True Colors (8 page)

She heard herself ask, “Did you come into my bedroom earlier?”

I dreamed a dream of passion, devotion and loyalty, and a promise that meant everything—

The shaking in his hands increased. He whispered against her fingers, “Just to make sure you were okay. Whatever you want, whatever you need. Tell me and I’ll give it to you.”

Everything.

And for one shining moment, her world became simple and clean and good again.

“I need you,” she said.

She felt the breath leave his body. His eyes opened, and the expression in them blazed. How she could have ever thought those pale blue eyes were icy, she would never know. They burned with a pure, steady flame.

Her hands slipped away from his face as he brought his mouth down on hers, and the warm impact of his lips caused her eyes to flutter shut. She was cradled from behind and caressed from above, and all the while she knew that the heavy, hard weight of him hovered over her, balanced for the moment but ready to fall. Her hands landed on the heavy, wide arc of his collarbones and slipped down the expanse of his pectorals, while her mouth formed a soft ‘o’ of surprise for how good it was, how incredibly good—

—and he took that as his invitation to slip inside. He curled his tongue between her lips with a sensual gentleness that spoke of infinite care and deep emotion.

She learned something from his kiss and took it to heart. This man felt things he never spoke of verbally. Instead he said them with his body and his eyes, his mouth and his hands, and in that moment as she kissed him back, she made a silent promise to him to learn the language he spoke so that she heard everything he had to say to her.

Then his language changed and became harder, more demanding. He spoke of need too, as he drove his hardened tongue into her mouth and shoved a heavy thigh between her legs. His massive body became a silent shout of urgency. He rocked his hips against hers, massaging the hot length of his cock against the arc of her pelvis, and the shudder of his breath blasted against her cheek as he cupped one of her breasts and fingered her erect, aching nipple through the thin nightgown.

She caught fire. It ran shining like liquid mercury through her veins. She arched into his touch and groaned as she gripped the back of his head. Her hands slipped against the short corn silk of his pale hair.

“Tell me to stop, sweetheart,” he muttered against her cheek. “Just say the word if we’re going too fast.”

His body said something else though, as he ground harder against her.

It said,
please, please
.

She stroked the wide arc of his back as she whispered in his ear, “You are my mate. I could never say no to you.”

His head reared back. He stared at her in astonishment.

For one terrible moment, dread darkened her vision and her heart gave a sickened lurch. She thought, I cannot be so wrong. I cannot live with it if I am so deluded.

The joy that came over his face was so incandescent, it blinded her. “That’s what it means,” he said. “True north.”

She broke into a bout of reactive shivering. “What?”

He leaned on one elbow to caress her face. “When I looked at you for the first time, the world changed. It all but knocked me off my feet. I’ve been thinking it was like true north had shifted, the magnetic pull from the one direction you use in navigation, but it’s more like the primary force from your card spread. I’ve been trying to figure out what it meant. All I knew was that it was you—you had become my true north, my primary force. Just like that, from one moment to the next.”

She closed her eyes and swallowed hard as the world came back into focus. “Yes, that’s what happened to me too.”

He bent down to nuzzle her neck. “It reminds me of a quote from a French philosopher. ‘The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.’ Do you know it?”

She wound her arms around his neck, and she let her frightened heart find ease and grow full of him. “I do now.”

I dreamed a dream of incomparable rarity and loveliness.

Then I woke to find it true.

Chapter Six

Sacrifice

Gideon stared at the woman in his arms. She was so gorgeous it took his breath. He had thought her beauty was understated and intelligent, but right at that moment she was so flagrant with color and voluptuousness he could only gaze at her in passionate awe.

Her cocoa-and-cream skin turned a deep rich gold in the light of the fire, and her vivid eyes shone blue and green. Those fabulous gold-tipped corkscrew curls spilled extravagantly over his hands, and her pale yellow nightgown moved like silk against his overheated skin. Her breasts were full and generous, and the dark areola of her erect nipples pushed against the thin material.

