Jacks’s doublet was lighter, a soft dove gray, save for the parts near his ribs that were stained red. She cut the garment off.
His chest moved slowly up and down.
She peeled the doublet away, careful not to brush his bare skin with her fingers. Yet Evangeline felt as if she were holding her breath as she started to clean the ragged gash of blood across his ribs.
It would need to be stitched. Or it should have—
Evangeline paused her ministrations as she watched Jacks’s skin knit together before her eyes. It was still painfully red, and she imagined it could easily open again with friction, but the gash was healing; it would not kill him.
The relief she felt was enormous.
By the time she finished bandaging him, he appeared to be asleep, closed eyes half-covered in tousled waves of golden hair. She briefly debated staying with him as he rested.
She was relieved he was back and that he was safe. More relieved than she should have been. She kept reminding herself Jacks was dangerous. But he didn’t look that way now—he looked like a sleeping angel, which was probably why she needed to leave him.
She ran her fingers through his soft hair, just once.
He leaned into her hand. “That feels good,” he mumbled. “You feel good, too.” He hooked an arm around her waist and drew her onto the bed.
“Jacks—what are you doing?”
“Just for tonight.” He tightened his arm, holding her even closer, until her chest was pressed against his bare skin.
“You’re injured,” she breathed.
“This makes me feel better.” He spoke against her throat and finished with a lick that made her head begin to spin.
Now would have been a really good time to untangle herself.
His mouth closed over her pulse.
She tried to tell him this was a bad idea, but a soft sigh came out instead. If his lips felt like this on her neck, she wondered how they’d feel on her lips.
Her eyes closed, and her breath went shallow. She shouldn’t think about Jacks’s lips on hers. And yet she couldn’t help but wonder if maybe she could kiss Jacks here, in the Hollow, in the one place curses couldn’t touch them. The idea was painfully tempting. But even if Jacks’s kiss couldn’t kill her here, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t ruin her in other ways. “We shouldn’t do this,” she said.
“I’m just asking you to stay the night.” His lips left her neck as he murmured, “You won’t even remember.”
Evangeline tensed in his arms. “What do you mean, I won’t remember?”
“I mean … it’s just one night,” he said softly. “In the morning, you can forget it. You can go back to pretending you don’t like me, and I can pretend that I don’t care. But for tonight, let me pretend you’re mine.”
She melted at the word mine. For a dizzying second, she couldn’t think. She couldn’t bring herself to pull away, and yet she couldn’t tell him she would stay.
“If it’s easier, you can pretend, too,” he whispered. “You can pretend that I’m still Jacks of the Hollow and that you want to be mine.” His mouth pressed against her throat once more and slowly traced a blissful line up her neck, to her ear. Then his teeth nipped her earlobe.
She gasped. The bite was sharp and a little painful, as if he wanted to hold her and punish her, too. But he didn’t have to punish her. This was already torture because she wanted it so much. She wanted him to want her, even if he was half-delirious in his wanting.
“I’m not delirious.” His voice was husky with something like sleep, but when he looked down on her, his eyes were clear and lucid.
And Evangeline felt as if she were tumbling into them.
When she was a child, her mother had once told her a story about a young woman who’d been playing hide-and-seek in a forest with her love. The young woman had been running through the trees, searching for a place to hide, when she’d fallen through a crack in time. It was just a tiny crack, a hairline fissure that should have plopped the young woman a few seconds into the future—or perhaps into the past. But Time had seen the young woman and fallen instantly in love. And so, instead of landing in the future or finding herself in the past, the young woman continued to fall through time. She fell and fell and fell, trapped by Time until the end of Time.
Evangeline knew that feeling now. More than two weeks had passed since she’d jumped off that cliff with Jacks, and somehow she felt as if she were still falling, plummeting toward something uncontrollable with nothing but Jacks to hold on to.