Page 70

For a moment, I can only look. I have stood before marble goddesses carved by masters and paintings worth more than this house. Not one of them could have prepared me for April, flushed and bare in the afternoon light, looking at me as though she is the one who has been granted a miracle.

I cup her breast and drag my thumb across the peak, and she sighs my name. I lower my head and take her into my mouth, and the sigh becomes a moan.

That sound… I would remain a man forever for that sound alone.

Her hands are everywhere. My shoulders. My chest. The plane of my stomach. Then lower, her fingers wrapping around my cock, and I very nearly come undone on the spot.

“April.” It is a warning. It is also a plea.

“Your very fine cock,” she murmurs against my ear, stroking me slowly from root to tip. “I’ve wanted to do that since the first day.”

“You,” I manage through clenched teeth, “are a menace.”

“You love it.”

I do. God help me, I do.

I turn us with care, mindful of her elbow, of the fallen ladder, of every hard edge in this room, until she is lying on the faded runner beneath me. I hook my fingers into the waistband of her leggings and draw them down her legs, her underthings along with them. She kicks them free. One sock remains. She does not seem to notice.

I find I adore it.

Then she is bare beneath me, and I am kissing my way down her body. Her throat. Her collarbone. The soft curve of her belly. The inside of one knee, then the other. Higher.

“Gabriel—oh.”

I taste her. Slowly. Unhurried. I have waited one hundred and forty-three years; patience is the one thing I possess in abundance.

Her fingers fist in my hair. Her hips lift. She says several words that would have scandalized polite society in my day, and a few that would scandalize it in hers. I learn her. What makes her gasp. What makes her breath stutter. What makes her thighs tremble against my shoulders.

When she breaks, she cries my name. It echoes up the staircase and into the rafters of my house, and I think it the finest sound these walls have ever held.

I rise over her. She draws me down, her legs winding around my hips, and our eyes meet.

“Hi,” she whispers again.

“Hello.”

Then I press into her, slowly, and the world falls away.

Heat. Tight, wet heat that steals my breath, my thoughts, every word in every language I have ever known. She gasps, her nails sinking into my back. I go still, trembling with the effort.

“Are you⁠—”

“Don’t you dare stop.”

So I don’t. I move inside her, slowly at first, learning this too. The rhythm of her. The way she tilts her hips to take me deeper. The way her breath catches each time I fill her. She meets every stroke, her heels pressing into the backs of my thighs, urging me on.

At some point, I realize I am waiting for it. The creeping chill. The gray at my fingertips. It does not come.

There is only heat. Only her. I lace my fingers through hers and press our joined hands to the floor above her head, and my hand is flesh. Warm, living flesh.

“Look at me,” she breathes.

“April,” I breathe her name as I look into her eyes. And it is that, more than her body, more than the pleasure building at the base of my spine, that undoes me. The way she looks at me. As though I am not a monster. As though I am not a curse.

As though I am simply hers.

She comes apart again, clenching around me, my name a broken cry on her lips. I follow her over the edge with a groan torn from somewhere deep inside me. Somewhere that has been stone for far too long.