He imagined watching her grow older, a pale sprinkling of frost touching those curls, the laugh lines growing at the corners of her eyes and that delicate, sensitive mouth. The images in his imagination drew him at a fundamental level. She could only become lovelier to him as he grew to know her with the intimacy of the passing years.

He bent his head and caressed the slender arc of her golden neck with his lips. He felt the sigh of pleasure that shuddered through her, the sexy shift of her body molding to fit his, and oh holy gods, he was the one who did that to her, great hulking brute that he was. The wonder of it closed his throat.

He knew too much about how to kill and hardly anything about how to live in peace. Hell, he hardly knew how to stay indoors for any length of time. She was too good for him, too refined. She put cloth napkins on her table, read books of poetry, and taught small children. The quilts she created were works of art that nurtured the soul.

He put bullets in clips to load his guns, and read files on unsolved crimes and treatises on war. He taught recruits how to wait, how to obey orders, and how to kill, and he played chess because it was a battle of wits that kept his mind sharp.

He put his forehead to her breast. His hands fisted in her nightgown.

He needed to come home but he didn’t know how. He hadn’t even known where home was until he looked in her face for the first time. He needed to be welcomed, but he wasn’t sure he deserved it.

She had fled her bedroom and her nightmare with a look of surprised horror. But he knew the nightmare she’d had. That nightmare was an old acquaintance of his. The details might change, along with the faces of the victims, but the story remained the same. It was a tale of a fire so dark it burned the soul black.

He
was
that nightmare for some people.

She stroked his hair. “Gideon?”

Christ, now he was responsible for putting that uncertainty in her voice, right at the time when she should be drenched in the knowledge of how lovely, how desirable he found her. He struggled to tell her something, anything, to let her know it could never be anything wrong with her. It was all about what was wrong with him.

He whispered, “I want to be a good man.”

Her hands stilled. Then she brought them under his jaw to coax his head up. She searched his expression, her beautiful gaze troubled. “Why would you think you’re not a good man?” she asked in a gentle voice.

“I’ve spent almost a hundred years in the army,” he said, his voice strangled. “I’ve seen things. I’ve done things you can’t imagine. I don’t ever want you to be able to imagine them. You deserve someone so much better than me, someone finer who knows how to live your life.”

“How do you know you’re not that man?” she asked. She reached up to kiss him, the delicate curve of her lips caressing his. “The heart has its reasons, remember?”

A tremor ran through his body. “You don’t know, you don’t understand.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” she told him.

Alice stroked his face and passed a hand down the broad expanse of his back, trying to soothe him. This was the same distress that shook through him earlier at the dining table. It was hard to watch him suffer, especially when she wasn’t sure he realized how much he was hurting. “I can’t possibly understand.”

“I chose it,” he said. “I thrived in the army. I was good at it.”

He would have been. She could see it. Strong, responsible, stable, reliable as the earth. He would have been the first in battle and the last to pull out, and the need for all of that would have been so self-evident to him, he never would have seen it as sacrifice. True nobility never recognized itself.

She might have acknowledged him as her mate yesterday, but it was in that moment that she fell in love with him.

She said, “I am a person of faith, Gideon. It got rocked a little yesterday, but it is back on solid ground now. I do not believe that we would be mates without also being right for each other. The fates or the gods, or whomever it was that created the Wyr to be what we are, would not have been so cruel.”

He muttered, “I don’t have your faith.
 
Not after all the atrocities and ugliness I’ve seen. Wickedness and inequities exist; nightmares are real. And the gods allow all of it.”
 
He met her gaze.
 
“But I do know one thing—you’re the purest gift I’ve ever been given, and I’ll do anything to keep you safe and be worthy of you.” He closed his eyes and turned his face into her palm.

She bit her lip. She could almost see the barrier that surrounded him. He wanted and needed to be with her, but somehow he was still closed off, and she knew she had not quite gotten through to him, not all the way, not yet.

