“Take this off.” She yanked at his vest. “Take it off. Now.” He pulled back to shed the furred vest, but she was too impatient to wait for him. She reached for the soft, woven-silk shirt beneath, gripped the sides of the reinforced yoke in her hands, and yanked. The silk ripped with a satisfying noise, baring a broad expanse of silky-smooth golden skin stretched across temptingly well-defined muscle.

Her mouth found his skin. She licked the salty-sweet flavor of his flesh, bit at him, found the hard, tightly gathered coin of his male nipple, and drew it into her mouth. He groaned, and the sound rippled inside her. Her muscles clenched and released and clenched again. She bit down on the pointed tip of his nipple. He gave a guttural roar, and his hips slammed forward, driving her up and back. Stars exploded, bright, blinding flashes of light, and she screamed as wave after wave of sensation crashed over her. Her hands clutched at his shoulders. Her legs locked around his waist, shaking in helpless abandon.

Wynter held his wife on his chest, his clothes wrapped around her. He’d longed for a long, hot soak in a steaming tub, but this was so much better. The weariness, the irritability, the anger and frustration had all melted away from him the instant he’d buried himself in his little Summerlass.

He ran a hand across her hair, marveling at its soft texture, the way the ringlets curled around his finger, loving the little threads of white shot through all that darkness. Midnight Storm.

“Why did you come here, after promising you wouldn’t?”

She glanced up, her gray eyes still touched by passionate silver, looking like shining moons against her dusky skin. “I wanted to know what you were hiding. And I thought you’d broken your own oath, so I saw no reason to keep mine.”

“I don’t break my oaths. At least until this year is up, the only woman to share my bed will be you and you alone.” He could have reassured her again that there was nothing between Reika and him, nor ever likely to be, but he found he liked that hint of jealousy in his hot-tempered wife. No woman had ever felt the need to warn other women away. Elka had known he would never stray and taken his fidelity as her due. He had assumed she was just as faithful, and he’d grown . . . complacent.

“So why did you keep coming when you knew the Atrium contained nothing of value to anyone but me? Oh, yes,” he admitted in answer to her look of surprise. “I know you’ve been here every day for at least the last week.”

“You have someone spying on me?” She rolled her eyes. “Of course you have someone spying on me. Probably every person in the palace.”

Of course he did. He’d given his foreign bride all the freedom she could desire, or rather, all the rope in the world with which to hang herself. He’d been a blind fool for a woman once before. That was a mistake he would never make again.

“Why did you keep coming back?” he pressed. “What were you expecting to find?” If she was the one sending messages to her brother, she’d had an entire palace to search, places with far more valuable caches of information. According to Fjall, she’d never gone near any of them. She’d come here and kept coming here.

“What was I looking for?” Khamsin’s curling black lashes swept down over her eyes, as she surrendered the truth. “The same thing you were looking for when you had this place created, I imagine.”

Wyn frowned in bemusement. “What do you mean?”

Her slender fingers trailed across his chest, stroking his skin and stopping over his heart.

He waited, but when no answer was forthcoming, he rolled to one side. She slid off his chest and into his waiting arms. He covered her body with his, bearing his weight on his forearms. The long, unbound strands of his hair fell around his face and hers, secluding them in a veil of silvery white.

“What do you think I look for when I come here?”

She looked up at him. She had only to lift her head a few inches to cover his lips with her own. For a moment, he thought she might try to distract him with a kiss, but instead she only lifted a hand to his face and ran a thumb across his lower lip.

“Love.” Her voice was so low, he had to strain to hear it.

He caught her thumb between his teeth and touched his tongue to its tip. “You think I come here looking for love?”

“For the memory of it, yes.” She met his gaze directly, and the clear, unwavering honesty in her gray eyes stilled him. “I’ve been coming here to imagine what it must have been like.”

“To love?”

“To be part of a family. To belong.”

It had been a very long time since Wynter wanted to gather another person up in his arms and offer them comfort. But the wistful sadness in that hoarsely whispered confession tore at the gentleness he didn’t realize still existed in his heart.

As if regretting the vulnerability she’d just revealed, Khamsin pushed against him and tried to wriggle free. He didn’t budge.

“You have a family.”

“Do I?” Her lips curved in a sad smile. “My mother died when I was three. My father hated me from the day I was born. My sisters and brother harbor some measure of affection for me, but that doesn’t mean I’ve ever been part of a family. Not really. Not like what you’ve preserved here in this room.” Her voice grew husky. She clamped her lips closed and turned her head away, but not before he saw the shimmer of tears spangling her lashes.

The sight of those tiny, glittering drops filled him with both icy rage and terrible, consuming sadness. What miserable excuse for a man would deny his own child, as Verdan Coruscate had denied his fourth daughter?