A Midwinter Fantasy - Leanna Renee Hieber [65]
“I’m sorry about your son,” he said. “I’ll get him out.”
“Shh,” she soothed. She swallowed. “Thank you for trying.”
“I haven’t given up yet.”
She smiled, filled with love for him, her hand still caressing his cheek. “I know.” She paused. “I dreamed about you, you know. All those years I did, wondering what you were doing, what you were like, and if I’d ever see you again. I fell in love with you the first moment I saw you and I didn’t know anything about you. Now I’m with you again and you turn out to be such a good man.”
Mace blinked. “I’m not a good man.” He wasn’t a man at all.
Tears filled her eyes. “You are. You came back. I know it wasn’t for me, but you came, and once you knew about me, you didn’t leave me, any more than you’re giving up on Travish or that poor boy you did come for.”
Mace stared at the pine branches overhead. They were so tightly woven that even though it was daylight he couldn’t see the sky through them. He could feel Sally’s soul reaching for him, loving him so much it was almost frightening. He’d never felt such a thing before and felt like a hatchling, unsure of what to do. “Jayden was waiting for me,” he told her. “I could feel how relieved he was.”
“Of course he was. You’re the closest thing he has to a father. He knew you’d come for him.”
Mace was confused. “How? I was never there for him when he was growing up . . .”
“Never?” Her emotions were steady, her belief in him far more absolute than his own.
“Well, I was there, but I never did anything for him. I never did anything for the boys. Lily had so many, and I didn’t really care.”
“But you were there, showing him what a strong man should be.” She smiled sadly. “Sometimes a boy doesn’t need anything more.”
She was quiet for a moment, just stroking his cheek and feeling her love and thinking. “It’s sad,” she said at last. “And strange. Our son fell in with those bandits because he didn’t have you as a father. Your boy went because he did.”
Mace watched her. The guilt he felt was somehow worse than the crossbow bolts, but the pain of both was easing under the strength of her emotions. Those feelings saturated him, drawing him to her, and he wondered if this was what Heyou had felt when he first met Solie. “I make a pretty piss-poor father.”
“No one’s perfect,” she promised. “Even the Gift Giver from the Winter Festival. We just have to keep trying.” That said, she leaned down to kiss him.
It was a soft kiss and comforting, not filled this time with years of passion and frustration. With her love singing to him it was a thousand times better, and he lifted his head toward hers, their mouths working together. She was happy that he was alive, he realized. She’d been just as convinced as he that he was invincible, and now she felt her remorse at his being hurt. She had loved him for years, and this kiss was partly her need to make up for causing him harm.
Mace didn’t agree that she was to blame. She got enough of that from her family and he would have come out here anyway, for Jayden—for Lily—but now, thanks to Sally, he was finally doing it for the right reasons. He didn’t mind a little bit of delightful payback, though, and so he reached up to stroke her as she lifted her dress over her head. She opened his breeches so that she could sit astride him and take him inside her, and she moved gently upon him, biting her lip as she looked up toward the sky.
He let her ride him to completion, too tired to do more and also too sobered by the depth of their connection. He could feel her, could become drunk on her, and he hadn’t known until now how incomplete he’d always been. Neither of them expected anything of the other, but suddenly he knew that he wanted her