night spent staring at the ceiling knowing she was sleeping twenty feet down the hall. I kiss her like I've been starving, because I have, and when she gasps against my mouth, I swallow the sound and pull her closer. My hands slide from her face to the back of her neck, into her hair, and she melts into me. Her arms wrap around my waist and her body presses against mine, all warmth and softness, and I can feel her heartbeat hammering against my chest, matching mine beat for frantic beat.
I angle her head back and deepen the kiss, and the sound she makes, low and desperate and wanting, nearly takes my knees out from under me. Her fingers curl into the fabric of my shirt, pulling me closer like our proximity isn't enough.
I want to consume her. I want to wrap myself around her until there's no space between us, until she can feel exactly how much I want her, until every doubt I've ever had about whether anyonecould look at this face and want it burns to ash in the heat of her mouth.
I break the kiss before I lose the ability to stop.
We're both breathing hard. Her head is tipped back, her eyes closed, her hands still gripping my shirt. The last bit of light catches the edge of her jaw, the curve of her throat, the place where her pulse is hammering visibly beneath her skin.
"So," she whispers. Breathless. "We have that."
A laugh rumbles out of me, rough and genuine. "Yeah. We have that."
She opens her eyes and looks at me, and the want in them is so naked, so unguarded, that it takes everything I have not to kiss her again and keep kissing her until neither of us can think.
"Tomorrow," she says.
"Tomorrow," I say back.
She stretches up on her toes and presses one more kiss to the corner of my mouth, right where the scar ends, and the tenderness of it wrecks me more than the heat did.
Tomorrow, I marry this woman.
And tonight, for the first time since I was nineteen years old, I can look at my reflection and not hate what I see.
Anya
The dress fits like it was made for me.
Iris adjusted it last night, taking in the waist half an inch and letting out the bust just enough that I can breathe, and when I look at myself in the full-length mirror in the guest room, I see my mother.
