Page 54 of Ravished By the Revenant

Later. After.

“You’re staring,” he says without turning around. Of course he knows. He always knows. He probably heard my heartbeat change from three rows away.

“I’m supervising.” I make my feet move down the path. “You know I hold a management position on this property.”

“Mm. And how does the management find the work?” He ties off the twine and glances over his shoulder, one dark eye and one blue shard, both entirely too knowing. A smear of dirt crosses his forearm. There’s a leaf in his hair. He’s the most ridiculous, gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen.

“Unsatisfactory,” I say. “There’s a leaf in your hair. Very unprofessional. I’m docking your pay.”

He raises one black eyebrow. “You do not pay me.”

“Then I’m docking your privileges.”

He straightens to his full absurd height and turns, wiping his hands on his pants. His gaze travels down my body in that slow way that should require a license. “Which privileges would those be, little intruder?”

Heat coils in my belly and travels through my veins, chasing out the last of the cold that seeing Marco left behind. This is medicinal, I decide. This is me processing trauma through healthy physical connection. Somewhere, a therapist feels a disturbance and doesn’t know why.

I close the distance between us, hook a finger through his belt, and look up at his face.

“Clara.” His voice drops an octave. “You have that look.”

“What look?”

“The look you had before the orchard lost its dignity.”

“The orchard volunteered.” I flatten my other palm against his stomach, cool skin over hard muscle, and walk my fingers up his abdomen, over scars and ink, until they rest just below his exposed ribs. Under my hand, the glow brightens. “Aldric. I’m going to need you to stop gardening now.”

“I am nearly finished with the tomatoes⁠—”

“The tomatoes,” I say, rising onto my toes to drag my mouth along his jaw, “can watch.”

The sound he makes isn’t human, and I can’t pretend that I don’t love it.

His hands grip my waist and lift me like I weigh nothing, and my legs wrap around him on pure muscle memory. His mouth crashes into mine, his lip piercings cool against my tongue, and I bury my hands in his hair and pull the leather tie loose.

“You come home,” he growls against my mouth, walking us out of the tomato rows, “and put your hands on me in my own garden. Insolent.”

“Your garden?” I bite his lower lip, tugging a piercing. “Check the deed, tenant.”

He laughs, and then my back meets the soft grass of the strip between the lavender and the raised beds, his huge frame caging me, bees droning somewhere overhead. His mouth is at my throat, lips and teeth and metal, and his hands are already at the hem of my shirt, shoving it up, palming my breast through my bra.

“Off,” I gasp, clawing at buttons while he wrestles with my jeans. “Everything off, we’re not doing the half-dressed farmer thing today, I want⁠—”

“Tell me.” He peels the denim down my legs, flings it toward the cabbages, and my underwear follows it into horticultural exile. “Tell me what you want. Use that filthy mouth.”

“I want you inside me before the bees unionize.”

Aldric pauses for half a second, nonplussed. “Not what I meant, and you know it.”

I chuckle as he settles between my thighs, still in his pants, and drags a finger through my folds. My hips arch off the grass.

His voice is rough. “Soaked.” Another slow drag, a circle around my clit that makes me whimper. “Say what you want, Clara, or I will kneel here and tend to you like the tomatoes. Slowly. For hours.”

“You’re the worst.” I fist my hand in his hair. “Fine. I want your cock. I want you to fuck me in your stupid beautiful garden until I can’t remember anything else. Explicit enough? Should I notarize it?”

“It will suffice.” His pants hit the lavender.

His cockhead presses against my entrance, broad and heavy, the first barbell cool where I’m burning, and when he pushes in, slow and relentless, the stretch punches the air out of my lungs. Like it does every single time he fucks me. He watches my face the whole way down, jaw tight, the shard blazing.