J.R. Ward the Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8 - J. R. Ward [264]
“No.” But she was glad he didn’t know how she’d touched the naked one. “I think they’re beautiful no matter whether they are covered or not. And I don’t care if they are imperfect.”
“They remind me of where I grew up.”
She waited, acutely aware of how much she wanted him to finish the thought. “How so?”
“We had a statuary.” He frowned. “It was covered in vines, though. The gardens all were. Vines everywhere.”
The Primale resumed walking.
“Where did you grow up?” she asked.
“In the Old Country.”
“Are your parents—”
“These statues were bought in the forties and fifties. Darius went through a three-dimensional stage, and as he’d always hated modern art, this was what he bought.”
As they came to the end of the corridor, he stopped in front of the door into one of the bedrooms and stared at it. “I’m tired.”
Bella was in that room, she thought. It was obvious from his expression. “Have you eaten?” she asked, thinking it would be lovely to head him in the opposite direction.
“I don’t remember.” He looked down at his feet, which were in heavy boots. “Good . . . God. I haven’t changed, have I?”There was an odd hollowness to his voice, as if the realization had emptied him out. “I should have changed. Before we did this.”
Reach out, she told herself. Reach out and take his hand. Just as he reached out for yours.
“I should change,” the Primale said quietly. “I need to change.”
Cormia took a deep breath, and, extending her arm, she clasped his hand. It was cold to the touch. Alarmingly so.
“Let us go back to your room,” she told him. “Let us go back there.”
He nodded but didn’t move, and before she knew it, she was leading him. Or his body, at any rate. She sensed his mind had gone off somewhere else.
She took him into his room, to the marble confines of his bath, and when she stopped him, he stood where she left him, in front of the two sinks and the wide mirror. While she turned on the spray chamber they called a shower, he waited not so much patiently as with unawareness.
When the rush of water was warm enough under her hand, she turned back to him. “Your grace, it is all set for you. You may wash.”
His yellow eyes stared straight ahead into one of the mirrors, but there was no recognition of his reflection in his handsome face. It was as if a stranger confronted him in the glass, a stranger he didn’t trust or approve of.
“Your grace?” she said. The stillness in him was alarming, and had he not been upright, she would have checked the beating of his heart. “Your grace, the shower.”
You can do this, she told herself.
“May I disrobe you, your grace?”
After he nodded a little, she stepped in front of him and raised tentative hands to the buttons on his shirt. One by one she freed them, the black cloth gradually parting open to expose his broad chest. When she got down to his belly button, she tugged the tails free of his leathers and kept going. All the while, he stayed still and unresisting with his eyes locked on the mirror, even as she parted the two halves of the shirt and pushed them off his shoulders.
He was magnificent in the dim light of the bath, putting all the statues to shame. His chest was enormous, the width of his shoulders nearly three times that of her own. The star-shaped scar on his left pectoral looked as if it had been engraved on his otherwise smooth, hairless skin, and she wanted to touch that place, to trace the spokes that radiated out from the center of the marking.
She wanted to press her lips to him there, she thought, press them over his heart. Over the flesh badge of the Brotherhood.
Laying his shirt out on the edge of the deep-bellied bath, she waited for the Primale to take over the undressing. He did nothing of the sort.
“Shall I . . . remove your pants?”
His head nodded.
Her fingers trembled