Tempting Fate by Kerrigan Byrne (best free ereader .TXT) 📕

think so. Sometimes I— I wake like this. I can’t stop it. It’s like a wave that drags me under and drowns me in dread.”

“Why did you come out here?”

Why didn’t you come to me?

“If I stay in the dark, it often won’t relent, or it will plague me well into the morning. Sometimes I can distract myself out here until it goes away. The chill of the air, the busy garden chores, splashing my hands and face with cold water, burying my nose in lavender. I can focus my mind on other things, and eventually it passes. But… this time it felt impossible.” Her head lifted from his chest, and the night chill kissed his skin.

Skin. He’d not buttoned his shirt.

“You’re better now?” he ventured. “Can you stand?”

Nodding, she allowed him to help her up, but when he would have pulled back, she stepped forward, keeping their bodies pressed together.

“Wait.” She laid her cheek back against his heart, finding the rhythm with her ear. One arm slid around his torso to rest on the column of muscle next to his spine, and the other traced the blue tattoo of a sneering skull right below his clavicle. “I didn’t know you looked like this.” Her fingertips charted a course over his pectoral, finding other images in the sparse smattering of hair on his chest.

She’d be too kind to say it if she found him hideous to look at.

His body was an unsightly map of fearsome beasts, weathered ships, weapons, icons, and symbols of death. She shouldn’t look, but damned if he didn’t want her to discover every inch.

“What are you doing?” This time, it was his voice that trembled.

“I cannot say. I just… like the way you feel.” The hand on his back tested the dips and swells of his muscle there, fanning across his expanse of smooth skin. “The way you look.” Her slight fingers skipped over the sensitive protrusion of his nipple with a featherlight caress, leaving trails of fire in their wake. “The way you hold me.”

“Felicity,” he growled as she bumped her way down a few ribs, finding the bandage on his healing wound and tracing the outside.

“I hate that you were hurt because of me.”

He hated that she might be in danger because of him. Hated himself for lying to her, and for the truths that would cause her pain.

Hated that there was a decent voice somewhere beneath his thundering desire— so faint and low— that told him to pull back. To button his shirt and take her to bed.

To her bed.

Alone.

Gooseflesh rose over his entire body as she angled back to look up at him, drawing her hand around his torso until both palms splayed against his chest.

His breath locked behind his ribs as he discovered things about himself he never knew before. Things he imagined other people did know by his age.

Because they’d been touched by other human beings.

The feel of her nails brushing his skin was possibly the sweetest sensation he’d yet experienced. He wanted more of it. He wanted to lean into a scratch like a needy hound. The place where his ribs winged into his back was ticklish. And the graze of his nipple could be felt as a jolt of pleasure in his cock.

Pleasant lessons were these. Blissful discoveries.

“Close your eyes,” she whispered.

Now that was a particularly terrible idea. When she looked like a perfect angel, a halo of gold cast over her hair by the lone lamp. Her unblemished skin glowing in the dark like a beacon. Eyes bruised with smudges of exhaustion beneath, but glittering with something both dark and dazzling.

He didn’t want to close his eyes, not when it would hide this vision from him.

“Please close your eyes?” she beseeched him. “I can’t do this if you’re looking, I’m not brave enough.”

He shut his eyes, unable to deny her anything.

Trusting she wouldn’t hurt him.

Fingers slid up his chest to the muscles beneath his neck and then around to feather through his hair and draw his head low.

A kiss, no more substantial than a cloud of mist, whispered against his lips.

He should stop this. Not here. Not now. Not when she was in such a vulnerable state and his entire body was just one raw nerve.

Begging to be touched. To be soothed. To be stroked and caressed and all of the things he’d never been before.

All of the things, he realized now, that a human needed to feel alive.

To feel… anything.

The revelation came in a flood of unwarranted emotion as she teased the curves of his mouth with little presses and plucks of her own. Nibbling at his top lip, licking the bottom one before retreating. Testing the scar at the corner with a dart of her tongue.

Growling, he ripped his mouth from hers and brushed her hands off his chest before he gave her his back and retreated toward the door.

The little pats of her bare feet on the flagstones told him she didn’t allow his withdrawal. “Gareth? Did I do something wrong?”

“All of this was wrong,” he remonstrated in a dark, guttural tone.

But nothing in this world ever felt so good.

His name was not Gareth, for one, and then the truths only became more destructive from there. “You should be the one with your eyes closed,” he snarled. “You shouldn’t go around kissing monsters.”

“Oh no.” She rushed around him, gripping his shoulders just as he’d done to hers before. “No, Gareth, you mustn’t think that. You are not a monster It’s the world that is monstrous.” Her palms lifted to his jaw, cupping it on both sides. “You are… a marvel. Your presence has been a miracle to me. I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t found me.”

It was the trust in her eyes that tied him in knots. The earnest glow on her features that laid him to absolute waste.

“Felicity, I am not— I’m nothing like you think. You haven’t witnessed who I am or what I am capable of. You