Helios and I were both panting, my monotone cream riding set saturated with sweat like my mare’s pale gold coat. My body would ache even more tomorrow after the unfamiliarity of the long, hard ride, but I knew I would relish it.
It was worth the ache and more, every single thing I’d been through to know every inch of the land I could see—the purpling heather over the far moors, the last of the morning fog swirling in the bowl of the valley near the little village of Thornton, the dark shadowed forest stretching horizontally over the estate like a belt cinching it all together—was all ours.
His and mine.
Mine, because I was his.
And by his own repeated declaration, he was mine.
Riddick plodded up the hill on his dappled grey mare, his forehead beaded in sweat, his short hair plastered to his head, and his expression deadly.
“All right, Rid?” I asked jauntily with a tip of my riding hat.
He scowled, his heavy brow compressed over his glittering eyes, but he didn’t say anything until he drew abreast of my mount. Then, he reached out to tug one of my thick plaited pigtails hard enough to make me wince but not enough to hurt, and he vowed, “I will never, ever go riding with you again. Alexander will have to buy a utility vehicle if he wants me charging off after you across the grounds.”
I tipped my head back to laugh at the great blue bowl of the sky, and when I recovered enough to tilt my chin down again, Riddick was riding off down the hill. I frowned as I made to call after him, but a voice beside me startled me into paralysis.
“I’ve seen you in some magnificent postures,” Alexander said mildly as if we were in the middle of a conversation already. He sat atop his great black stallion with his gloved hands crossed over the tooled leather pummel of the saddle. With his long, muscular thighs encased in stone-coloured riding pants and tall glossy black boots, and his wide shoulders and narrowed waist cinched in a velvet black blazer, Alexander looked every inch the lord of the manor. I took in the stubble lining his jaw like flecks of pure gold and noticed the strain in his cheeks from biting back a smile. “But it has to be said, Cosima, you are a sight to behold right now.”
Warmth suffused my chest and split my lips into a smile so wide, they ached. “It may be because I don’t think I have ever been so happy. I feel as if I could float away.”
“The threats that have weighed you down for so long are gone, so I’m not surprised you feel that way. Though”—he urged Charon closer to me so that he could snag my chin between his cool gloved fingers and force my eyes intently to his—“you will always have me to tether you.”
I used my chin to urge his hand over my cheek and leaned into him. “I’ve always been partial to you holding me down.”
Xan’s face broke into one of his rare, beautifully creased smiles that made his eyes gleam like polished silver. I reached over to trace my thumb over the shape of that smile and then chuckled when his teeth nipped at the pad.
“You’re happy too,” I told him because even though he seemed the same staid, regal man with a face like a mask and eyes like two cold stones, I could sense the shift in the air around him. He too seemed lighter.
“I’ve been happier with you in every moment we’ve spent together than I have ever been in the entirety of my life without you,” he admitted easily as if his words didn’t mean absolutely everything to a girl who had never been loved so candidly in her life by a man other than her brother.
“Do you think…?” I ventured before halting the stream of words by biting my lower lip.
Alexander glared at me when I didn’t continue and then carefully unhooked my teeth from my mouth. “Do not hold anything back from me, my beauty. You are a mystery I’ve spent too long waiting to unravel, and the process begins now. I want to know everything.”
“I don’t want to jinx it,” I said with a wince because it was ridiculous to believe in such trivial superstitions after everything we’d been through.
His face settled feature by feature, brick by brick, into a stone wall of somberness. I gasped as he twisted to fit his hands under my armpits and half-dragged, half-lifted me from my saddle onto his where he settled me with my legs draped over his thighs, a diamond of space between our groins, one powerful arm around my waist and the other wrapped in my pigtails so that my head arched back and my mouth bloomed open just under his.