CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Noelle had asked to see him, but as Tamatsu slipped his thumbs inside the waistband of his slacks, she worried about the possibility of cardiovascular failure.

Generally, she wasn’t prone to an excess of fright, but the anticipation of what he was going to do, or not do, was putting a vise around her heart.

Forcing down a swallow, she rubbed her throbbing chest and licked her lips.

His gaze was on hers as he stepped out of the slacks.

Wordlessly, she watched him press the legs together at the ankles to maintain the pleats. He draped the pants over his forearm and walked into her closet as if the room was familiar and his, and she heard the scrape of hangers along the bar, and then a click. Likely him slotting his pants into any gap he could find.

He closed the closet door as he stepped out, eyes closed, rolling shoulders back.

She dragged her tongue across her lips and tried, again, to swallow. Her throat was closing in, or perhaps her diaphragm had given up on making her lungs properly contract and relax.

As he moved closer, she didn’t know where to rest her gaze. She’d never had a chance to take in all of him at once. He’d always been either afar and dressed or close and nude but, at the moment, she didn’t care how far he was as long as the rest of the fabric departed his body.

He pulled his undershirt over his head, carefully lifting his hair through the hole before tugging the shirt over his head.

He didn’t bother folding that. He tossed it toward her and, reflexively, she notched her fingers into the soft cotton and raised the garment to her nose.

His scent had haunted her for years. Spicy and masculine. Every time the scent of ginger had hit her nose, she’d turn and look for him. Of course, he hadn’t been there, just a phantom of him, punishing her.

As she balled the shirt in front of her, he leaned against the bed’s edge, head cocked, brow furrowed.

He stared, silently, of course, unnerving her. Had the situation been different she would have helped him disrobe. That way she’d have an excuse to look away from his eyes and not be considered a coward, but she couldn’t touch him there.

His hair hung winsomely around his face.

She slid her fingers into the strands and let out an involuntary breath.

At least she was breathing somewhat.

He was real and standing there in front of her after so long, and she was holding a part of him. The scent wasn’t that of someone who’d been just a phantom of a long-gone lover, but of a man she’d turned away so long ago. A man she’d destroyed.

Gods.

Closing her eyes, she pulled her fingers down to the end of his hair, and then fisted it. She’d wanted only to touch, but that wasn’t enough. She needed to memorize that feel in her hands again, now that her palms weren’t quite as blistered and calloused from swinging swords. Now that she had soft, sensitive hands like the lady she tried to be.

“Why are you so damned perfect?” she murmured.

No answer came, but she, of course, couldn’t expect one.

She opened her eyes so as not to squander the perfection standing in front of her. He was the perfect balance of length and muscle. She’d loved the way she’d been able to sit on his thighs and press her knees against his waist, as if all his dips and grooves had been perfectly carved for her.

She’d loved the way his belly would quiver whenever she traced a fingertip along the diagonals of his abs, and the way he’d grab her ass and force her against him as if she hadn’t thought to do the same thing herself.

He’d always taken what he needed when he needed to, and she’d loved that assertiveness. She’d loved that he took pleasure in viewing her body the same we she did his.

“I really do want to know what I did wrong in my last life to be in this situation now.” She twined his hair around her fist, muscle memory in play rather than careful planning.

She used to tug, and he’d snarl at her in a way that made her laugh. And when she laughed at him, he’d shut her up with his tongues, his fingers, his wonderful cock.

“Do you remember how you used to silence me?” she asked, slowly raising her gaze to his heated one. “Do you remember what you used to do?”

His nod was jerky and precise.

She gave his hair a tug that made him bare his perfect angel teeth.

“Is that a threat, dear?” She clucked her tongue and let go of his hair. Then she pulled her lip between her teeth and worried at it while she thought.

There was a magical cure for nearly everything. Certainly, Tamatsu’s affliction wasn’t so unusual that they couldn’t find someone to reverse it.

He shook his head.

“You think you know what I’m thinking?”

He straightened up and retrieved the pad and pen.

“And you won’t.”

“Bullshit,” she spat. “You are not defective simply because you have moods and desires. I don’t believe that for one moment. You’re not a machine. You’re a sentient being created for service, but that doesn’t limit what you are. Why would you be given free will if you weren’t meant to exercise it?”

He closed his eyes and slowly shook his head.

“You know you don’t belong there, but you still regret Falling?”

After a minute of finger-drumming, he opened his eyes and wrote:

“As did so many others. What do you think that means?”