Maybe it would just take time to let the reality of what had happened to them sink in. But maybe…

“You’ve got to remember, we met when I was having a really off day,” she told him. “Because most of the time I’m actually a bit of a shit, too.”

His startled gaze snapped up to hers, twin aquamarines frozen in the firelight. She flicked a finger at his nose and rolled her hips at him.

The corners of his sexy mouth began to curl up. He came on top of her more fully, and she parted her legs, knees bent to cradle him with her whole body. It was so good to feel him grip her by one thigh and anchor her down that she moistened for him in a liquid gush. The heavy length of his cock lay against her entrance. He pressed at the place where she was so sensitive she could feel his erection pulse, and she knew in that moment the invisible barrier was gone and he was right there with her, body and soul.

“Care to expound on that statement?” he murmured.

They had so much to learn about each other. The barrier would probably come back. It might take a long time for it to go completely. But for now, she opened her mouth to lick at his lips. “Nah,” she said, as she gave him a small grin. “I think you’ll see for yourself soon enough.”

The crow’s feet lines at the corners of his eyes deepened. He bent his head and ran his lips lightly along the skin of her neck, as he whispered, “I can hardly wait.”

The warm, moist exhalation of his breath on her sensitized skin was a caress all its own. It had the same effect as touching a match to kindling. Her body flashed hot as if a sheet of flame had doused her, and the hunger she felt for him was so ravening she shook from it. Oh gods, it was stronger than anything she had ever felt before. This feeling was so huge it threatened to swallow her whole.

She’d had lovers. Only a few, but they were enough that she thought she knew what she was about. She tried to brace herself, to hold on to some kind of rational thought or expectation. The first time with a new lover was never all that great. She’d always had to urge them to slow down. They needed time to get to know each other’s likes and dislikes before their lovemaking would get really good, and it wouldn’t matter in the slightest if he—if he wasn’t all that sensually gifted because he was so very fine, just so damn perfect in every other—

He took her nightgown by the neckline and tore it off her. Then he fell on her like a starving man on a feast. His entire tremendous body was ridged with all the heavy muscles held taut, and the look on his face was so desperate and raw that tears sprang to her eyes. His head arrowed down to her breasts, and he licked and suckled at her nipples until they jutted wet and distended, unbearably sensitive nubs of flesh. He moved from one to the other, as he stroked a big hand along the inside of her thighs and teased the private opening of her cleft with shaking fingers. She felt herself moisten further for him until his hand was soaked with her pleasure.

She touched him everywhere she could reach, with her mouth and her hands, arching up to rub her torso along the muscled length of his. He was breathing hard and whining low at the back of his throat, a barely discernible sound that nevertheless caught at her and pulled her outside of herself. When she groped between them to grip the heavy, hard shaft of his penis, he froze with a groan.

She looked into his pale, burning gaze as she fingered his erection, learning him by touch. His skin was flushed dark, the bones of his face clenched. Her hands were shaking, too. He felt huge to her, the length of his cock thick, ridged with veins and capped with a broad head with velvet soft skin. They both looked down the space between their bodies. Her slender legs were splayed wide for him, her delicate flesh plump, moist and inviting.

The emptiness at that juncture became a spike of need. She tugged on him gently, letting her hand stroke along the length of him. “Come inside,” she whispered. “We can go slow some other time.”

He shook his head, his breath coming in short hard pants, even as his hips pumped a slow grind that thrust his cock into her fist. “Not too fast. Not— God!”

The agonized pleasure that crossed his face as she massaged him was the most exquisite thing she’d ever seen. Her need spiked higher, hotter. She was so empty she hurt. She sucked air and struggled to articulate. “Gideon, please.”

He met her gaze quickly. “Does it ache, sweetheart?”

His desperation had not gone. He held it in check, and the tenderness and heat in his eyes made the easy swell of her tears spill over. She nodded jerkily.

He bent and nuzzled at her breast, and whispered, “I’ll make it better.”