“You’re going to fly again.” He pushed all the conviction he had into the words. “You will, Aryal. Healers can do miraculous things with joint repair these days. If all else fails, there’s joint replacement. You’re going to fly again. I swear it.”
He knew he might not be right, but she didn’t need that kind of honesty right now. She needed optimism and belief, and he put everything he had into giving it to her.
Her chest convulsed again. He kissed her temple. She didn’t cry easily and wouldn’t let go. It felt like it was wrenched out of her, and she fought it every step of the way. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”
Funny how while he was comforting her, for some reason, the burning pain in his chest had eased.
“I can’t believe what a drama queen you are,” she told him.
“Me?” He was genuinely astonished.
“You made a mistake. Sure, it was a bad mistake, but nobody died except the bad guys. What are you going to do, cry ‘mea culpa’ and beat your chest for the next ten years? Everybody’s over what happened but you. I am not saying this because you wanted somebody to. I’m saying it because it’s true. Move the fuck on already.”
Her words were rough, but they were sincere. He went from burning to lightness. It might have gone to his head a bit, because he rolled her over onto her back, and he came up over her to kiss her.
She made a muffled noise against his lips. She sounded incredibly grumpy. Then she kissed him back.
They were both filthy, blood streaked, and the cold floor was making him nuts. None of it mattered. This wasn’t about sexual passion. Or maybe it was, but it was about something else too, something that was more important.
That made him suspicious. He didn’t know what to call that important, unknown thing, but whatever it was, it felt necessary and right. He teased her lips and she licked at him. Then he deepened the kiss until their tongues met and caressed. She tasted of apple brandy, heady and light.
The sensation went to his head. He eased over her more fully, pressing one leg between hers. The friction of denim cloth from their jeans was a quiet sound interspersed with the sound of their deepening breath. She ran her hands up his back, her touch on the expanse of naked skin sending a shudder through him.
He couldn’t believe he hadn’t been inside of her yet. He needed to know her response to that most basic and primitive joining. Her long lean body was a match for his. It felt amazing to stretch out along her and revel in her feminine strength, like it unlocked a previously unacknowledged part of him.
Somewhere inside of him, that wild, dangerous part that he kept so tightly leashed broke loose and started running unfettered again. He had just enough presence of mind to wonder where the hell it was going, and why it needed to get there so urgently.
Neither one of them was capable of consummating a goddamn thing, yet still they kissed and kissed. He ran his fingers up her torso, underneath her ruined T-shirt to stroke at the graceful swell of one breast. He played with her soft, distended nipple as she cupped the back of his head, holding him down to her mouth.
Finally he pulled away enough to kiss the corner of her lips, and he leaned his forehead against hers. She stroked his hair, and it felt like a miracle.
He sighed. “Okay, when you’re not making me batshit crazy, I guess maybe I like you after all. But if you tell anybody that, I’m going to have to throttle you again.”
A soft explosion came out of her nose. She said, “An hour.”
“What’s an hour?” He fingered a strand of her soft hair.
“I want to renegotiate our bargain, to be consummated at some future date when neither one has had the shit kicked out of us.” A thread of humor laced her words. “Unless that happens for purely recreational purposes, of course.”
He paused to listen inwardly to his own reaction. The loudest part was relief and respect. After admitting to how devastated she was, she had not only mustered humor and genuine emotion, but now she had taken the first step to making plans beyond taking revenge on the witch.
Underneath all of those reactions though, ran a bloodred pulse of hunger, coursing in a subterranean river through his arteries and filling him with greed.
An hour was an eyeblink, a mere moment in time. He had squandered more time than that when deciding where he wanted to go for dinner on a boring day. An hour was woefully inadequate considering all the things he wanted to do to her, and with her.
Considering all the things that she would do to him. Somehow he had gone from enduring that thought to wondering.
And wanting.
He said, “No hour. A night, from dusk to dawn. You get one, and I get one. No stopwatches, no alarms going off, no hourglasses.” The wild part of him ran harder, and his voice deepened. “No rules.”
A shudder ran through her, and the feel of it thrilled him. “You would do that, give up total control for that long.”
“I totally would do that, if you would.” He put his mouth over hers to feel her warm, moist breath. “Do you dare?”
She started to laugh almost silently. The uneven puffs of air against his lips were like bubbles of champagne. He breathed them down and felt them enter his bloodstream, coursing with his greed. She told him, “You know asking a harpy if she dares to do something is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”
“I had hoped,” he admitted.
Even as he said the last word, she spoke over him. “Yes.”
Triumph roared through him, and with it came an epiphany.
This thing with Aryal wasn’t aberrant. Those things in his nature that she showed him weren’t aberrant. They were a part of him that he didn’t know existed until Aryal brought a light to shine on them. This wasn’t sexual tourism. It was sexual discovery.
He barely heard over his internal realization what she said next. “You know other people—any other people—would think we were crazy.”
He understood exactly what she meant. Hell, they didn’t even do BDSM in any straightforward fashion, and they certainly didn’t follow the norm or any of the suggested guidelines. He didn’t think there were any subculture groups who would approve of the rampant disregard either he or Aryal gave for safety checks.
He didn’t want a safe word, and she didn’t ask for one. They were both dominant, and he knew for a fact he wouldn’t be a switch—someone who switched the dominant role with the submissive role—for anybody else but her. And he was almost certain she wouldn’t either.
She quieted that internal whip that drove him because she became the whip, her soul as sharp as a knife.
He could cut himself on her, wrap her in his arms and be her buffer. Heal her from herself, bruise himself on her.
Let her heal him. Let her be his buffer.
They were so unapologetic, so kinked.
He said, “We’re perfect.”
SEVENTEEN 
After he spoke, they fell silent, as if they had gone more than far enough for one conversation. There were implications everywhere in what had just happened, and Aryal didn’t want to consider any of them, nor did she want to decipher any of the unfamiliar emotions that rioted inside of her. That crowd of strangers, yelling in an incomprehensible language, was back in her head.
Except one of those strangers was perfectly understandable, as it held up a giant spongy finger that pointed to a placard that said, “Total fucking win-win.”
She considered sinking back into despair, because at least she understood that emotion, and it hovered around the edges of all the others, ready to bring down the weakest in the herd.