Chapter 9: The First Night

His palm was still on her breast, and his thumb moved once, slowly, across the torn lace.

Sorrel's breath left her.

"That was not a question," he said hoarsely. "I am taking it as an answer."

"Good."

He sat up with her in his lap, so that her knees rested on either side of his hips, and his mouth found her throat.

He kissed it slowly, from the hinge of her jaw to the hollow at the base, and she felt him breathe her in.

"You smell of burnt linen," he muttered. "And herbs. And something I don't have a name for."

"Ronan."

"Say it again."

"Ronan."

His arm tightened around her back.

He drew the ruined bodice down off her shoulders, and the cold air of the room met her skin, and then his mouth did.

He took her nipple between his lips and sucked, soft and then not soft, and her fingers closed in his hair.

A sound came out of her that she had never made in her life.

"There," he said against her.

"Don't stop."

"I'm not going to stop."

He moved to the other breast, and his hand slid up the back of her thigh under what was left of the gown.

His palm was hot, and the scales on his fingertips were rough against her skin, and every place he touched seemed to wake up behind his hand.

She pulled the torn shirt off his shoulders.

He went still.

The grey on the left side of his chest, and down his arm, was in the lamplight where she could see all of it.

"You don't have to look at it," he said.

"I've been looking at it for ten days."

"That was healing. This is not."

"I know what it is."

She bent her head and put her mouth on the scaled place over his heart, the roughest and warmest part of him.

His whole body jerked.

He swore, low and ragged, and pulled her up and kissed her hard, until she was dizzy.

Then he laid her back on the scorched mattress and stripped the gown off her in one long pull.

She lay naked in the light of his skin.

It had begun to glow again under the grey, a slow red, and it lit her from the side and made her shadow tall on the wall.

He knelt over her and looked.

"Sorrel," he said again.

"Come here."

"In a moment."

He kissed her collarbone, then the soft place under her ribs, then lower.

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