My name. She’d called my name. Pulsing around me. Sighing with her release. I swallowed the whimper from her cursed lips with mine, fisting the sheets on either side of her head, chasing her delicious rapture to the soul-searching end. And when I found it, I knew life would never be the same.
21
“There’s more than one?”Keelynn gasped.
Perfection. That’s what she was.
Her choice of topics, however: not perfect.
I didn’t want to discuss my trip to the underworld or my curses. I wanted to talk about her breasts peeking from beneath the sheet and the swell of her hip and the things I wanted to do to her.
“At this point, I’m more cursed than not,” I said. How was her skin so soft? Like the brush of a sun-kissed flower petal. “And no. There is one other way.”
“What is it?”
My hand fell to the bed. “You’re the one who reads fairy tales. You tell me.”
A wrinkle appeared between her delicately arched eyebrows. “True love’s kiss.”
“Now you have it.”
The wrinkle deepened, then smoothed as the corner of her lips lifted. “That shouldn’t be hard for you. You’re not hideous.”
“High praise, indeed, Maiden Death.” Just what I wanted to hear from the woman who had slowly stolen my heart. “Every man wishes a woman would refer to him as ‘not hideous.’”
“You know what I mean.” She swatted my chest before curling into me as if content to stay in my arms forever. “You’re handsome and you bloody well know it. Surely you could find a woman to fall in love with you to break your curses.”
I didn’t want just any woman. Keelynn had shown me her worst qualities from day one, and I’d found myself falling for her despite it all. I wanted this hateful wasp who smelled of lavender and made my heart swell and my body ache. “If only love was that simple.”
Attraction wasn’t love.
Women loved how I could make them feel. My title. My magic.
They loved the idea of me. Not the cursed truth.
The truth.
How could I claim to love her when all I did was lie?
I said, “There’s something I need to tell you,” at the same time she said, “We need to talk.”
The heat from her laugh went straight to my heart. “You first.”
Me first? Not a feckin’ hope. I wanted to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. “Ladiesfirst. I insist.”
Her shoulders lifted and fell when she sighed. “All right.” When she left my arms, I knew she’d never be back. “I’ve decided to return to Graystones.”
This had been my plan all along. So why did it feel like someone was holding me underwater with my breath running out?
“But we’re only a few days out from Tearmann.” I couldn’t say goodbye to her now. Not yet. I wasn’t ready yet.
“I’m not going to Tearmann. Not anymore.” She pulled the ring from her finger, offering it to me. “Take it. It’s yours.”
I told her no, but she insisted, giving me reason after reason for leaving me. Reasons I’d been planting since the moment we met. She put the ring in my hand, and I had exactly what I’d come for, and yet none of this felt right. It felt so feckin’ wrong.
I tried to talk her out of it, but my words fell on deaf ears.
For centuries, all I’d pined for was freedom. Now the ring—my freedom—was in my feckin’ hand and all I wanted was to shove it back at Keelynn and beg her not to leave me.