“You mean metaphorically?” she asked.
So he told her. Then he backed up and told her about Ana, and he told her the truth.
“But the Blackguards… they said she jumped.”
“They lied to save me, Karris. I didn’t ask them to. I swear. Ana said some pretty foul things about you, and I knew I’d lost you forever. I threw her out onto my balcony—I, I don’t think I was trying to murder her, but she hit the railing and tumbled right over. I went to the roof to try to balance. I can’t anymore. So I went down to let Gavin out, to let him kill me.” He couldn’t look at her. Even with her battered face, he could read horror easily enough.
Finally, after telling her about Gavin, he said, “I didn’t know what he did to you, back then. How he… humbled you. I should have figured it out, but I’ve been so worried about myself that I couldn’t see even the most obvious things about those around me. I’m sorry, Karris, and I know I haven’t acted like it, but I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you, if you can ever forgive me.”
The silence was deep enough to drown in.
“Infuriating. Incorrigible. Inelegant. Inefficient. Incredible in both senses. But not, in the end, insincere, are you, Dazen Guile?”
“Huh?”
“Kiss me,” Karris said.
“Pardon?”
“It wasn’t a request.”
He stood up from his chair and sat on the edge of her bed. She grunted with pain as his movement jostled her.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Maybe—”
“Not a request.”
“But your lips are cracked and—”
“Not a request.”
“Ah.”
He kissed her with the gentleness of a man kissing an invalid.
She pulled back, peering at him through swollenness-slitted eyes, disapproving. “That was horrible, Dazen Guile. That was not the kiss I’ve been waiting sixteen years for.”
“Second chance?” he asked.
She looked unconvinced. “Hm. You don’t deserve it.”
“I don’t,” he said seriously.
“You don’t,” she said gravely, “but then, if you and I aren’t about second chances, I don’t know who is.” She grinned a bit, though.
He kissed her again, tenderly, but drawing her in. But what began as a gift for her benefit, a smooth, strong seduction soon morphed. He folded her small form into his, wrapping protective arms around her. As they kissed, he could feel a tension loosening in him, a tension that had been knotted for so long he’d come to think of that pain as part of the pain of being alive.
She pulled back, and instantly back on guard, fearing rejection, Gavin pulled back, too.
But Karris murmured, “I’m afraid you’ve left me breathless, Lord Guile—”
“Well thank you.” Relief beneath his grin.
“—because I can’t breathe through my nose right now.”
She laughed and he joined her ruefully. “You are so beautiful,” he said. He felt as if his heart had swollen too large for his chest.
A dubious look. “I might be part blind right now, but you shouldn’t be. I got beat up, what’s your excuse?”
He chuckled. “I didn’t mean particularly, precisely at this moment—You know what? I think my lips can make a more convincing case without words. Come back here.”
They kissed, and kissed, and chuckled together about Karris needing to take little breaths and Gavin misreading her little moans of desire and her little moans of pain when he got too passionate. The world ceased. No worries, no cares. That knot Gavin hadn’t known he carried eased and opened and disappeared, and he felt suddenly stronger than he had been in his entire life. Free. The power of the secret broken, chains shattered.
“Orholam have mercy, how I want to make love with you,” she said.
“I can be persuaded,” Gavin said quickly.
She made a little sound of frustration. “If only my body were so amenable.”
“I could be… gentle,” he offered, giving a roguish grin.
She pulled him close and whispered in his ear, “After sixteen years of missing you, Dazen Guile, the last thing I want from you is gentle.”
He swallowed. Speechless. “Will you marry me, Karris White Oak?” Damn. He could have done better than that. Such questions should have some eloquence.
Then again with his history with Karris, perhaps a simple truth was better than an artful one.
“Karris, why are you crying?”
“Because it’s past time for my pain medicine, you big idiot.”
There was a knock on Gavin’s door. “Oh, you have got to be joking,” Gavin said, looking at the door like he could kill it with his eyes. He turned back to her. “Does that mean yes?”