“For who? Certainly not for me.” I shake my head slowly back and forth, devastation ripping through me. I know he can feel every excruciating pulse of it in the bond. And in this moment, I don’t care.
I want him to feel it.
I want him to know.
He makes a pained sound, sharing my anguish.
“Do you want to know the saddest truth?” I ask, voice breaking. “I never hated you. Not even at the very start. Not even when we were enemies. Not even when I thought you wanted tokill me. Because even then, there was still a part of me that was drawn to you. Air to open flame.”
His entire frame shudders. His emotions have never been so raw, so accessible to me. Tonight, he does not have the strength to hide them away.
“How can you possibly think, after all we have been through together”—I am crying freely now—“that I would ever be able to hate you?”
“Stop.” A shattered plea. “Don’t say any more, Rhya. Don’t say things you can’t take back.”
“I don’t want to take them back!” I thunder, determined. “You may want to live a lie, Pendefyre, but I don’t. Not anymore. If you don’t want me, tell me. I’m tired of trying to sort out the truth from the pretending.”
There is an endless pause. I think he’s going to let me go, let me walk away. But instead, he groans low in his throat.
“You think I don’t want you?Gods.” His lips skim my neck, a trail of flame. “All I can think about is your mouth on mine, your hair in my hands, your fingers on my skin. I lie in my bed at night, listening to you toss and turn, and it takes everything in me to keep from ascending that ladder. To keep from carrying you straight back down it, putting you in my bed, and letting the fire we sparked in that forest finally burn itself out.”
Heat furls through me at his words, coiling in my very core.Skies.If I’d known, all those sleepless nights, he was lying just below me, sharing my torturous thoughts…sharing my secret desires…
“Why didn’t you?” I whisper.
“Because I know better!” His grip becomes bruising, his fingertips biting into my upper arms. “I know these things I feel for you are dangerous—for you, for me, for both of us. For bloody everyone.”
Yale had said much the same back on the dance floor. Hearing it confirmed by Penn himself is like a sword through the heart.
“Then why are you still holding me?”
“Because, gods help me,I don’t care anymore!” His voice breaks. “I don’t care about the risks. I don’t care about the repercussions. I have tried. Tried not to feel this way, tried to lock inmy feelings. It’s no use. I’m not strong enough. Not when it comes to you.”
He pulls in a ragged breath, his bare chest pressing more firmly to my exposed spine. Skin to skin. The evidence of his desire is hard against my backside. Undeniable. Feeling it there only intensifies the hollow ache building at the very core of me.
“Wanting you is all I do, Rhya. Waking or dreaming, avoiding you completely or seeking out your presence. I want and I want and I want…and…It. Fucking. Terrifies. Me.”
“You think I’m not just as terrified? You think the things I feel for you don’t scare the breath out of me?” I pause, heart pounding. And then, unable to stop myself, I turn in his embrace. He sucks in a breath as I reach up to take his face into my hands. Beneath my fingertips, his skin is like a furnace. My eyes drift to his lips. “Please, Pendefyre…don’t let me walk away again.”
“I could hurt you.” His admission is agonized. “The way the fire rages in me, the way my emotions fuel it…If I lose control, if I slip—”
“You won’t slip. You won’t hurt me.”
“You cannot know that.”
I meet his eyes. They burn into mine, volcanic with so much yearning, I can’t see anything else. Can’t feel anything else. “I’m not afraid of you, Penn. I’m not afraid of your fire. I’m far more afraid of what we will forfeit if we never try. If we let fear win.”
The words have barely left my lips when his mouth comes down on mine, a crushing impact. His kiss is a firestorm—unpredictable heat, uncontrollable desire. It blazes through my body, an inferno that singes me from the inside out, frying my nerve endings.
This—this—is what I came here for. Not to tell him about Yale, not to see if he was all right, not to bicker with him. This,right here, his lips on mine, his heated body flush, so close I think we might slip inside each other’s skin and never come out. He invades my senses, floods every part of my mind. The bond between us catches fire, a channel of invisible flame, burning hot enough to scorch my soul as emotions spark back and forth from his mark to mine.
Penn deepens the kiss. It turns raw. Relentless. Wild. My head falls back on instinct as his lips lay siege. My body arches like a bowstring as his hands slide up my bare spine to find my neck. He presses his thumbs into the hollow of my throat, where my pulse races at double time, and I moan into his mouth, an unstoppable sound of pure want.
The noise unlocks something in him. Shatters the last bit of his self-control. One minute I am standing in his arms and the next I am lifted clear off my feet, carried three steps, and set on the edge of the parapet. He barely lets me settle before his hands reach for the slit of my skirts. With a rough jerk, he parts my legs and moves between them. Any hesitation is a distant memory now, any repercussions a far-off consequence. We think of neither past nor future, consumed in the immediacy of our hunger for each other.
When Penn spots the dagger strapped in the leather sheath around my thigh, he grins, a flash of white in the dimness. His lips are still curved when they reclaim mine. But all amusement ignites like paper as I wrap my legs around his waist, locking in his tall frame as my arms twine up around his neck. His passion is a throbbing press between my legs, matching the need that pulses through my veins. I suck his lip into my mouth at the same moment I delve my fingers into his hair, as I have wanted to for so long, reveling in the feel of its thickness.
“Gods, Rhya.” He gasps into my mouth as his hips grindagainst mine, a delicious move that dizzies all my senses. “If you keep touching me like that, I’m not going to be able to stop.”