but he didn’t say it unkindly. It seemed almost…affectionate.
Erin sobered in a rush, licking her lips. Her eyes flitted over the cut hair. She’d given Jake many haircuts since he was young. She was good at cutting hair.
The space between them was beginning to feel different. Warmer. Closer. Her fingers smoothed the little tuft down and his breath hitched at the contact.
“We really can’t help ourselves, can we?” she whispered to him, awed, frightened, curious about what rose up in her breast. Her gaze flickered to his lips, want and desire blooming with it.
He growled again.
“Huffy male,” she whispered. She’d always thought ‘huffy’ was a funny word and she only seemed to use it when she was drunk. She wanted to laugh again, she wanted to tease him. But everything suddenly felt so serious.
To distract herself, she took another strand and she couldn’t help but run her fingers through it. Another growl from him, though it was mingled with a purr. He liked it. Erin almost mourned what she was about to do. She wouldn’t be able to run her fingers through his hair like this again until it grew back.
She wisely chose not to linger on that thought and sliced another section of hair. It fluttered to the floor.
Then she cut another and another, all too aware that his eyes were on hers until she forced him to look away so she could reach the back sections. It was difficult to maneuver the blade around his horns. She worried that she’d accidentally nick one, especially since her fingers felt swollen from the alcohol. But she managed just fine and she couldn’t resist running her finger over the smoothness of one. It felt like ivory, cool and silky.
A ragged groan tore from his throat and Erin snatched her hand away, jolted into remembering that she was supposed to be cutting his hair, not stroking his horns. Not meeting his eyes, she went around to his other side, cutting the hair there too.
She worked in silence. She worked in rhythm with the rain, with the heartbeat under his skin she swore she could hear—or maybe it was her own—with how many times he caught her eyes when she least expected it. He seemed to like looking at her. That knowledge filled her with something she didn’t want to dwell on.
It was growing darker and darker in the cave, but she managed to make his haircut clean. She shifted until she was kneeling close to his side, her knees pressing into his outer thigh, leaning in front of him to even out the front. Goosebumps blossomed over the skin of her arms when his hand brushed her side. Her eyelids felt heavy. She swayed a little as she looked down at him. There were little hairs sprinkled across the edge of his nose and without thinking, she reached forward to brush them away, not realizing how intimate it seemed until afterwards.
The knife drifted down until it was in his line of vision. His eyes flickered to it, then flickered back to her. He hadn’t spoken this entire time—neither had she—but when he did, his voice was like rough velvet as he said, “You could cut my throat right now, rixella, and I would let you. When my only ambition in life has been to survive. That is the power of this.”
His voice made her feel like she’d just had another swig of the alcohol. It made her burn. His voice was almost…awed. As if he was faced with some terrible thing he couldn’t help but respect. That he couldn’t help but give in to.
“What else would you let me do?” she asked quietly, hardly recognizing her own voice. Her head spun, her flesh felt tingly, but she didn’t think it was from the bottle. Not anymore. She felt powerful. She saw the desire in his eyes—that terrible, terrible desire—but she saw her own reflected back.
This was the male that had kidnapped her. The male who had probably ruined her chances of ever finding her way home again, of ever seeing her family again. This was the male who wouldn’t tell her what his plans were for her, and yet…
She’d never felt like this. So torn between hatred and need. That part of herself—which she’d confessed to him—wanted to hurt him for taking those things away from her, while also needing to drag him close so she could feel his heartbeat, so she could taste his tongue.