Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
The soft hands of the drowned wives flinch, and falter, and let go.
He brings me up into the air, breaking the surface.
I come up retching, hauling in breath that’s half water. He holds me against him, treading the black channel with one arm crushed around my back, and his face—god, his fucking face. The careful stillness is gone, blown clean off him. Instead, he’s afraid. The monster that’s watched this coast for centuries is wide-eyed and afraid, and it’s for me.
“I have you,” he says, voice strained and ragged. “I have you, foxglove, I have you, I have you…”
“They pulled me in,” I sob into his throat, suddenly able to speak, to cry. “I couldn’t—I didn’t want to go, I couldn’t stop my own feet, they called me and I couldn’t—”
“I know.” He moves us toward the shallows, and he doesn’t let go of me for a second, his hand spread wide and firm against my heaving back. “I know. I felt it the moment they reached for you. I have never swum so fast in all my years, Christ, Iris, I thought…” He breaks off. His arm tightens until I can’t breathe for a different reason. “I thought I’d come up with nothing in my arms.”
His feet find the bottom. He stands, lifting me clear of the worst of the cold, my legs going around him out of instinct, and we’re chest to chest in the waist-deep shallows with the dark loch all around us, and the last violet light dying out of the sky. Both of us are shaking, his clothes soaked and heavy on him because he came in dressed, he came in just as he was, no thought for anything but reaching me in time.
Because he did just reach me in time.
And the fear turns over into something else, all the heightened nerves, thundering heartbeats, and feverish adrenaline incinerating into want, into need, into desire. That primal demand to prove you’re still alive.
My mouth finds his, and his hand fists in my wet hair. The kiss becomes desperate and deep and graceless, all teeth and breath and relief. He makes a rough, broken sound, and his hands are everywhere on me, my back, my ribs, my face, gripping, checking, like he can’t believe the whole of me came back up with him.
“Never,” he begins against my jaw, my throat. “Never again. You do not go into this water without me, do you hear me? You do not let it call you; you are mine, and the loch does not get to have you—”
“—I couldn’t stop it,” I interject, gasping, holding tight.
“Then I’ll stop it.” His hands close hard on my hips, pulling me against the rigid line of him. “I’ll stop it every time. Nothing takes you. Not them, not the loch, no one. You’re mine, Iris, mine to the bone.”
“I’m yours,” I breathe, and my hands are already pulling the rest of his clothes off him, the soaked sweater, the trousers, dragging them down and off so they sink away into the black beneath us. He lets me, kissing me fierce and deep and possessive, like he’ll devour me if I stop.
Then he thrusts inside me, fast and hard, the full breach of his cock pushing up into me. I cry out and he swallows the sound with his kiss, and he fucks me there in the channel with the cold all through me, his arm locked around my back, holding me up out of the loch like he’ll never set me down in it again.
And that’s when it occurs to me, somewhere underneath the wanting, that there’s no bottom here.
We’ve drifted out past the shallows out to where the channel drops away, and the water’s too deep to stand in, yet he’s fucking me like a man braced on solid ground.
Like there’s something under him.
His hips drive up into me with a power that needs purchase, needs leverage, needs to be standing on something, but there’s nothing there, there’s fathoms of black water there, and he isn’t sinking, isn’t treading, both his hands are on me, accounted for, and we don’t go down.
I make a mistake and look down.
The light’s almost gone, but through the dark water between our bodies, below his waist where his legs should be working, I see the movement is all wrong. His legs disappear into the darkness of the water, but it’s not because of the depth, it’s because…it’s because they’re becoming a different color. A different texture…something sleek and black and—
“Don’t look down, foxglove,” he commands, and there’s that old amusement in it, that knowing, his voice has dropping into the register that is utterly inhuman.
I look at his face and gasp.
His eyes have gone black again. Full black, no blue left, no white, just the depthless dark drinking what’s left of the light, and the hands gripping me have changed, the nails gone long and hard, points pressing into the skin of my back and my hip, just shy of breaking it, the threat of them everywhere he holds me.