Every breath tastes like regret and want.
Genevieve is dead.
My heart is buried with her.
And yet, lying next to Aisling feels like balancing on the edge of a blade.
This marriage might save our families.
But sharing a bed with the woman I have such a history with, after swearing I’d never want a woman again, after promising forever to someone now rotting in the ground…
Yeah.
This is going to be a painful alliance.
6
AISLING
The warmth that wraps around me as I slowly rise to consciousness feels dangerously safe and comforting.
For the briefest of moments, a smile tugs at my lips, a sense of contentment and belonging so rich, it seeps deep beneath my skin.
But as the fog of sleep drifts away, reality starts to sink in, memories of the previous day—my wedding day—flashing before my mind’s eye as if in fast forward.
Then my eyelids fly wide as my brain belatedly registers the position I’m in.
The strong arm wrapped around me like a shield, wrist resting between my breasts, a masculine hand cupping one in an absent, possessive way that makes me forget how to breathe.
There’s heat along my spine—body heat that definitely isn’t my own—and then something harder, more insistent, pressing against the curve of my ass.
Oh, God. Raf.
At some point in the night, he must have rolled over, pulled me against him, and started to spoon me—with his palm on my breast and his erection tucked perfectly against me like he belongs there.
My heart takes off in my chest, thundering, betraying me. I don’t want this. I don’t want him.
I definitely don’t want to want him. But my body must not have gotten the memo.
I hate Raf Chiaroscuro.
I hate what he did to me.
I hate that five years later, every wound still aches when I prod it.
But my body?
My body remembers the way we fit together.
His heat.
His smell.
The iron strength of his muscles—even if they’re larger than before.
Something selfish and cruel inside me whispers,You could wake him like this. You could grind back against him, feel that slow, low groan vibrate against your neck the way it used to.
I stiffen, horrified by thought—by the way my core throbs at the memory of that sound.