Page 125 of Sands of Atonement

My heart was about to burst, hearing him say everything I never knew I wanted to hear from his mouth. I pulled his shoulders closer.

Ezra’s hand wrapped itself in my hair and pulled me back, parting our lips and exposing my neck. His tongue danced and sucked my abused neck and shoulders. My nipples peaked, begging for something I didn’t know what.

Despite how low my eyelids were, I tried to keep them open so I could memorize how beautiful he looked kissing me.

The hardness pressed between my legs created burning flutters through my insides.

Ezra stilled for a moment. His lips unmoving.

And another moment went by.

His hand unraveled from my hair. He backed his hips away from me.

Cold air entered between us, and the look in his eyes was worse than pain.

It was disappointment.

And to me, it felt a lot like rejection. Again.

Chapter 31

Ezra

Kissing Eshe, after not touching a woman for six years, unleashed a man within me that I could not recognize.

I reeled him into the back of my mind and kept him in chains. No more. That taste was the most addictive, heart-gutting, soul-destructive taste I’d ever known. I feared I might never come back alive. I couldn’t remember my own name when I breathed her in, when I pressed her body against mine.

A hard, throbbing ache writhed in my chest as I carried Eshe back through the waters. Her weight was nothing compared to the weight of my sins. The betrayal of my men as a leader. I was distracted, exactly why the law was there, to set us apart and prevent us from falling into the temptations of man.

Eshe was quiet and tense in my arms. She pulled back as soon as I did.

As soon as I felt the sand beneath my feet, Eshe let go. A disturbing chill replaced the warmth in her body. Something felt wrong about the way she was no longer in my arms. My brows lowered as I watched her in her thin, soaking linen dress, marking every curve of her body as she walked up the shore.

Within a few minutes, it would dry. Within a few minutes, I would try to forget this had ever happened.

She didn’t look back as she walked away with tense shoulders. Even though I was walking up slowly, I could tell her face had turned from rose-flushed to a ghostly pale with foreign eyes that had gone distant. Empty. Cold. Back to where I recognized her the first day I saw her again.

She looked like the old Eshe. The one who hated me with every fiber of her being.

Not this new Eshe, whom I couldn’t seem to keep my fucking hands off of. She was soft and pliable under my hands and moved the way I wanted her to. She made me feel something I’d never felt before with any other woman.

That was fucking scary.

I knew this must be because I hadn’t touched a woman like that in six years. I wouldn’t feel this way if I hadn’t repressed myself for so long.

“Eshe,” Norrah drawled, standing up from the boulder she had been mingling with Casimir and Yven and approached us.

Eshe stopped in her tracks and scowled. “What?”

I could practically hear her heart race from where I walked behind her.

Norrah reached forward with her fingers but let them drop. “Your neck.”

She had a horrified expression on her face. Her eyes flickered to me, knowing who had done the damage.

“Oh.” Eshe flushed and placed a hand over the mark I gave her the night before. For some reason, that pissed me the fuck off. “It’s—it’s nothing.”

The fuck it was nothing.