He leaned closer, every muscle in his body tensing as his fingers gripped the armrest tightly, and a primal kind of possessiveness flared behind his eyes. “I’d like to see them try.”
Chapter 14
Celeste
Iwassuddenlyafledgling bird trapped in the gaze of a venomous snake as he watched me, and I had to remind myself to breathe. My entire body reacted to his arrogant, possessive tone—my cheeks heating and a strange swooping sensation building in my lower abdomen. I barely restrained myself from flaring my wings suggestively. He wouldn’t even know what it meant, a fact which made my face heat even more. I was certain my flush had spread all the way down my neck, something he confirmed when his eyes dropped to my throat and lingered there.
“I think we should wait until you are well,” he finally said when his gaze returned to mine. His pupils were so enlarged in the candlelight that they nearly swallowed his ice blue irises, and I watched as his eyes narrowed and his expression turned more thoughtful. The possessive gleam was still there, but there was something else in his gaze as he continued to consider me. I would have given anything to know his thoughts just then. “Let’s get you back to bed, Doveling,” he murmured. My shock at the endearment went entirely unnoticed as he licked the tip of his fingers and pinched out the wick of the candle, dousing us in darkness once again. He was careful of my wings as he cradled me in his arms, and his path to the bedroom was much shorter than mine had been to the library.
“Where do you sleep at night?” I asked him as he leaned across the unused side of the bed to lay me on “my side.”
He folded my wings into a more comfortable resting position before gently drawing the sheets up to my chin and carefully tucking them around my body, making sure that I was snug and warm. “I don’t sleep,” he responded absently, and then smoothed a wayward lock of my hair around my antler. He had already turned and was loading more wood into the fireplace by the time his words actually registered in my brain.
“You don’t sleep at all?” I asked incredulously, propping myself up on my elbow and ruining all the careful fussing he’d done over the blankets. But how could someone survive like that?
“Not as mortals do,” came his vague reply as he arranged the logs just so.
I stared unseeingly at his back as he rebuilt the fire, looking instead at the past few days—or had it been two weeks?—of our relationship through the lens of this new information. He hadn’t been sleeping with me because hedoesn’t sleep. I didn’t know how to reconcile that information with my hurt feelings. How does one come to terms with the fact that a wound they felt never actually occurred?
“Do you still want the dog?” he asked as he turned to me from the fireplace, unaware of the chaotic reshuffling of feelings currently taking place in my brain. The flames behind him grew and backlit the curve of his cheek so that I could see the frown he directed at my rumpled bed sheets.
I tried to smooth them back into place so that all his fussing hadn’t been for nothing.
“Celeste?” he prompted when I didn’t answer.
What had he asked?
Oh, the dog.
I dropped back onto the pillow rather forcefully. “I’d rather have you.” The words were out before I could stop myself, a measure of my tiredness, perhaps. But they were true, and I couldn’t take them back. The magical dog was a comfort, but it was second-best, and my attachment to it really came from the fact that it was a part of him.
His frown deepened further before he leaned down to brace his hands on the edge of the mattress and his expression was lost to shadow. “I would never desire to impede your personal autonomy, but other than byyour own choice—no one will ever take you from me.” This was delivered as a quiet statement of fact by a man entirely confident in his own abilities to defend what belonged to him. “Not my family and certainly not yours,” he continued as he straightened and began unbuttoning his left sleeve. “You might notfeel yetthat you are mine, but that doesn’t mean I don’t. This mark,” he stated, jerking up his sleeve to reveal the ink-black lines spreading out from the healed wound that lay beneath, “means that I have been bound to you for all eternity. Life and death will fade away and every version of this planet will crumble into dust, and I willstillbelong to you.” He paused for a second to take a breath, and when he continued, his voice was softer. “I have been taught from childhood to respect the cultures of others, and because you are mine, yours is even more important to me. But you must understand that within my culture, and before the Creator who placed this magic within my people, there is no ‘barely married.’ I am yours. You have me,” he finished gently, imploring me to believe him.
And I did, to a point. I knew it wasn’t reasonable to expect this man I barely knew to feel close to me emotionally just because we’d gotten married. He still held himself away from me. So no, I didn’t have all of him. Not yet. One thing I knew for certain was that if any consummation were going to occur, I was going to have to seduce him.
He seemed to see the doubt on my face, because he bent his leg and—with a sigh—seated himself on the bed beside me like he’d done when he brought me food to taste. “I’m yours, Celeste,” he repeated, with slightly less confidence than he’d had seconds ago, and those strangely timid but earnest words were a balm to all my imagined hurts. I had to take a few deep breaths to keep myself from tearing up again. “What can I do to convince you?” he asked.
“Could you lie here with me for a little while?”
He looked at me as if I had two heads, so I tried to explain.
“I know you said you don’t sleep,” I said before pausing to swallow, unsure of myself, “but do you think you could stay with me? Just until I fall asleep?”
“You want—” He raised his hands to gesture and then froze, his brain still working. Even in the dim lighting I could see his eyebrows pulled together in confusion. “I… uh… Sure. Yes.” He looked so baffled as he glanced around the bed as if this were an entirely new concept for him. “Just a moment,” he said as he stood to remove his outer shirt. Walking to the window, he peered outside, obviously searching for something while unbuttoning his top, and then, after he satisfied himself about whatever he was looking for, removed his shirt and draped it across the end of the window seat. He returned to the bedside and grasped the covers, holding them between his fingers for a beat, perhaps unsure if he wanted to be under them or on top of them. Eventually deciding on “under,” he lifted the blankets and climbed onto the bed, settling himself rather stiffly beside me before laying the blankets back on top of himself. “Like this?” he asked.
I couldn’t decide if I were more confused or amused, but confusion seemed to be winning out. “Have you truly never lain in a bed before?”
He was slow to respond. “I have. Just… never with someone else,” he said, confirming my suspicions about needing to seduce him. I was still puzzling over how to go about that when he asked, “Why does this please you?” And I had to remember that he was asking about lying in bed together and not seducing him.
I thought for a bit about how to explain. “It’s a comfort thing,” I finally settled on. “People sleep together because we like being near the person we’re sleeping with. When I was little, I would crawl into my big sister Kyra’s bed nearly every night, because I hated being alone in the dark. And on the nights I managed to fall asleep by myself, I always woke up in the morning to find her inmybed.”
“Oh.” He was quiet for a moment longer before admitting, “I’ve seen lots of people sleep in a bed together, but I figured it was mostly for economical reasons.”
“For… what?” I asked when he didn’t explain further.
“Beds are expensive,” he said dryly. “I figured people shared so that they didn’t have to buy so many beds.”
I wondered if I would ever understand him well enough to be able to predict his train of thought.
