The hours passed until the sky paled by subtle degrees with the approach of dawn. He felt it in the familiar tightening of his muscles, the heaviness that crept from his extremities inward as his body prepared for its daily imprisonment. Daysleep was coming.
First light broke the horizon, and the stone took him mid-breath, his eyes open, his face turned toward her.
He watched the morning brighten further until Hannalinde stirred. The coverlet shifted. She opened her eyes, blinking against the light, and her gaze found him immediately, six inches away instead of the usual six feet.
She lifted her hand and laid it against his cheek. Her palm was small and warm, and her thumb traced the ridge of the scar that ran from the corner of his mouth to the corner of his eye.
Then she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his for a single, devastating beat before she pulled away.
His heart, deep inside the rock, cracked.
“Good morning, husband,” she whispered.
Chapter 18
Hannalinde
She should get up and wash. Dress. Eat the bread and cheese the keepers had undoubtedly left on the table, drink some ginger tea, begin the embroidery for Carlijn’s ballgown, their new project. But she found she did not want to leave her husband’s stony arms. Not yet.
The pregnancy had done something to her body that Old Aalis described in terms that would make even Pudding blush. “At some point, you’ll want a good railing. It won’t hurt the hatchling, so don’t worry about indulging if you have the urge,”she’d said, adding a few choice tidbits of advice about positions. “It’s all perfectly normal.”
Normal. As though anything about her situation could be called that. She’d never even made love, and yet she carried a child. But thedesireto do so had been building in her for weeks. It was as unwelcome as the nausea had been at the beginning, and twice as persistent and unpredictable.
It came at odd hours. In the bath, when the warm water lapped at skin that had become exquisitely sensitive. During embroidery, when her mind drifted. Sometimes, when she conversed with Rikard, and his deep, pleased purr raised the fine hairs on her arms.
She’d resisted it for as long as she could. But now, with his arms around her, the wanting had changed. It used to be abstract, a restlessness without an object, her body’s mechanics running on their own schedule regardless of what she was thinking or doing. Now it had focus. The particular architecture of Rikard’s horns. The width of his shoulders. The way his voice dropped half a register when he saidwife.
His arm still rested on her, now draped over her back since she’d twisted toward him to kiss him good morning. He still held her close, even in daysleep. Warmth pooled low in her belly, and she closed her eyes.
She should not want a gargoyle in this way. For months after the first attack, her skin had crawled at the brush of fabric, the press of a crowd, even Carlijn’s friendly hand on her arm. She’d trained herself to endure contact without flinching, but it was never easy.
And yet Rikard’s touch had never repulsed her, she realized. That was why it had been so easy to agree when he wanted to share the nest with her. She did not just want to be held. She wanted to be held byhim.
She turned onto her back so his arm crossed her chest. The coverlet slipped to her waist, and the morning air was cool against the thin linen of her shift, raising gooseflesh on her arms. Beneath the fabric, her breasts were heavy and sensitive, the nipples pebbled against the cloth. She pressed her palm against one and eased sideways until his frozen hand cupped the other.
Rikard was stone. He could not see nor hear her. He wouldn’t know.
The touch sent a thread of heat from her breast to her belly that pulled like a stitch drawn taut. She exhaled, a small, unsteady sound, and her eyes found Rikard’s frozen ones in the weak morning light.
“I want to touch you.” Saying it aloud made it real in a way that thinking it did not. “I want to know what your skin feels like under my hands. I want to hear you purr for me.”
The statue that was her husband did not answer. She hadn’t expected it to, and the silence was permission of its own kind.
Her hand slid from her breast to her belly, tracing the hard curve of it over the linen. Below her belly, the heat gathered and would not be ignored.
“If you were awake, I might ask you to touch me in return,” she continued. “I think I’d like it. You are always so careful with me.”
She slid her hand lower, to the place where the heat was centered. Through the linen, she pressed her fingertips against the shape of her sex, and the pressure sent a shiver through her.
“I haven’t done this in years,” she confessed. Of course, she’d once touched herself the way any woman did, practical and private, like a warm bath or a cup of something sweet. But after the gargoyle hunted her, even her own hands felt like an intrusion. Her body had become hostile territory, and she’d retreated from it the way she’d retreated from everything else. She wondered if she even knew how anymore.
She gathered the shift, drawing it up over her thighs. The air touched bare skin, and she shivered again, as her hand settled between her legs. She was already slick. The pregnancy had made her body responsive, ready before her mind.
She touched herself carefully like she was testing an old wound, pressing the edges to see if they still hurt. The answer was heat and sweetness and an ache low in her belly that was nothing like pain.
“Someday, perhaps, we’ll know each other this way.” Her breath hitched, thinking of it. Her fingers moved in slow circles, finding a rhythm that stoked her pleasure. “I think we’ve already begun down that path.”
She was talking to a statue. She knew that. The absurdity of it would have made her laugh if her body weren’t doing things that made laughter impossible. The pleasure was building in layers, each pass of her fingers adding heat to heat, and the sound she made was small and involuntary, a breath caught between her teeth.
