“Alexandra... your cheek... it’s a little pink here. It looks a bit like a burn... did I do this to you? When we...”
She couldn’t yet speak. His touch had sent a quicksilver tingle down her spine.
“Oh.” She touched her cheek absently. “I think it was because your whiskers scraped... when we...”
“Ah.”
When they kissed each other nearly senseless, was the rest of that sentence.
Judging from the heat, her entire face was pink now.
Why were they being coy?
Because it was daylight, and the coffee and tea and scones were so sweetly civilized and the people they were this morning seemed to have no relation to the animals rolling around and moaning on the carpet last night.
“Anything can be a weapon,” she teased, lightly. Just a little ironically.
But he looked nearly stricken. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to... I never meant to hurt you.”
He didn’t specify for what. For the raw, unguarded, desperate hunger that inadvertently burned her tender skin with kisses?
Or for... everything?
“I’m not fragile,” she said shortly.
“I know,” he said gently. He sounded a little surprised. “I knew that the moment I met you.”
Shewas surprised.
“But you should have been allowed to be,” he added softly. “You should be allowed to be.”
Her eyes widened in astonishment.
She dropped her gaze, moved and unsettled. She supposed a man who had once been a boy who had never been allowed to be weak would notice that fragility had never been an option for her, either.
Perhaps this was why his every instinct seemed to be to protect her.
And yet it seemed clear he was still prepared to send her away.
For that matter, she was prepared to go.
Clearly one night of cathartic passion had not magically repaired the deeper wounds between them.
She lifted her head swiftly when she realized he was probably genuinely worried that he’d hurt her. He’d been essentially called a beast the whole of his life.
“You didn’t hurt me, Magnus. It doesn’t hurt. And if I had wanted you to stop at any point, I would have asked you to stop, I promise. I wouldn’t have furled my dress up to my waist.”
Amusement flickered in his eyes, but his expression remained serious. “You are certain you wanted to...”
“Yes.” It was barely a sound, and absent of intonation. But she let her eyes convey the vehemence of the truth of this.
Who was this wanton woman who made these sorts of confessions over coffee and scones?
They let all of those potent words they’d just said hover in the air for a while.
She stirred sugar into her coffee. “Perhaps it needed to happen just the way it happened.”
The way it happened. In other words:
