“Yes,” he replied, gone raspy and strained. “Yes, good.”
She didn’t remember much beyond that moment, that moment where she had indicated thatsomething.
It had apparently been enough.
He had taken her garble of desire, her half-coherent expression of enjoyment, and used it, drawn it out, taken it to somewhere she had never imagined someone else finding on her behalf. It was brighter and hotter than the summer afternoon, than all the sunlight of every summer of her life, and it cracked over her skin and through her muscles with the sweet relief of pure, untainted enjoyment.
He held her through the throes of it, through the writhing and the crying out, through the thrashing and arching and clawing.More, he met her there, his fingers finding the loops in her braid, his mouth hot and hungry on her throat, his hips stuttering and pushing in response to her release.
He lost himself then, just as she began to find her own self again. As her clawing gave way to cradling, as she was able to hold him through his own ascent and destruction just beyond the crest of her own, he fell too.
He fell with her.
They fell together.
CHAPTER 25
They lay, panting, above the covers until the sun began to set.
Roland felt still for the first time in a very long time. Or, he supposed, for the first time since she’d drugged him with that herbal drink after he’d been shot.
It was more accurate to say that he felt genuinely, sincerely still for the first time in a long time—without the aid of medical suppression.
His cheek was cushioned in the springy cloud of her hair, which he’d mussed to hell and back out of its braid during the height of their passion, and he was using the arm he had wrapped around her shoulders to toy with the loose pieces that poked through the once-careful plaiting around the perfect halo of her scalp.
“What does your hair look like when it is loose and wild?” he asked softly, trying to twirl one of the tiny coiling curls around his pinky and finding that it always escaped him. Inversely, if he twirled a larger cluster of tresses, they would hold the shapehe made for a moment before easing back into loose, lovely softness.
“It is not your turn to ask a question,” she said against his shoulder, the curve of her smile denting into his clavicle so cleanly, he could almost map the exact spot of her dimple. “And I am not sure you want to know the answer anyway.”
“I assure you that I do,” he replied, turning into the hair in question and inhaling deeply. “I insist you ask one so that I may find out.”
“Hm,” she said, stifling a little yawn against his flesh and twisting into a sprung coil to stretch, her limbs reaching far into the air for a brief moment, only to release herself back into a sprawl again, collapsing against him with a sweet thud. “Tell me something you would not tell me, unless otherwise compelled by a game such as this one.”
“That is not a question,” he said, frowning.
“Roland, I could phrase it as one, but I imagine that will just draw out the inevitable,” she answered, giggling.
He frowned a little deeper, considering it. “Well,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t meet Mr. Richards, the coroner, at the Vixen. He does play there, but that isn’t how we know one another.”
She shifted, propping up on her elbow and gazing up at him. “Oh?”
He grimaced, nodding. “I used to supplement my income, in the early days of the Tod & Vixen, by digging graves and carrying coffins for dead too poor to have their own pall bearers. I still help him from time to time, if he needs it.”
She furrowed her brow, looking baffled. “And that shames you?”
“No!” he said, snapping around to look at her. “No, it isn’t shame. I … I don’t know.” He could feel himself coloring, his cheeks warming as he drew a hand over his face. “I do a lot of odd jobs when I have the time. I support both of my parents to a degree, though they do also both carry in a decent income on their own now. I was always so embarrassed of everything opposite Tod and Matthew. It is easier to be smug and secretive than humble and laughed at, Mae. Far easier.”
“Yes,” she said with a little laugh. “I know that.”
It made him look at her a little harder, at the glow of her red-brown skin in the purple and orange light. “Yes, I think you might,” he said after a moment. “Fine. Same question, then. Tell me something you wouldn’t unless otherwise compelled.”
“What?!” she said with a little gasp. “I thought you wanted me to shake my hair out.”
“I changed my mind,” he said, twirling another fingerful of hair and tugging it gently. “Besides, there is plenty of time for that.”
She gave an exaggerated frown and turned her face into his shoulder, mumbling something incomprehensible into it.
“What was that?” he said, already starting to smile, pulling another spiky strand of hair loose from her plait. “You’re mumbling, Miss Casper.”
