Free HER SWEETEST DOWNFALL (Paranormal Romance / Fantasy Novella) (Forever Girl Series - a Journal) by rebecca hamilton

That was the main source of your confusion, the main reason your actions defied your better senses. Now that you understand, it should not happen again.”
    Ophelia swallowed. “So now what?”
    “Lenore will return. My worry is whether you are ready for what comes next. You need to be, and yet, we cannot change that you are not.”
    Kneeling up, Ophelia cupped her hands on the either side of Ethan’s face. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you.”
    He grasped one of her wrists. “The problem is you don’t trust yourself.” 
    How could she? She’d been right about Robert, but how many things had she been wrong about? Hadn’t she believed her mother’s stories were only fairytales? Or was there some deeper part of her that had always known better? And yet, the night her father had died, she’d not sensed anything. Shouldn’t she have felt something—known somehow that he was in danger?
    Ethan stood and pulled Ophelia to her feet. With his hands resting on her hips, he took in a deep breath and closed his eyes for a long moment. 
    When he opened them, he dropped his hands away and walked over to sit on the cot. Ophelia waited, hoping for him to say something more, to make sense of the storm raging within her.
    “My entire family was murdered,” he said. He stared down at his hands. “I was too quick to trust the wrong person. To trust them instead of my own instincts.”
    Her heart thumped at the sentiment. She wanted to ask more, yet she could not bear to carry his heartache with her own. “Am I wrong to trust ye?”
    “What would it mean for me to say no? If I am not worthy of trust, my answer is meaningless.”
    Ophelia padded closer. She touched his hair and smiled softly. “Not to me.”
    Ethan looked up. His hand found hers, and the warmth of his fingers against her palm, his fingertips against her wrist, sent a tingling sensation through her entire body. He eased her closer until she stood between his knees, and with his other hand, he pulled her body down to his.
    In the past, she would have stopped. She would not have allowed herself to have these feelings in the first place. She’d already lost everyone who ever meant anything to her, and she didn’t need to set herself up for that kind of pain again. But Ethan’s touch comforted her in this new, strange life. 
    “It is an insult to your worth for me to love you,” he said, “but I cannot change the feelings you’ve ignited in me.”
    She leaned forward, toppling him back against the cot, and pressed her lips to his. He wrapped his arms around her and rolled her onto her back, tracing his kisses from her lips, down her jaw line, and to her collarbone. 
    As he shifted his weight up to kiss her again, his pelvis pressed closer to her own, and the heat between her thighs pulsed. He closed his lips over hers, and his tongue explored her mouth, touched her teeth, slid against her own tongue. His hand glided soothingly over the serpent’s mark, and his fingers wrapped around the hair at the nape of her neck. Ophelia kissed him back heatedly, her hands moving along the strong planes of his back.
    Ethan broke the kiss. He stared into her eyes, searching, tension forming in his jaw and a line creasing between his eyebrows. He pulled away and sat on the edge of the bed, and the mattress shifted, the wool blanket hushing as it rubbed against the sheets.
    “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
    Ophelia sat up and touched his shoulder. “Ye ‘ave no reason to be.”
    He walked over to the fire, leaving Ophelia alone on the bed with an aching worry in her chest.
    “Are ye all right?”
    He chuckled sadly, shaking his head. “More than all right. But once you are inside the Maltorim, that will be our end.”
    Ophelia took a steadying breath and stared down at her hands. “Say I don’t join the Maltorim?”
    “That mark will kill you if you don’t turn. And if you stay with me, we’ll be hunted by other Guardians until you are captured and set right