His grin was tight.

“Perhaps that’s cold comfort to you, but think about that. Can you really be so much an outlier if many others had the same plight as you?”

She didn’t know how to respond to that yet, and perhaps she never would. She had no idea what being an angel meant. So, she said the only thing that made sense, and hoped it’d be enough.

“I’m … sorry, Tamatsu.”

Drawing in a long breath, he picked up her braid and brushed the end over the back of his opposite hand.

She reached for his hair, too, since it hung down so near her face, but he shook his head and cocked his chin toward the headboard.

Furrowing her brow, she let go of his hair and looked behind her. “What?”

He tapped the headboard and made a scooting gesture.

“Move back?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

He closed his eyes and breathed out one of those long exhalations she suspected was his way of showing that his patience was being tested.

“Sorry.”

She did what he’d asked, putting her spine against the cool, dark wood, and waiting for further instruction.

Or perhaps just waiting to be looked at.

He stared at her with the intensity of a long starved man who’d finally seen a hint of a feast. But he couldn’t touch the food because the spread was meant for someone else.

But she was for him. That was what made the situation so thoroughly heartbreaking.

He picked up her braid again and, slowly, skimmed it along the line of her jaw and around the jut of her chin.

Once upon a time, he could spend minutes, content with touching her face with his fingertips. He’d halt his thrusts into her for a while to touch and stare, and she’d always wondered what he must have been thinking when he looked at her like that. Perhaps she’d never have a chance to find out.

He skimmed the hair across her lip, and his jaw hinges twitched. Nostrils flared.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” she whispered as he skimmed the ends of her hair down the column of her neck. “You’ll remind yourself of everything we can’t have.”

And everything she couldn’t give him.

He might have been starving, but she was drowning under the weight of the things she’d held in store to give him—the things meant to feed and nurture him. Mixed with her guilt and anger, the weight crippled.

The hair swirled at the top of her nightgown where her neckline met her cleavage. He rolled his gaze up to her, querying.

“Now?” she asked.

A curt nod.

“But—”

He silenced her with an equally impatient shake of his head.

“Fine, then,” she whispered.

He leaned back onto his forearms and fixed his gaze on her chest.

She unfastened one tiny button after another. Five, then six, fumbling clumsily, hands shaking. Nerves shattered. The garment lay open down to her navel.

He forced out some air and sat up. Once more, he pinched up her ponytail. He used the end to paint the hollow between her breasts, or at least, all he could reach. Her hair wasn’t princess-length anymore. She’d cut it to fit the modern times, but it was still unfashionably long. She’d thought to cut her hair again, but Jenny hadn’t let her. Jenny liked familiar things.

“I’m thinking about those pens at the bank,” she said softly, watching him move the edges of her shirt aside, exposing her. “They chain them to the podiums. You have just enough leeway to fill in your deposit ticket, but you might have to write at an unnatural slant.”

He cocked a brow.

“I don’t like when you raise your brow that way,” she said. “Always means you’re planning something that even I can’t predict.”

The brow fell, but his look of dark curiosity didn’t.

“Do I want to know?”

No response from the angel.

He leaned back again, drawing in a long breath as he worked his hand down his belly and toyed with the top of his briefs.

She watched, spellbound by his long, pale fingers tugging at the elastic, and the subtle spasms of his belly muscles as he crept his hand into the shadowed place.

She couldn’t see where his fingers were or what they touched, and wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to. Already, her breathing had become labored and body tight with anticipation of an act that wouldn’t come.

“Don’t … Don’t do this to me,” she whispered, and his gaze was on her again. Quelling.

He’d do what he wanted, and she wouldn’t say no.

How could she, after what she’d done to him?

He pulled the elastic down or himself out—which, she couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that he was exposed, the entire, girthy length of him, and her eyes closed.

Torture.

He intended to torture her on her own bed, in her room, in her own damned house.

The bed shifted.

He moved.

She felt the dips to the mattress on either side of her. One knee, then the other.

She opened her eyes.

There he was, pale skin glowing in the moonlight, pitch black wings terrifying and beautiful as his backdrop. He straddled her easily, not touching her legs even through the covers as he worked his hand up and down his shaft in long, slow draws.

He’d called himself an aberration, and perhaps he was, and maybe she was, too, for wanting to lean forward and take the dark, swollen end of him between her lips.

