Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,103

the villain in his own nightmare.

“Why?” I ask.

“I worried you’d smell blood on me. Be horrified by me. And I wanted . . .”

My heart beats fast in my throat. “You wanted what?”

His gaze falls to my outstretched palm. Hunger glimmers in the blue, a flickering flame that burns so hot that I feel scorched. “I learned at a very young age that death waits for no one. Instead it waits in the wings to steal you away, always in the moment when you least expect it. Meanwhile every wish you had, every hope you ever clung to, is gone. You’re lucky if you bothered to live but damned if you spent an entire lifetime waiting to die.”

Shadows dance along my right peripheral.

Or maybe it’s just the tears threatening to spill free.

I’ve amassed a fortune over the years and reclaimed ownership of my body. I’ve said yes to a king and saved a queen. And I don’t think I realized, until this very moment, anyway, how very little room I’ve given myself to hope or dream. I live because I draw air into my lungs and put food in my belly, and I live because it’s expected that I’ll continue putting one foot in front of the other, day after day. But I haven’t wished on anything in so long that I’m not even sure it’s a skill that I still possess.

Have you ever been loved, Miss Carrigan?

Sweat dampens my palms.

That would be my one wish—to love and be loved.

To feel its heat in my veins and its courage in my bones. To know that when I wake each morning, it’s to a face that I dream of when I sleep. I want laughter and the adventure that comes with tackling life beside your soul mate. I want the fierceness of safety while facing the risk of falling ever deeper. And if I let myself hope, if I really let myself dream, I wish that this man would chase me to the ends of the earth, just so he could catch me in the end.

“Is that what you wanted?” I ask, my voice hoarse with unshed tears. “To make a wish?”

Damien pushes away from the wall.

His long legs demolish the space between us until he’s right there in front of me. Tall as he is, his eyes are level with mine when he drops to his haunches and clasps my outstretched hand. Calloused against soft, big against small. He traces my lifelines with his forefinger before gently bringing my hand to his mouth.

He kisses the center of my palm with his eyes closed.

“I want to live,” he says on a rough breath, “I want to live long enough to know happiness. I want to feel it, Rowena, here”—he presses my hand to his heart, which beats solidly inside his chest—“and I want to be the man who loves first and loves hardest. That’s what I want, but what I wish . . .” Steadily, he meets my gaze. “I wish that I could kiss you, just once. I wish that—”

I crush my mouth to his.

A harsh sound rises in his throat and then his hands clasp the back of my head and he’s dragging me close, close, close until my arse is nearly off the stool and it’s only the strength of his body that keeps me from falling to the floor.

His kiss isn’t patient or gentlemanly because Damien Godwin is no Prince Charming here to whisk me away on his white steed, and I’m a woman who will always save herself.

No.

Our kiss is a brutal clash of lips, a spiral of desperation when the world around us is crumbling at our feet. Our kiss is heat and burning fire when my heart has been frozen and neglected for years. Our kiss is us, a perpetual battle of the wills that has me sinking my fingers into his hair and tugging on the strands, hard, because I want to hear him groan.

Like melody in my ears, he feeds it to me guttural and low against my lips.

His fingers flex over my shorn head, and he seeks retribution with a nip of his teeth. God, yes. I pull away to seek out his chin, the underside of his jaw. My nails rake through his thick hair, over the slope of his nape, and then my lips find the hollow of his throat. I press an open-mouthed kiss to his racing pulse, and then another, because I live for the way he