Page 75 of Grim Tidings

“It should terrify you,” he warns. “How much I want you.”

“It doesn’t.”

If anything, it’s more powerful than any surge of magic I’ve felt. Just as intoxicating, too. It lights me up from the inside out, to know that I’m not the only one who has been holding on to desperate, aching hope.

“I tried to stop,” he whispers.

“I know you did. I did, too.”

His hand cups my face, his thumb brushing over my cheek before he anchors it under my ear. “It won’t end well.”

I nod. “I know it won’t.” Our decision to give in to our mutual attraction doesn’t change our circumstances. But isn’t that why I came here? For a chance at something different? For once, I’m not going to concern myself with the messy details of the ending. I’m going to plant myself firmly in the middle. “But I don’t ca—”

He doesn’t let me finish. Gabriel swallows the rest of my sentence with his mouth against mine, kissing me at the very top of the light-house, golden light spilling boundless in every direction.

Chapter Seventeen

Gabriel

I’m a good man, but I’m not a fucking saint.

There’s only so much I can take of those big brown eyes staring up at me. Her red mouth parted. Her bleeding heart held in her careful hands. I’ve been keeping myself at a distance, trying to convince myself this is all some sort of elaborate act, but I can’t do it anymore. I know who she is. She’s shown me.

So I press her against the window and kiss her the way I’ve been trying to convince myself not to. I collapse under the weight of all my wanting. I give in.

I kiss her like she belongs to me. In a way nothing has in more than a thousand years.

She makes a small sound, and my hand shifts, my thumb dipping to her chin, pressing down, urging her mouth open. I sweep my tongue against hers, and she makes another sound. Darker. Sharper.

One of her hands fists in the front of my shirt, and the other slips beneath it, her palm against the bare skin of my rib cage. Her hand is cold, and I grunt into her mouth, my entire body flinching. I feel the shape of her smile against my bottom lip, and I bite the edge of it, her husky laugh slipping around us like smoke.

“Why are you laughing?” I drag my mouth down the curve of her jaw, under her ear. Along the line of her neck. I’m leaving no stone unturned. No single inch unmapped.

Darcy arches her back, letting herself be shaped by my hands. “I don’t know,” she muses, her voice a breathy gasp when I catch her earlobe between my teeth and pull. “I think I might be happy?”

“Wasn’t that the point of your list? You had a plan.”

She laughs, sinking her fingers through my hair. Her nails scratch at my scalp. “You were never part of the plan,” she whispers.

I’ve felt betrayed by my own instincts, but maybe my magic hasn’t been a warning but a siren’s call. Maybe crossing paths with Darcy was inevitable from the very beginning. Maybe this is exactly where I’m supposed to be. Here, with Darcy, in a room made of glass with the sun painting everything gold.

I like the idea of that. Fate handing me something for once, instead of taking it away. I brush one more kiss against her mouth and then brace my hands on either side of her. She stares up at me, her eyes bright and wide and smiling.

“You could tear me apart, you know that?”

“I could,” she agrees. The smallest of smiles as her fingers climb the indents of my ribs. “But I won’t. You’re safe with me.”

We lose track of time in the lighthouse.

I kiss her against the window, against the slowly rotating flare of light, against the wall by the door when we’re trying to leave. She laughs into my mouth, and I kiss her harder, trying to memorize the taste of her. Now that I have it, I’m greedy for her affection. I’m so tired of never taking anything for myself.

“Is this what corruption feels like?” I mutter against the skin of her neck, teasing my teeth against her collarbone.

She shivers, sinking both hands into my hair and pulling. “Have you always been this dramatic or is this a recent—ah—”

I bite.

“A recent development?” she finishes in a rush, breathy and sweet.