Road To Fire (Broken Crown Trilogy #1) - Maria Luis Page 0,79

The carpet tickles my bare toes and my skin pebbles with gooseflesh from the heat of his hands.

This isn’t about sex or lust or getting off.

It’s something more, something . . . enigmatic.

I breathe, you inhale, and we both go up in flames.

Turning me around, he inches me back another step until my calves collide with the wood frame of a bed and the backs of my knees meet a soft mattress. “Sit.”

I sit, already missing the warmth of his touch.

Straining my ears, I pretend that I can hear more than the reigning silence. I imagine the pop and crackle of a fire glowing in the century-old fireplace. I imagine the scratching of a tree limb against the window, soft and insistent, as though begging to be let in. I imagine him pressing me deep into the mattress, his mouth slanting down over mine as he slips his hand inside my knickers to make me cry out his name.

I imagine it all, vivid and bold, then feel an unexpectedly cool breeze as something lands in my lap.

Fabric. It’s fabric.

One brush of my finger over the finely sewn seams instantly indicates that it’s a shirt.

A shirt that he stripped off.

My eyes go wide as I hear his knees crack, then feel the breadth of his back on the inside of my thighs as he kneels between my legs.

“What are you”—I shake my head, heart pounding faster than it has any right to for a man like Saxon Priest—“what are you doing?”

His deep voice hits me in the chest like a sledgehammer out to smash me into smithereens: “Letting you see me.”

Oh.

I fist the shirt as emotion stings my eyes. It didn’t escape my notice how he kept his clothes on earlier, even after demanding that I remove all of mine. The fabric was his armor, his shield against society. And here he is, on his knees, giving me free reign over his naked torso.

“Y-you don’t have to.”

“Free will.” A small pause. “Tell me what you see when you close your eyes.”

On his command, my lids fall shut.

And, just like that, I’m whisked away on the grotesque wings of my worst nightmare.

“Shocked blue eyes,” I breathe out, shuddering at the memory as it plays out before me in my mind’s eye. “I felt his surprise, right there in my gut. I felt like it was my own. It was . . . something that I couldn’t have anticipated, not ever.”

“What else?”

I tangle Saxon’s shirt around my fingers, winding it in and out between each digit, simply for distraction. Still, I keep my eyes squeezed closed, as ordered. “The fear—the way his hands jolted up like . . . like he could make it stop. The bleeding. His body going into shock. But there was nothing he could have—” I break off, breathing heavily as the memories assault me. It hurts. It hurts so much to remember, and shouldn’t I be satisfied? I did what I set out to do. I killed the king. But all I can see is his expression and now there’s no stopping the shudder that wracks my frame. “I’m sorry. I don’t think—I don’t think I can do this. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to keep remembering.”

“Touch me.”

My hands stop fidgeting. “Saxon.”

“See me while I see you.”

It’s then I hear it, among the imaginary crackling fireplace and the branches clawing at the window—the raw vulnerability underlying the self-assured command.

A protest leaps to my tongue but my fingers have a mind of their own.

I discard his shirt, letting it fall to the mattress beside me, before shifting forward on the bed so I can reach him.

My thumb grazes the corded muscle linking his shoulder with his neck. With the slightest pressure, I skim north, only to find his head already bowed.

“Keep going,” he husks out, “breathe for me.”

It’s not until my palm flattens across his back that I realize he isn’t breathing at all.

He kneels, breath drawn in, and waits for me to pass judgment.

There’s no light, nothing to guide the direction of my hands, and yet I follow the hills of his shoulder blades and the valley of his spine. I touch him as though I’ve spent years memorizing every rigid line of his body. And, with each pass, I feel my heart fracture just a little more.

Scars are scattered across his back.

Some overlap, crisscrossing in feathered batches that churn my stomach and remind me that not all nightmares have the luxury of being locked