Forever The World of Nightwalkers - By Jacquelyn Frank Page 0,68
to allow her to hide from him, “before you tell me we are strangers … before you tell me I haven’t thought this through, I want you to think. Think about everything you’ve thought and felt since I announced my intentions to make you mine.”
She looked up then, her whole body shaking from the impact of his words, his touch and his heat. She wanted to be outraged, but somewhere along the line it had abandoned her. Now all that was left was an overwhelming rush of curiosity, of possibilities … of things she never would have thought herself capable of thinking.
“You just … you never said anything … you were so …”
“So were you. And tell me now that you never thought the same thing. Tell me you never looked my way and wondered …”
“I wasn’t allowed—”
“No,” he said roughly, his grip on her breast tightening enough to get her attention and make her catch her breath. “We are done with bullshit and the shells of lies we armored ourselves with. Think, Marissa. Think … I was dead. If not for Menes, I was dead and gone from this world and from you. You were there at that moment. Do you remember? You think it was a dream, but you were there, holding me, screaming for me. I looked back from the Ether and could hear you.” He leaned close to her ear and whispered fiercely against it, “I knew then that I had died without ever knowing what it meant to live. Knowing I’d had sex, but never made exquisite love, that I’d known lust, but never true passion. I knew longing, frustration, and craving much too well and satisfaction not at all. I came back for those reasons, but mostly, Marissa, I came back for you.”
Tears burned at her eyes, clawed up her throat and suddenly, like a veil lifting away from her mind, she did remember. She remembered having a horrible nightmare about three weeks earlier, waking from the cold death of sleep with a gasp, feeling tears dried on her cheeks and rawness in her throat as if she had truly screamed, as if she had truly lost him. She had flown from bed, scrambled through her things, rummaging through clothes she couldn’t remember taking off while in pajamas she couldn’t remember putting on. She had found her cell and the work directory, searching frantically for his number and was about to hit SEND … until she realized what she was about to do and stopped, her breaths hard and ragged. She had realized how inappropriate it would be. Had realized she could never call him just to see if he was all right. Not then. Not ever. She had collapsed onto her knees then and wept. She told herself later that she had cried because she’d been rattled by fear, but in the face of his honesty with her, she didn’t have it in her to lie to herself again. Now, knowing it had been real, that he’d almost slipped away from her forever …
“You see?” he breathed, when he saw the comprehension in her eyes, the dawning of the terrifying realization of what might have been if not for fat around him and huggeds dangere and the very unlikely choice of an Egyptian king thought long dead. “That was the exact feeling,” he said, letting go of her and drifting fingers up over her breast, chest, and throat until he was touching the corner of her awakened eyes. “And to know that much grief without ever knowing that much passion of life is the stuff of too many human tragedies. Don’t let this be another of those tragedies. We’ve been given a second chance, you and I. We can’t waste it. If we do then we deserve every single moment of the pain we should suffer for it.”
His kiss, as light as it was, was so incredibly poignant that she felt her throat closing up. When, she wondered, had anyone ever kissed her like this? As though she were a unique and precious thing, not to be toyed with lightly, but not to be shelved and untouched either. The answer was never. Even when she had fancied herself in love, even in what she had once considered her most loving relationship to date … as exciting or as hungry or as hormonal as anything might have been, none of it was in the same class of the way Jackson was making her feel.