Page 90 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

She could see his eyes closed now, his jaw clenched tightly. “Jory,” he said. “I dinnae want to frighten you.”

She sucked harder and he hissed through his teeth. The muscles of his abdomen flexing against hers, his fingers tightening on her ass. Giving himself away.

“Callum,” she said between kisses over the spot she’d just wounded.

“Aye,” he choked.

“Remember when I said that there were no sharks because you were the most dangerous thing in the water?”

“I—”

“Shhhh,” she said with a nip to the same spot and Callum groaned, thrusting almost imperceptibly against her. “All those big scary animals are afraid of you. And they should be.”

“Jory—”

“Those sharks, those orcas, those—what was it you said? Giant squid? They’re terrified of you,” she purred. “But do you know who isn’t afraid of you?”

She had pulled back enough to look at his face, and he stared back, his gray eyes wide, brows knit tightly together.

“Do I smell afraid, Callum?”

“Nay,” he said through clenched teeth.

“Is my heart racing?”

“Aye.”

“But you don’t smell fear. What do you smell?”

“Jory,” he groaned, and she could see the veins and muscles in his neck, standing out from the effort to hold himself back.

She smirked. Because they both knew the answer to the question. And so she leaned in, her lips against the shell of his ear, and whispered, “You don’t scare me at all, Callum MacLeod. Do your worst.”

She felt the growl that reverberated through his chest and couldn’t help but smile into the darkness as he let go of the leash.

29

“You don’t scare me at all, Callum MacLeod. Do your worst.”

In an instant, the space of a human heartbeat, a thousand years hurtled through Callum’s brain. Centuries of wantings and cravings, of trying to find what he was looking for in the arms of humans and vampires and one very down-on-her-luck fae countess. Those encounters hadn’t been without pleasure, but they hadn’t satisfied either.

He remembered vividly a summer day in his youth, when he’d been trapped in the limbo of being too big to be considered a boy but too green to be treated as a man. He’d wanted blackberries. He’d wanted them so badly that he would have overpaid. He would have worked. He would have done almost anything. But all he’d been able to get was a blackberry tart. It had tasted good, sweet and flaky, but it had lacked as much as it had possessed. He’d wanted to taste the blackberries alone, not covered by sugar and crust, but unaltered, bursting against his tongue. Dark, sticky juice sluicing across his palate to drip down his waiting throat.

It felt as if he’d wanted blackberries for centuries and been forced to settle for tarts.

But not anymore. At least, not tonight. His hands shook with the looming fulfillment of a craving nearly as old as his miserable existence.

Callum had grown accustomed to the many realities about his immortal body over the past centuries. The speed. The strength. And yet even for him, he thought that the time it took for him to open the rear door to the SUV and slam the captain’s chair as far back as it could go was shockingly quick.

“Whoa,” Jory breathed.

Her wetsuit was off except for one foot, still stuck on a statuesque leg, the black neoprene pooling around her like an oil slick. He had a sudden urge to take ripe blackberries and crush them gently against her body, to lick the dripping, running juices and pulp from her flesh. The way he’d once done.

He couldn’t, of course, which felt somehow crueler than any denial in a long time, and he wondered if she would still be around in the summer so that he could lick the flavor of fat, swollen blackberries directly from her tongue.

She was staring at him, like a doe before a wolf. Watching. Waiting. But this doe wanted to be caught. He could smell it. She’d been right about that. She didn’t smell like fear. She smelled like salt and sea and sex, the birth of everything.

“Take it off.”