“Um…” She hiccupped and gingerly stretched. Her limbs felt a bit heavy but otherwise fine, and a tentative bounce of her head didn’t produce a single flicker of pain. “Surprisingly good?”
“Then the amulet and the charm worked as intended.” His slight smile didn’t erase the worry in his amber eyes. “Excellent.”
“Hugh, the fae saw me again. He told me I barely escaped him before, but it wouldn’t happen again. He…” As she remembered, more wetness spilled down her cheeks. “Hehurtme.”
Hugh stilled. “How?”
“I don’t know.” She shuddered, sniffling. “It shouldn’t be possible, but—”
“No, honey.” The heat from his careful clasp of her face, from his sheltering body, abruptly ratcheted to sweltering. “What did he do to you?”
“Wound my braid around his fist. I thought—” Her breath hitched loudly. Once, then a second time. “I thought he’d tear out my hair, Hugh. Then he tapped me on the nose. Like he was disciplining adog.”
Hugh’s nostrils flared with his deep inhalation. “I see.”
And so did she, once she’d blinked away the tears blurring her vision.
To her shock, literal smoke wafted gently from his lean frame, lazily curling toward the ceiling. His irises weren’t melting amber, but fiery magma literallyglowingwith heat. For all the gentleness of his hands on her face, the muscles and tendons in his arms stood taut and ready, poised for violence.
Their areas of skin-to-skin contact didn’t burn her. Maybe he had enough control over his body heat to prevent that. But she had the definite sense that other internal controls had already slipped from his grasp, at least for the present.
Right now, his calm didn’t stem from cool rationality or an intellectual regard for fairness. More from his sheer determination to murder whoever had hurt her and confidence in the eventual success of his plan to rend limbs, cleave skulls, and foment absolute mayhem.
She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if he forfeited his own life in some mad mission to avenge her pain and humiliation. Also, too much more smoke would set off a fire alarm.
So she redirected all his intensity in a different direction.
Lurching forward, she grabbed his shoulders, used the momentum of her larger body to push him down onto the sofa’s blood-dappled sheets, and plastered herself atop him. Then she kissed him with all the lust, all the desperate fear and gratitude, in her wide-open heart.
23
Hugh’s mouth opened beneath Gwen’s as he tumbled onto his back. The searing heat of his lips stung her tongue, and she didn’t care. She sucked on the tip of his, coaxing him to abandon whatever dark impulses had overtaken him in the aftermath of her vision. Needing him present with her, all that raging heat aimed toward their mutual pleasure instead of violence.
He moaned into her mouth. Wrapped her in his arms, fingertips sinking into the softness of her hips, her ass, as he yanked her tighter to him. His tongue circled hers, swirling until sparks flew behind her closed eyelids and her thighs shifted restlessly against his, while his greedy palms mapped her with bold possessiveness.
When he suddenly stilled under her, she ripped her mouth free, panting. “Yes?”
Blanket permission or no blanket permission, she wouldn’t do anything he didn’t want.
“Gwen. You…” His throat bobbed in a hard swallow. “You’re well now? Not hurting?”
“Totally fine.” She rested her hand in the center of his chest, over his demon’s heart. “I’m sure you can feel it.”
“Good. Then let me…” His palm slipped between their bodies, then down between her thighs. “There you are.”
That hot, strong hand molded itself with deliberate care to the center of all her want, and she shuddered at the gentle but firm claim. At the bolt of pleasure that hitched her breath and hastened her pulse.
Unable—unwilling—to resist, she pressed against his hold. Another spike of sensation set her cheeks aflame, and her lips parted.
“I made you a promise, Gwen.” A light squeeze of his palm, and high color burnished his own cheekbones at the low, needy noise she couldn’t stifle. “And I’m a demon who always, always keeps his word.”
Before she quite understood what was happening, he’d stood, turned the key to disable the elevator, and returned to tug her new cotton nightgown over her head. Then he tossed a spare blanket atop the thick, soft library rug—freshly cleaned via a spare spell Max had located—and tumbled their entwined bodies down onto the floor. The next thing she knew, he lay flat on the blanketed rug, perpendicular to the sofa, and she…
Oh, my.
At his silent urging, her wobbly knees spread wide. His steady hands on her hips hitched her forward until she knelt over hisdesire-flushed face, entirely bare and open to him. She had just enough time for a single, frantic worry—gods and goddesses above, what if she suffocated an actualSERC councilordue to her untrammeled, immoderate lust?—before…
As he’d promised, her thighs bracketed his neck as he sucked in a deep, leisurely breath. Inhaled the scent of her slick need. Then blew a hot, teasing stream of air directly at her swelling flesh as she trembled above him.
