Page 62 of His Darkest Desire

The hesitancy in his voice was contrasted by a harsh edge in it when he asked, “Did you not have a mate in your world?”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Kinsley stilled. The silence that followed Vex’s question pressed in on her, making it hard to breathe.

Why? Why had he asked that?

She drew her legs closer and dug her fingers into her arms. Her eyes stung with the threat of tears. She’d already felt so vulnerable sitting naked before him, but somehow that question made her feel impossibly more so.

“Kinsley…”

“I had a husband,” she whispered.

His voice hardened. “You were wed?”

Kinsley bit down on her bottom lip and drew in a deep breath as she attempted to keep the tears at bay. She couldn’t cry, wouldn’t cry. She’d shed enough tears over Liam to last her a lifetime. “I was, but not anymore.”

Slowly, Kinsley lifted her head and looked at Vex. Her heart leapt at the sight of him. One of his hands was clenched in a fist, while the other gripped the edge of the tub so tightly that his knuckles had paled and his claws had scratched the quartz. His thick, dark, shapely brows were angled harshly down toward the bridge of his nose, his lips were peeled back to display his fangs, and fire blazed in his crimson eyes.

“Are you…angry with me?” Kinsley asked hesitantly.

“No.”

“You look angry.”

He dipped his chin ever so slightly. “Not with you.”

Kinsley searched his face. Was he angry on her behalf, or was he…jealous? And why did the thought of his jealousy make her belly flutter?

She released a fortifying breath and looked back down at the water, allowing the tension to bleed from her muscles. “I was born in the United Kingdom, just outside London, but my family moved to the United States when I was eight. That’s a place across the ocean to the west of here, thousands of miles away. Liam was my first friend there. He and I were always close, and as we grew older, we only became closer. We were…inseparable. When I turned sixteen, he asked me to be his girlfriend. It always felt like I was meant to be with him, like he was the one, and I dreamed that we’d be together forever. Sounds like a little girl’s silly fantasy, but… I was in love.

“And it felt that way when we got married. We were twenty, we were happy, and we had our whole lives ahead of us. But then our lives seemed to become separate. We both had full-time jobs, and Liam was in school, so we didn’t see each other often. We spent what time we could together, but there was just so little of it.”

Kinsley closed her eyes, fighting back those burning tears. “Our real troubles began a couple years later.”

She curled her lips inward. There was so much she wanted to say, so much she wanted to let out, but she couldn’t. Not with Vex. She couldn’t tell him of the pain she’d gone through, the loss. She couldn’t tell him that the one thing he’d demanded from her in exchange for her life was beyond his reach.

Cloth rustled, and Kinsley opened her eyes to find that Vex had shifted to face her more directly.

He leaned toward her with his head lowered and his gaze fixed upon her. “This pain you carry, Kinsley, this anguish… It is due to him?”

Without intending to, she eased closer to him, loosening her grip on her arms. Something deep within Kinsley urged her toward him to seek solace, to find comfort.

“He was part it,” she said. “That distance between us grew, and we both became unhappy. In the end, he found someone who…who could give him everything he wanted. Even as he told me he still loved me, he chose someone else.”

Kinsley’s gaze locked with Vex’s as her bottom lip trembled. “Why wasn’t I enough?”

Vex extended his arm and cupped her cheek with his hand, stroking his thumb across her skin. The fire in his eyes burned in solidarity with her pain; it called out to the anger she’d harbored in her heart, the anger she’d barely let herself feel. The anger she’d buried under her anguish.

Despite the storm in his eyes, Vex’s touch was firm but gentle, warm, and soothing. “He did not deserve you, Kinsley.”

Kinsley’s breath caught, and her eyes flared. Her whole universe narrowed down to the feeling of his touch. Where was the cold, domineering goblin she’d first met? This…this was not the man who’d considered her beneath him, who’d treated her like a foul, intolerable creature, like a tool useful only until she’d served her purpose.

A maelstrom of emotions swirled within her—anger, pain, confusion, all around a core of desire. Her skin sparked to life where Vex touched her, and heat that had nothing to do with the bathwater spread through her body.

The way he was looking at her…

It was as though he’d tear apart the whole world to spare her from pain, as though he’d move the heavens and earth for her.