“I’m afraid, too,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “Of wanting you. Because wanting means opening a door I bolted shut, and I don’t know what’s on the other side anymore. I don’t know if I’ll find something good or something that looks likehim.”
Her fingers paused. The old dread crept in at the edges, cold water seeping under the door.
She pulled in a deep breath in an attempt to calm her racing heart, and the expansion of her chest pressed her breast more firmly into Rikard’s frozen hand. His impassive touch reminded her that he still held her, not her old nightmare.
She opened her eyes. Her husband’s frozen face was before her, his gray eyes fixed on nothing. He was safe. He was tender and true. He had stayed with her all night.
She let out the air in her lungs, and the cold left her with it, enabling her fingers to resume their work.
Her pleasure built slowly, one stitch at a time, and she let it come at its own pace. She let herself remember what it had known before the violence and the fear, that touch could be loving, that her body and its desire belonged to her and no one else.
Someday, she might share it with someone again, but for now it was hers. Her husband had returned it to her, somehow, with his mead-soaked confession last night.
I wish to be your mate in all ways.
“Rikard.” His name in her mouth tightened something in her core. Pleasure crested now, gathering at its peak like a wave drawing up before it broke.
For one bright, reckless instant, she imagined it was his hand instead of hers, enormous and careful and gentle, and the image sent her over the edge with a gasp.
The release moved through her in slow, rolling waves, each one softer than the last, until her body went liquid and her breath came in shudders. She lay still in the aftermath, her hand resting on her thigh, and the tears came without warning, slipping sideways down her temple and into her hair.
She was not sad. What she felt was something that had no name she knew. It was the feeling of being cracked open by pleasure instead of pain.
When the tears stopped, she used the hem of her shift to dry her cheeks and turned to her husband again, still inside the comforting circle of his arms. She put her hand on his chest and swore she could feel his heart beating faintly through the stone.
“Thank you.”
Chapter 19
Rikard
He was hard.
The irony was so vicious it could have drawn blood. Trapped in stone with the dawn light warming his frozen hide and his wife’s scent still thick in the air, Rikard’s cock was perfectly hard and catastrophically useless.
In fact, every daysleep he was hard, when his body was locked in stone and could not take advantage of the fact. What a cruel joke.
Another joke: Hanna still thought he was asleep when he was stone. No, not asleep. She thought he wasabsent. That he was simply an empty stone statue with no thoughts or feelings. Though it was a well-guarded secret from humans, he probably should have told his wife that he heard and saw and felt during daysleep with a clarity undiminished by the stone.
But if she’d known, she never would have given him that little gift of her pleasure. And the things she’d said…
He did not believe them, necessarily. Too often, desire loosened the tongue. But they still plunged straight through his heart like an arrow.
She was gone from the nest chamber now, eating and chatting with Carlijn from the sound of it, but he was stuck here for the next twelve hours, empty-armed, thinking of her. How she felt under his fingers. How she sighed and said his name.
All day, he tracked her by sound: the pad of stocking feet on stone, the scrape of the bread knife, the hiss of a candle being lit. The rustle of fabric as she dressed. The soft splash of water in the basin. Each small domestic noise layered over the memory of the sounds she’d made in the nest, and the combination was torture.
The hours crawled by, the sun tracking across the nest. He had a lot of time to think about what he was going to do when he woke. What he’d say to her.
He did not want to say too much and embarrass her. What she’d done was so vulnerable, and he knew she would not have shared that with him if she was aware he could see and hear her. But shewantedto share it with him, if not now, then someday. And so he dedicated his thoughts to how he might give her pleasure…or rather, how he might encourage her to find it herself.
After all, he could not help her in certain regards, even if she decided he was a worthy audience after sunset.
She had needs. Her body was hungry, and she was touching herself with her own fingers because they had an agreement that he’d never bite nor bed her.
But there were other cocks. Detachable ones.
Like Pudding’s bone phallus, the one she’d produced from her basket with such theatrical flair. Polished ivory, anatomically detailed, rendered by someone who understood the engineering of the thing as well as the aesthetics. He’d dismissed it at the time as a prop for Pudding’s performance, a curiosity, nothing that concerned him. It was still under his desk, probably.
