Free Reign by Ginger Garrett Page B

his arms.
    He stopped and pushed her back, frowning, trying to read her blank face.
    “You do not want sex?” she asked. She tilted her head, as if perplexed by his odd behavior.
    “I want you,” he said, the honesty of his words surprising him. “There is a difference.” It was a truth he had never known, and yet speaking it made it real.
    A light flashed in her eyes. She was alive in there, indeed. “You don’t know me,” she said. “I understand what I owe you, and I will give it to you. You don’t have to lie to get what you want.”
    It was the most personal thing she had said to him yet. He held his tongue, shocked.
    “I didn’t want the marriage,” she added. “I was forced to accept it.”
    He laughed, startling her. “I didn’t want the marriage either. It was my father’s decision. If I had thought I could change his mind, I would have fought a hundred men to get out of it.”
    She looked away from him, color coming up in her cheeks. No tears ran down her face, so he did not think she was wounded by his admission.
    “And then I saw you,” he added. Reaching out, he pulled the ivory comb from her hair, and it fell in a black cascade around her shoulders. He saw his hand tremble as he did it. It didn’t bother him now. She needed to see him weak. She wouldn’t trust him until she did.
    He undressed himself and sat on her bed. She watched him but did not move toward him, and once again he could not read her expression.
    “I thought you wanted me to come to your chambers,” she said.
    “If I leave, even for a moment, you’ll go back to your thinking before I see you again. You’ll dwell on everything you’ve lost.”
    “And if you stay?” she asked, taking a step toward him, not out of desire, he thought, but out of curiosity.
    “We can form an alliance against our fathers, in our own way.”
    Jezebel
    The sun had been climbing in the sky for nearly five hours before Ahab left the next morning, sated and quiet. He did not seem to notice how Jezebel’s hands shook as he kissed them before leaving. Her thoughts were like a thousand sharp needles scattered across her mind. Nowhere could she find comfort from what had happened.
    There had been no blood. She was so used to blood when men touched her. But Ahab hadn’t hurt her. He had seemed concerned with her, how she felt, how she received his tenderness. She felt like an ant caught in a jar. She had no escape from his attention. She had been too afraid to close her eyes. But he had closed his, in pleasure, and not just his own pleasure, but the pleasure of being with her. He took pleasure with her. Other men had taken pleasure from her.
    Anger rose up from her heart into her mouth. She spit his taste from her tongue onto the soiled linens. She needed to act like a princess, a real one, not one that had slept near open sewers and watched infants slaughtered so their mothers could go on giving themselves away.
    Last night had been horrible, an intimacy so terrible it pierced her soul. She stood now, ripping the linens from the bed, throwing them to the floor, disgusted and afraid of what they now represented.
    That had been easy, those nameless offerings. Women never named the infants they planned to give to the goddess. They weren’t meant to be known. Some things are not meant to be known , she thought. After the offerings, no one ever stayed. Mothers fled so they would not see the bodies burn. Men who worshipped through sex fled so they would not have to truly see the women they had lain with.
    Ahab had not run away. He’d stayed for hours, stroking her hair. There was no shame in his eyes of what he had done to her, touching her like she was of value, instead of the rejected, despised thing she was. Marriage was worse than she imagined. Intimacy was a cruel new world. It seemed to make all her wounds and her confusion brighter, like air to a flame.
    She took the oil lamp from the bedside and poured the oil over the linens. She didn’t