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

might imagine you have because you saw me end less than a handful of men in your defense, but I promise you. It’s so much worse than that.”

“How?” Her hold didn’t let up as she held his face captive in her velvet grip. “Tell me.”

“There is no point in confessing because there is no absolving me,” he warned, encircling her wrists and pulling her palms away from his skin, deciding to give her what truths he could tell. “I cut out all of the soft parts of myself when I was very young. I had to, so I could be steel and stone rather than flesh and blood. I did it so I could perform the ghastly deeds required of me, but only at first. After so long, I began to enjoy violence. And a few years later, I’d gone past caring at all. I became bored with it. Cold and impenetrable. Unfeeling. Ruthless. I’ve hurt those who didn’t deserve it. I’ve taken what didn’t belong to me. I’ve exacted revenge much more excruciating than the actual insult. You can’t begin to understand who I—”

“Look here.” She tucked chilly fingers into his and he couldn’t help but warm them. Using his acquiescence, she brought one of their joined hands to his chest, and spread his own fingers over his heart before covering it with her palm.

“You are not steel and stone. This is flesh and blood. Warmth and awareness. You are a man, not a machine. And though you are hard, I do not think you cut out your softness. Someone else tried to cut it out of you, but you did not let them. I think you buried it somewhere in there, where they could not find it. Perhaps where you cannot find it, and have convinced yourself it does not exist. But I believe you could uncover that softness and reclaim your good heart. Let it beat again.”

Gabriel had to swallow twice before he could form words. His limbs had become paralyzed, his pulse erratic and strange. His head swam with a miasma of thoughts, desires, fears, and fantasies. “I don’t know how…”

She brought his knuckles to her cheek and dragged the downy skin over them like an affectionate cat before pressing her lips to each scarred bone.

His chest pumped harder as he watched, a captive of her sincerity.

“I think you do.” She flicked a gaze at him from beneath her lashes. “You are gentle with me…”

“I don’t always want to be.”

A shy curl of her lip was her astonishing response. “Maybe someday, you won’t have to.”

He pulled his hand from her grip. “Don’t say things like that to me, woman.”

“Why not?” Her lashes fluttered in confusion.

“Because there isn’t a someday for us, you know that as well as I do.”

“But… if there were a way?” She lost a bit of the courage and composure she’d been using to seduce him, and uncertainty clouded her eyes. A tooth bit into her lower lip.

Gabriel could feel her curling into herself, searching him for any signs of substantiation. “If you’d no past, and I’d no future, would you want me? Do you want me? Or… have I fabricated this connection between us by some twist of romantic girlish illusion?”

It was the dawning of that horrible thought in her eyes that was his final undoing. The visible worry that she stood before him unwanted, that propelled him forward.

Shoving his fingers into her hair, he cupped the sides of her head only to claim her quivering mouth with a possessive kiss.

He’d meant to soothe her doubts with words. To tell her he’d never found a woman on this earth more desirable. That he burned for the barest liberty, and never allowed himself to hope for even something as miraculous as a kiss.

Reaching up, she threaded her own fingers into the hair at his nape, leaving him with no barrier against the press of her body.

This.

It was the only word he could conjure, and it encompassed everything.

This mouth. This kiss. This woman.

His every nerve sparked to life, hungry to catalogue every point of contact.

Gabriel had no frame of reference, but he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no sustenance, be it God- or man-made, rivaled Felicity Goode in taste or texture. No woman could even hope to compare.

She was too pure for this world. Too soft. Too open. She cared too much and trusted too easily. To kiss her was to glimpse what heaven might be like. To taste her was to sample ambrosia.

And to have her hands roaming his bare skin?

He’d never been a religious man, but he’d found a new goddess to worship. Because someday, they’d all be nothing but dust and shadows, but his dust would have mingled with divinity for a moment.

For a kiss.

And that made him something more than any other man alive.

He made no decisions, had no plan of seduction or advancement, but suddenly he’d circled her waist with his hands and lifted her onto the closest workbench without breaking the fusion of their mouths.

Tongues glided together in a wet exploration of a mounting inferno charged with a powerful, intangible element. Something like captured lightning. Electric and wild and unruly.

Her knees parted, and he moved between them. Where he belonged.

Where he yearned to stay.

Charting the curve of her jaw with his mouth, he dragged a moist exploration down the swanlike column of her neck, only to bury his face in her fragrant hair. He inhaled deep as he laved and sucked and sampled the delicate flesh connecting her neck and shoulder.

Her raw, husky gasp of surprise rippled over his skin in a sensual abrasion of sound and submission.

The sound brought everything that made him both man and animal roaring to the surface.

It was only the curl of her fist in his shirt that kept him tethered to his humanity. Tenderness bloomed beneath the pulsating desire, tempering it. She trusted him. She wanted him.

She didn’t fear him. Didn’t think he was a monster.

That in itself was