Each Step Sublime
If you haven’t read my short story, “Each Step Sublime” you can find it in the Agony/Ecstasy anthology. (Excerpt, links and info, below)
Read an excerpt | Agony/Ecstasy website
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kindle | Book Depository
ISBN-10: 0425243451 | ISBN- 13: 978-0425243459
If you have read “Each Step Sublime,” please enjoy this epilogue. I wrote it in response to a challenge on the Romance Divas forum.
Each Step Sublime: Epilogue
Your hero and heroine are isolated from civilization together and must find their way back. During which one of them temporarily loses use of one of their senses. Please include the color blue and a mention of footwear.
I wake to darkness with warm sunlight on my skin.
“A glorious morning, Poppet.” His voice is deep, smooth, and so close to my ear that his breath raises goose bumps on my skin. “I wish you could see it.”
His hand brushes my cheek, my neck, my collarbone. His touch is slow. Warm, rough fingers move steadily, sure of his direction. Sure of his possession.
“You might undo the blindfold.”
“I might,” he agrees, but his hands do not leave my body. He continues his survey of my skin—not exploration, for by now he knows each curve and hollow, each freckle and scar. He has taken me so often and so thoroughly that his image inhabits me. It invades my dreams and consumes my waking thoughts.
Love is thrall. I need no further proof than this.
Later, after he has bent my body with pain and battered it with pleasure, and made me say a hundred times that I am his, he unknots the silken ties. I cannot say he frees me, for I am still bound: I am his Poppet and his plaything, eager victim of his varied whims; self-made sacrifice to his rough affection.
He rubs life back into my hands, and kisses each palm with a tenderness that belies his brutal treatment of me. He gathers me into his arms and presses his lips against my ear. “My love, my love,” he whispers. “My life. My heart. My soul.”
At last he lifts the blindfold, freeing me from darkness. I open my eyes to the too-bright sunlight streaming through the windows of his cabin. I rise to peer through salt-scoured glass. The sea beyond is calm and blue, all innocence after three days of dark and raging storms.
“How far off-course are we?”
“Leagues and leagues,” he says as he dons his clothes. “The navigator says the stars are wrong. We were blown beyond the farthest edges of his maps.”
“Yet you took your time with me.”
Calmly, he selects for me a gown of trailing sea-green silk sewn with pearls and bits of shell, and slippers of silver satin that will never touch the ground. “Why waste time worrying on that which I cannot control?”
Why, indeed, when I am here, soft and willing, and his in every way?
He carries me outside. His sailors avert their eyes. They know what he does to me. What he has done to every woman he has loved. Before I came they spoke dark whispers of their prince’s proclivities. They called him a monster—wicked, wanton, wrong—though he never took a woman who was not willing.
Now they whisper about me, the pale siren from the sea who stole their prince away from the princess meant to be his wife. They believe that silly child would have healed him with the lukewarm treacle of her affection.
He would have destroyed her.
She is too weak to endure his love, and too innocent to enjoy it. She is delicate as blown glass, meant to be handled softly and never touched in anger. I am strong as a sword of tempered steel, made to fit his hand; bound to suit his purpose. I bend where she would break. I adore what she would hate. How can he help but love me?
“What news have you?” He calls to his navigator as that shy, wiry man hurries toward us.
“We are lost, my lord. There is no land in sight. We are doomed!”
I laugh.
Two sets of human eyes turn toward me.
“We are not doomed. The sea is my first home. I have but to go beneath the waves and get my bearings. I will direct you safely to our shores.”
Gratitude shines in the navigator’s pale eyes, but my prince’s gaze is dark with worry. “No.”
“But my lord,” the navigator’s voice wavers, “she is our only hope.”
“I will not lose her to the sea.”
I place my cool hand against his warm cheek, and brush his lips with mine. “I am not yours to lose.”
“You are mine,” he says. “I would rather die than be without you.”
“Trust me to return.”
Long minutes pass in silence, with no sound but the wind and the waves. At last he says, “I trust you. I must.” Pain surges across my nerves as he sets my feet upon the deck.
I kiss him before I leave his arms and shed the clothes he chose for me. Naked and alone, I climb the rail and dive into the sea.
