She stepped in another step and took Conall’s offered hand, sliding down into the water to sit next to him on the submerged bench. He felt good, with the cushion of water like a tease between their skin. His hand in hers was big and safe and strong, and when she put her other hand on his chest she could feel his heart thrumming against her palm.
He tugged her closer, and Gizelle went willingly for a kiss, squeaking against his lips when she unexpectedly floated.
She could feel him smile beneath her kiss, and that was even better than the kiss itself.
Chapter 38
Gizelle was an armful of joy.
Her kisses were the sweetest thing that Conall had ever known, but never cloying. She had a bright, fresh sweetness, wild and intoxicating. She lived more in every moment than he’d lived in a lifetime, and when she rose beneath him and cried out in pleasure, Conall thought that perishing from happiness might actually be a thing.
He loved watching her discover things, even when it frightened her. Especially when it frightened her, because she was so brave, shaking with fear and fighting down her instinct to flee.
Kissing her in the hot tub that she’d crawled back into after bolting away—it was a triumph on every level.
Ours, his elk agreed in perfect harmony. Our brave, beautiful mate.
They dried in the warm sunshine on the porch, and Conall drew Gizelle down to sit on the lounge chair in front of him.
A hairbrush had been among the things that had appeared in his bathroom. “May I brush your hair?” he asked, stroking back the hairs that were drying, loose, around her face.
Gizelle tipped her head back to look at him from an impossible angle. “You want to?” she said skeptically. If Conall hadn’t been touching her, he doubted he would have been able to lipread upside down.
“I want to,” he said, and when she didn’t protest, he got up from the chair and went to retrieve the hairbrush.
When he returned, she had pulled out the few pins that remained from Lydia’s work and was tugging counter-productively at a knot near the end of the braid, trying to untangle it.
“Let me,” Conall said, drawing her hair into his hands as he settled back onto the chair.
Gizelle drew her legs up, crossing them in front of her, and put tight hands on the sides of the lounge, clearly bracing for the worst.
Holding only her hair, Conall could barely hear—everything was a distant swish of sound. Clearly whatever magic was at work did a better job skin-to-skin. He moved his leg so that it was touching her hip and it focused again, like rabbit-ears fixing the reception on an old television.
“... might get hungry,” Gizelle was saying. “I got hungry when Lydia was brushing my hair.”
Conall teased the knot she’d made out of the end of her braid and gently unwove it.
“We can stop any time,” he assured her.
But when he began to brush, she slowly relaxed.
The braid had saved her neglected hair from being much worse; though Conall had to stop and carefully coax tangles from several places, he knew that it would have been much wilder if had been left loose.
“I sometimes think about where I might have come from,” Gizelle said unexpectedly, and Conall stopped brushing for a moment, holding his breath.
“Where do you think that was?” Conall started brushing again, slowly.
“Do you think I was made? That a man in a white coat made me in a laboratory like some sort of Frankster?”
“Frankenstein?” Conall guessed. He did not correct the common misconception that Frankenstein was the monster rather than the scientist.
“Frankenstein,” Gizelle agreed. “Do you think I’m all parts of different people and that’s why I’m so much in little pieces and hear too much?”
Conall had once been good at navigating the usual girlfriend questions like ‘does this make me look fat?’ and ‘do you see wrinkles?’ but this was far outside of his realm of comfort. “I don’t think you’re a monster, Gizelle,” he said firmly.
“But could someone have made me to be like this?” she insisted.
“It’s possible,” Conall conceded. Then he added, “And if I had made you, I would have made you exactly like this.”