My insides fluttered, as if I’d swallowed a ball of electricity and it sizzled within.
The fire jumped and flickered, painted this strange dungeon in wild flame, and I watched it play along Hawke’s hair. His back. Slide along the high, carved line of his cheekbones as he turned to pin those wicked eyes upon me.
“Fetch the water.”
As if in a dream, I found my feet moving. Obeying without rancor, without a struggle. My gaze slid to the shelf set over the hearth, close enough to keep its contents warmed but avoid burning.
The large pot resting atop it steamed gently.
Letting go of the opium in my pocket, I reached for the wooden handles on each side, polished and worn. I tried to move the whole, to lift it, but the large pot was too heavy for my efforts. I pulled harder. The water inside it sloshed too close to the edge. I flinched as it sizzled upon the fire-warmed hearth.
His hands curled over mine, dwarfed my own. He’d made no sound, but suddenly he surrounded me. Once more, I was ensnared between his arms, caged by the fell and smell of him. I shuddered as the force of my need, the sheer bloody-minded want of him, nearly took my knees out from under me.
He pressed my palms to the temperate wood. With his help, we lifted with an ease that set my heart pounding harder. I could all but taste the pulse at the back of my tongue, as if it were a flavor or a scent.
Walking in tandem, we set the pot down together.
Hawke took me by the shoulders, neither gentle nor patient, and turned me about. His eyes seemed darker, somehow, but the shape of his mouth, the set of his jaw, had not eased. As if he were angry. Conflicted.
Large, blunt fingers pushed the coat from my shoulders. Peeled it down my arms and left it where it fell.
My heart drummed faster. My mouth dried.
Hawke studied the fit of my collecting corset, straighter than fashionably required and thicker than most. Again, his fingers bit into my shoulders. Again, I turned beneath his unyielding guidance. This time, I felt the laces of my corset give.
I took a deep breath. It shook.
“Hawke, I—” It was not him that stalled me, but my own preoccupied consciousness. What would he do? What would I allow?
Would I be afforded a say?
Did I want to be?
The belt holding my various pouches slackened, and this, too, was stripped away. I heard it clink against the floor, the discarded buckle meeting stone.
I felt him step closer, felt the heat of him against my back as one arm came around me to withdraw the blade I carried from its sheathe. The edge winked, razor sharp and lit to brilliant gold.
I felt the same give in my back.
“Such toys,” Hawke murmured behind me.
Delicious shivers whispered over my skin.
The knives were abandoned. Clink. Thud. His fingers swept my loose braid to the side, and I felt the rasp of his calluses against my nape. The buckle at my throat gave.
The corset fell to the floor with the coat, and I stood clad in only my trousers, a thin cotton shirt and boots.
The air that surrounded me was not cold, yet my nipples tightened. I shuddered with the sensation. My fingers tightened into frightened fists at my side.
I swayed. “Hawke.”
“Say the word,” was his reply, but there was no kindness in it. “Beg me to let you run.”
Run? He expected me to run? In that moment, I decided that I was through with running.
I had come to demand his intervention, but the game had changed. I would beg for nothing.
One large hand spread across my back, and the feel of it fractured something brittle inside me. Something cool and cautious; something I had forgotten at his first imperious directive.
I was to be untouchable, was I not?
How foolish I was.
He cradled me in the crook of his arm, supported by his strength, until my boots were removed. Then I was righted, as if I were no more than a toy at his beck and call, and I felt his fingers at the flap of my trousers.
My head came up. My hands laced around his, gripping tightly as heat suffused my cheeks. “Wait—”
Deftly, he reversed my grip, caught both hands and banded me securely between his arms. “Beg for me to stop.” The dark menace in the ultimatum ghosted across the sensitive skin of my ear and heightened that delicious sensation inside me. The flesh between my legs clenched, and I gasped.
I did not beg.
Holding my wrists with a single firm hand, he undid the buttons holding my trousers in place, and pushed them down. My saving grace was that my shirt, a man’s and much too big for me, hung to my knees. Yet I could not deny that I could feel the air upon my bare legs, shuddered as it slipped beneath my shirt to brush against my sensitive flesh.
I inhaled sharply.
Hawke drew me from the pile of discarded clothing, guided me closer to the basin of steaming water. It was not nearly large enough for a bath, and I wondered on a strained note of near hysteria if he intended to drown me in it.
“Kneel.” It was a taunt, a dare that I could not mistake.
He knew I wouldn’t misunderstand. Had counted on it.
My lips curved. Did he consider me so weak?
I knelt. The stone bit into my knees.
Hawke’s jaw shifted, a muscle leaping near his temple. A dull flush darkened the skin pulled taut across his cheekbones, and the answering thrill this engendered pulsed a wicked pleasure through me.
Slowly, deftly, he rolled his sleeves to the elbow.
It was easy to imagine this man center in the rings, whip stretched taut between his elegant hands; effortless in direction, unforgiving in expectation.
I watched him now, trembling with anticipation, as he cupped his hands and submerged them into the basin. Water splashed to the stone when he raised them again, trickled down his forearms and peppered his trousers. I watched the glistening liquid trace his skin, catch on the dark hair revealed by his rolled sleeves.
When he allowed it to drip over my shoulder, to seep into the pale fabric of my shirt, I stirred. The heat of it simmered against my skin, slid across my breast and down my back. To my surprise, a moan rose in my chest.
“Release your hair,” Hawke said, his eyes not on mine but the stain spreading over my shirt. I looked down, breath catching as I saw clearly the outline of one pale pink nipple, cradled gently by translucent fabric.
I’d never had to consider the issue before, as my corset concealed all.
Now color rose in my face, and self-conscious awareness shredded the remains of my calm. I sucked in a breath that broke half way, made as if to stand.
Wet hands caught my head, fingers speared into my hair. I was forced to look up, to meet the madness in Micajah Hawke’s mismatched eyes, the intensity with which he studied me.
I had never before seen that look upon a man, never understood to what lengths a woman might go to do so. What gripped him seemed as close to savage hunger as I could imagine, focused as a predator might upon such tender prey.
Madness, perhaps, but if it truly was, it was a kind of lunacy I understood.
Such things came with the blood, after all.
“Your hair,” he rasped, forcing the words out as if he were angry. Or desperate. “I would see you as you are.”
My undoing, that heated sentiment. Whatever he felt, whatever he wrestled with inside his own skin, it was me he looked at.
With shaking fingers, I unbound my plait. It left my fingers gray and smudged, but this did not last. For ten long, torturous minutes, the ringmaster of the Midnight Menagerie washed the lampblack from my hair. He smoothed the stains from my skin, ran his work-roughened hands over my shoulders, peeling down the shirt’s collar just enough. My arms, my throat, even my bare legs were not neglected. To see his golden skin against my much paler flesh was as shocking now as it was when first I’d noticed it, an uncomfortably powerful intensity that served to heighten my senses to the point of excruciating anticipation.