Free Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) by Cindy Brandner Page B

crossing the room to where she sat, the fire’s heat penetrating through the thin weave of her nightgown. Moonlight lay in a broad strip across the floorboards, lighting the bones of his face in stark relief.
    He knelt on the floor and put his head in her lap so she could not see his face. His arms lay lightly along her thighs and she could feel how they trembled. His whiskers were like needles against the fine skin of her inner thigh but she wouldn’t have moved for the world right now. She didn’t even dare to speak, though she laid her hand gently on his head, feeling the soft springiness of his curls and the tension that lay along his skin.
    “I wish I knew how to reclaim ye,” he said quietly, though his tone was fierce. “I wish I knew how to wipe the vision in my mind of him takin’ ye, of him makin’ love to my wife. It makes me feel as though I’ve a rope chokin’ me round my neck every time I think of it. I wish I’d killed him with my own two hands an’ maybe that would have washed the poison out.” The hands in question were clenched into fists, bunched tight in the cloth of her nightgown.
    “Oh God, Pamela, I’m sorry, but I cannot seem to shut it out. Every time ye lie with me—I see his hands on ye—touching ye. I put my hand to yer breast an’ I swear I can see the marks of his fingers there still.”
    It was what she had feared, that despite the fact that Love Hagerty was no longer alive, the ghost of what she had done with him would linger about their bed, that the mere knowledge of it would rip Casey apart and never cease tormenting him. He was a strong man, and secure in the fact of her love. But he was also a man who needed to possess his woman, just as she herself needed to know her hold on him was stronger than any other force in the world.
    She had racked her brain for months now, trying to think of a way to bring him back to her as they had been before he knew about Love. She could only think of one way.
    She unbuttoned her nightgown and shrugged her shoulders, the fragile white cotton puddling around her hips, leaving her bare in the firelight. Casey lifted his head, feeling the faint breeze of the falling cloth.
    “What are ye doin’, woman?”
    She put a hand to the tight line of his jaw, forcing him to meet her eyes.
    “You could do anything to me,” she said, pulse hammering in her neck. “Do you know that? I would let you do anything to me if I thought it would heal this between us. I never was this way for him. I need you to know that. I always kept as many clothes on as I could manage. I closed my mind and my heart to him. I could never give him the vulnerability of my naked body. I’ve only ever given those things to you. I would let you beat me if I thought it would take this away from us. I would even step aside and let you go to the bed of another woman. The beating,” she said, and the words came out half-choked, “would have to wait until well after the baby is born, obviously.”
    Casey swallowed, his fingers biting into her thighs, eyes so dark with pain that she could barely discern pupil from iris.
    “Jaysus, Pamela— beat ye ? Pregnant or not, I could never raise a hand to ye in violence, an’ I think ye know that well enough. An’ be honest, could ye really countenance me bein’ with another woman?” His gaze was as merciless as the fingers that gripped her flesh.
    “I could if it meant you’d come back to me whole afterward.”
    “Could ye? Could ye live with the thought of it, of me touching another woman the way I do you? Of me lyin’ naked an’ aroused in her arms?”
    It was her turn to swallow. She could not dislodge the acid taste that flooded her mouth at the thought of him with another woman. And suddenly she could see it all too clearly—the long line of him, the dark hair of his chest and groin against the pale body of another woman, his mouth on her fine skin. She knew what it was to have that strength brought