She licked them, knowing she couldn’t pleasure him. Knowing she couldn’t touch or be touched. Supposing that she should have never touched him in the first place, and perhaps she wouldn’t have if she’d known.

Scoffing, she closed her eyes and put her head against the wood behind her. “I would have,” she muttered, and brought her hand up to the hollow between her breasts. “I would have still touched you because I’m weak and selfish. I take what I believe is mine, and you were mine.”

Out of context, her rambling likely wouldn’t have made much sense to him, but she’d had to speak the disordered thoughts, anyway. He had to know what kind of woman he’d lain with.

“I would have killed them—or tried to—if I hadn’t been so tired. I remember that, how tired I was.” She opened her eyes then and forced her gaze upward. He was still watching, still stroking, and still so slowly.

When she’d returned and saw the women, she’d been so caught up in what she knew he’d done that she hadn’t digested the truth he wore on his face.

He hadn’t been wearing the smile of unfettered passion, but of torment, and pain, and … desperation.

Of needing something so badly but not wanting it, even if the thing felt like heaven.

“What did I do to you?” she whispered.

His lips parted, but of course, no words came out.

“What would have happened if I’d stayed? Would you have broken my heart every time we made love and I had to leave the bed?”

He shook his head hard.

“How do you know?”

He stopped squeezing, stopped working his fist, and hovered there for a moment, breathing unevenly and staring at the ceiling.

His throat pulsed with a swallow, belly twitching from the aftershocks of his orgasm.

Carefully, he made his way over the side of the bed and walked to the bathroom.

He returned minutes later, gloriously nude, but no longer erect.

He picked up pad and pen and sat at the chair near the bedside. Slowly, he wrote, pausing occasionally to glance up at her before setting pen to paper again.

She feared what was on that page, and wondered what sorts of half-lies he was devising to placate her, or if he even cared to placate her at all.

When he thrust the paper to her, she didn’t immediately take it.

He tapped the bed beside her and made her look down.

She’d never been a coward, so she picked up the paper and squinted at his scrawled text.

She’d had her lips parted to rebut, but the next sentence quelled the urge to speak.

“I had to,” she whispered to herself.

He tapped the bed again, ostensibly to get her back to the task at hand.

“We weren’t always having sex.” Though there had been a lot. A human lover might not have survived his appetite.

He rolled his eyes and underlined the sentence.

And then he pointed to the next unread line.

And she’d felt like a princess, gratified that those peons could stare all they wanted, but they couldn’t have him. Only she could.

But that hadn’t turned out to be true.

“Naked,” she muttered.

“Okay, not naked then, but I seem to recall you had your hands places they shouldn’t have been.”

He raised a brow. He likely had no idea which line she’d just read.

She kept scanning.

She peeked up at him.

He made a rolling gesturing of his hand, likely indicating that she should keep reading—and certainly without all the commentary.

“Of course I didn’t, you big oaf. I’ve never heard of an elf refusing the person she’s tethered to.”

He let out a breath—a silent sigh.

“Oh, fine.” She kept reading.

She narrowed her eyes and reread that sentence. “But …”

The theory may have held some water, though so much of that period of her life was a blur. One happy memory ran into the next, and she could hardly differentiate between nights and days, only that he’d filled them. His face, his deep voice.

The safety she’d felt with him.

But the theory couldn’t have been true. He wouldn’t have needed others.

She was about to make that very objection when he pulled the pad back. He wrote:

Her mouth opened, shaped to speak the words, “Oh gods, yes,” but what came out was, “No,” and she shook her head hard.

“No, you can’t. Tarik said that—”

Tamatsu snatched back the pad. He scribbled more, but she had to explain. She needed to get the words out before he tried to change her mind.

“I’ve already hurt you too much.” The words rushed out of her mouth like a child’s hurried tattling on a sibling who followed close at their heels. “I made you suffer in so many ways and for so long, and I refuse to do that to you again. For the rest of my life, I’ll have to carry in my conscience that I did such a cruel thing. You hadn’t been able to control your urges, but I could have. I could have walked away instead of having my revenge, and I gave you a trial to complete and no satisfaction for completing it.”

She shook her head hard yet again, resolved.

“No. I won’t hurt you again, my stōr, matter how badly I want what you’re offering.”

Briefly, he stopped writing, but she took a page out his book and thumped the bed beside him.

“Tamatsu.”

He looked up, brow furrowed with what seemed to be frustration, but frustration was better than pain.

“I’m sorry, but no.”