Page 37 of Ravished By the Revenant

“I was dead for six hours. There’s a difference.” She lowers herself into the chair with a wince she doesn’t manage to hide, and I feel a twinge of what could only be guilt.

“You are in pain.”

“I’m in aftermath.” She reaches for the bread. “It’s different. Aftermath comes with a highlight reel.”

I don’t ask what any of that means. Instead, I sit and watch her tear into the chicken like a woman rescued from a shipwreck. I let her get three bites in before I say what I rehearsed while cooking.

“Clara. This morning. I did not intend…” I pause and purse my lips. This woman is turning me into a stammering page boy. “I was rough with you. If I hurt you, if I took more than you wished to give, I⁠—”

“Aldric.”

“—am prepared to hear grievances, and to amend my conduct in whatever⁠—”

“Aldric.” She sets down her fork. Her cheeks match the strawberries in the garden, and she stares at the wolf banner instead of me. “I loved it.”

I stop. Blink. “You loved it.”

“Every ridiculous, unhinged, medically inadvisable minute of it.” She pushes a potato around her plate, and her voice turns almost shy, which is something I didn’t know she was capable of. “I passed out from orgasms, you enormous idiot. That’s not a complaint. That’s a Yelp review with five stars and a photo.”

I breathe out through my nose. “I do not know what a Yelp is.”

“It means…” She finally looks at me, chin up, defiant even in her embarrassment. “Do it again sometime. Okay? Grievance withdrawn. Case dismissed. Eat your chicken.”

I eat my chicken. I taste none of it. The blue thing in my chest pulses so hard I fear it’s visible through the waistcoat, and Schmetterling, curled on the third chair, watches me with an expression that says he has never in three hundred years seen anything so pathetic.

“Walk with me,” I tell her when the plates are cleared. “You need air. You are even paler than usual.”

Clara wrinkles her nose. “Whose fault is that?”

“Mine. I take full credit.” I hold the garden door open. “Come. The orchard apples are turning. You may insult my pruning.”

The afternoon is warm and golden, the bees are drunk in the lavender, and Clara walks beside me down the gravel path with her hands in her pockets and her shoulder bumping my arm every few steps. I don’t think it is by accident.

“So this is your life,” she muses, tipping her face to the sun. “Chickens, bees, one immortal cat, aggressively good cooking.”

I raise an eyebrow. “And now one intruder who eats my strawberries and steals my shirts.”

“Borrows. And that shirt is softer than anything made this century, so really, that’s on you.” She stops at the strawberry bed, crouches, picks one, and eats it right there, juice on her lower lip, eyes closed against the sun, and I understand with total clarity that we are not going to finish this walk.

We make it as far as the orchard.

She stops beneath the oldest apple tree—the one I have pruned since before her country existed—and reaches up to touch a low-hanging apple. Her shirt rides up, baring a strip of soft warm skin above her jeans, and whatever remained of my civility leaves me entirely.

“You’re doing the thing,” she says without turning around.

“What thing?”

“The looming. The breathing. The—” She turns, and her pupils are already blown wide, her voice gone husky. “The looking at me like I’m a city you’re about to sack.”

“Clara.” My voice comes out like gravel. “Your terms require that you ask. Explicitly. With words.”

She holds my gaze for one heartbeat. Two.

“Fuck me against this tree, Aldric.”

I have breached castle walls with less speed.

Her back meets the trunk, and my mouth crashes into hers, and she’s already climbing me, fingers in my hair, one leg hooking around my thigh. She tastes of strawberries and sunlight, and she moans into my mouth like she cannot hold it back.