I want to be where your breath forgets itself, where the quiet between your words darkens with wanting, where your skin, a field at dusk, grows fevered under my mouth. There, in the hallowed shallows of your body, I would linger— where the bones narrow, where the warmth pools, where the low gasp rises like a bird startled from the thicket. Your thighs are a threshold I cross on hands and knees; your belly, a vulnerability...

“I feel disgusting.” The way she said it, it wasn't an apology or a plea. It was simply a truth she laid out between them, as if it were no more strange than saying the sky was blue, or the river ran north. He studied her face, how the sun hit the fine bones beneath her skin, and he could not reconcile the word "disgusting" with what he saw. Her hair was the color of a wheat field set ablaze; her body slim, almost careles...

Call him Elias, if you must call him anything at all—for names are but the flimsy nets we cast over the sea of a man's soul, and Elias Raine is a soul not easily snared. A man of uncommon silences and uncommon storms, he arrived on the island as a shadow might alight on a wall—present, yes, but without ceremony or weight. He brought with him no companion save a battered leather journal, a pair of unrepentant boots, and th...