“I’m disturbing you… I think.” She frowned at his hands and then at his face, a puzzled look in her eyes. “Stopping to smell the roses?”
He frowned too, shook his head when he realised something—she didn’t know as much about elves as he had believed. He looked down at the delicate flower, at the broad petals that were white for the most part but a deep violet near the heart of it. He supposed it could be mistaken for a rose at a distance.
“It’s a papaver.” When the confused edge to her bright golden eyes only grew, he added, “A poppy.”
Her dark crimson eyebrows rose. “Oh. It doesn’t look like a poppy. Why were you doing whatever it is you’re doing with it?”
He looked at the flower and let the tension drain from him, denying the instinct to protect his species by withholding information, something that ran deep in all elves.
“I have a connection to nature. It is not as strong as it once was. When I became corrupted… Nature does not like the darkness. She is the light.” He risked a glance at Mackenzie, feeling deep in his tainted soul that she was his light.
She smiled softly at him, utterly undoing him, making him ache with a need to be closer to her, to hold her in his arms for a spell and soak up how good it felt to simply be pressed against her in the hope it would give him the strength to make it through another day without surrendering to his instincts.
“Is your connection with her gone?” She looked genuinely concerned that it might be, her brow furrowing as she gazed at the flower and then looked into his eyes.
He gave a gentle shake of his head. “No. I thought it would be, but recently… after our fight… when the darkness took me… Fuery brought me to a witch to be healed. Rosalind. She lives in England, in a cottage surrounded by nature. I felt connected to nature there.”
And it had overwhelmed him.
“Does it calm you?” She angled her head to her right, causing her fall of scarlet hair to brush her burgundy corset on that side, something he refused to look at because he was having a hard enough time resisting the need to touch her without taking in her curves.
He nodded.
“I feel… not at peace.” His eyebrows knitted hard as he searched for the right word that would explain how he felt when he connected with nature. “Balanced, perhaps? Like the light and dark inside me finds an equilibrium, two ends of a scale that sit at the same level with me in the middle at the pivot point. Neither pull upon me, and I am calm.”
Her smile returned, gentle with understanding. “It sounds peaceful.”
“I suppose it is.” He managed a smile of his own.
When she went to take a step towards him, he shot to his feet and held his hands out in front of him, halting her. She frowned at him again, hurt accompanying the flicker of confusion in her eyes this time.
She was reading his intentions the wrong way again, mistaking them for something else. He wanted her close to him, wanted to narrow the distance between them and gather her into his arms and hold her.
Kiss her.
Only he knew it wouldn’t end there.
If he held her as he wanted in the hope it would calm his instincts, assuaging them with an innocent form of contact with her, it would lead to a desire to kiss her that he wouldn’t be able to resist, and that would lead to him wanting her, aching to be inside her and satisfy her, to feel the deepest of connections to her.
And in turn, that would lead to him wanting to claim her to keep that connection with her.
He wouldn’t force sex upon her just to relieve himself of the instincts that were pushing him to claim her. She was right. She needed to be sure of her feelings, and his.
As for him, he was sure of them.
So sure that he couldn’t stop himself from doing exactly what she clearly expected of him.
“Leave,” he croaked as need rose within him, battering the walls of the cage he had constructed around his instincts, attempting to break free and seize control of him. “I don’t want to hurt you, Mackenzie. I don’t want to wreck this thing between us by making a wrong move.”