Severin laughed quietly. She heard it with a prey’s primal senses.
Danger.
Run.
Instead she froze, the doe hoping the wolf didn’t smell her.
Her breath came hot and hectic, and she watched his big hands, his feral eyes, the ugly knife.
Fear and arousal. Terror and desire.
He set the blade to her flesh and slowly, slowly made his cut, parting her skin with a reverence that felt like worship.
She squealed, but more because of nerves and fear than from pain. Blood welled in the shallow cut, just a little. Severin made a strange guttural sound that made her clit throb.
He stared at what he’d done to her, his gaze hot. After a long moment he pushed up to kneel again.
She looked at her thigh in bemusement, wondering why she was so turned on.
He licked the smear of blood off his blade, wincing as he nicked his bottom lip. Expression full of determination, he laid the knife on the nightstand.
His brow furrowed and he looked lost.
“Come here,” she said.
He picked up the knife again and for a moment she thought he was going to want more. Instead, he walked to her dresser and put the knife in her top drawer before coming back. Maybe he didn’t trust himself. Silently, he got into bed, avoiding eye contact.
“Severin,” she said quietly. “Are you okay?”
He nodded, but his jaw was tight.
“I let you.”
“I still shouldn’t have.”
She smeared her finger through the blood on her thigh and held it up to his face. “Is it the blood or the cutting you like?”
He captured her hand and sucked the blood off her finger, making her back arch, but he only looked disgusted with himself.
“Your fear. Your pain. All of it.” His deep voice was especially husky and he cleared his throat as though to throw off whatever spell he was under. “I need limits, Minnow.”
“You have limits. You like to hurt me, but you won’t harm me or kill me. Even in the heat of the moment, you wouldn’t.”
He nodded, but she got the impression he didn’t believe it the way she did.
“Do you forget you love me sometimes, Mister Leduc?”
“Never.” The word held a gravity of feeling that warmed her more than a fancy poem would from another man.
Joy spread through her. Their faces were so close together now his every exhalation stirred her hair. The dispassionate mask he often wore was gone, and she could clearly see his feelings for her. No one had ever loved her like he loved her, even though he had a hard time expressing it. She didn’t need pretty words when she got to see it in his eyes.
When couples said it too easily it made her think of the moaning in porn – meaningless noise. Maybe she had to guess what Severin was thinking a good part of the time, but the emotions he did let her see were raw and real.
She leaned closer and licked the well of blood from his lip where he’d cut himself. It was a strange feeling – as if it made them closer somehow, even though he’d come down her throat so often it shouldn’t have felt like a big deal. He kissed her, slowly, tenderly, this man who was big enough to snap her in two, and yet seemed to spend a lot of time trying to protect her from himself.
He held her and stroked her, for a long, long time. While she was still drifting and euphoric, he cleaned the cut on her leg and bandaged it, looking after her with the gruff attention that showed what she meant to him.
Later, alone, but still wrapped tight in the echoes of Severin’s affection, the nasty email she got from her mother and the disappearance of her sister’s account almost didn’t hurt.