A Kiss of Shadows - By Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,36

hadn’t realized how much. If Griffin had been in the other room, I’d have gone to him. I might have driven a knife through his heart in the morning, but tonight, I’d have gone to him.

I heard Roane in the doorway behind me but didn’t turn. I didn’t want to see him standing there. I wasn’t sure my abused strength of will could take it. The front of the dress was ripped, ruined, but I still couldn’t get the zipper myself. “Could you, please, unzip me?” My voice sounded strangled as if the words had to be pulled from my lips. I think because what I wanted to say was, “Take me, you rowdy beast,” but that lacked a certain dignity and Roane deserved better than to be left craving something he could never touch again. I could drop my glamour and sleep with him after this night, but every night he touched me in true form would only draw the addiction tighter.

He unzipped me, hands moving up to help slide the dress from my shoulders. I jerked away from him. “My skin is soaked with the Tears. Don’t touch me.”

“Even with the gloves on?” he asked.

I’d forgotten about the surgical gloves. “No, I guess with the gloves you’ll be safe enough.”

He lifted the cloth off my shoulders, slowly, carefully, as if he were afraid to touch me. I slipped my arms out, but the cloth was so thick with oil that the dress wouldn’t slide. It clung to me like a thick, heavy hand, sucking against my skin as I peeled it down my body. Roane helped me pull the wet cloth over my hips, kneeling so I could step out of it. I was unsteady on the high heels and cursed softly that I hadn’t taken them off sooner. I’d closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see him as he helped me undress. I touched his shoulder to steady myself on the high heels and nearly fell anyway because my hand touched bare skin.

I opened my eyes and found him kneeling in front of me, nude except for the gloves. I stumbled back from him so violently that I ended up in the tub, on my ass, one hand held out in front of me to ward him off. I was sitting in about an inch of water and fumbled for the faucets to turn the water off. Though I might have been better off leaving it on and crawling under it.

Roane was laughing. “I thought I’d get you unzipped before you noticed, but I didn’t know you’d close your eyes.” He stripped the gloves off using his teeth, my dress still in his arms. He plunged his naked hands into the oil-soaked cloth, hugged it against his bare chest.

I was shaking my head over and over. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Roane.”

He looked at me over the tub edge, and there was nothing innocent in his big brown eyes. “For tonight I can be sidhe for you.”

I sat in the tub like I was about to take a shower in my underwear, and tried to sound reasonable. All the blood seemed to have left my brain and gathered in other places. It made it hard to think. “I can’t do glamour tonight, Roane.”

“I don’t want you to do glamour. I want to be with you, Merry. No masks. No illusions.”

“Without your own magic, you’ll be like a human. You won’t be able to protect yourself from the charm. You’ll be elf-struck.”

“I won’t wither and die for want of sidhe flesh, Merry. I may have lost my magic, but I am immortal.”

“You may not die, Roane, but forever is a long time to want what you cannot have.”

“I know what I want,” he said.

I started to open my mouth, to tell him at least part of the truth, part of the reason that I had to clean myself off and get out of town. But he stood up, and my voice died in my throat. I couldn’t breathe, let alone talk. All I could do was stare.

He wadded the dress in his hands so tight that the muscles in his arms strained with the movement. Oil squeezed out of the cloth, gliding in slow lines from his chest, across the flat smoothness of his stomach, trailing ever lower. He was already smooth and hard, but when the oil slid over him, his breath caught in a sharp hiss. He ran one hand down his stomach, spreading the