Page 57 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

“Ah,” said Ligat, with a smile that said she might as well not have bothered trying to be indirect. “Good. I’d hate to feel used.”

He stood up as he spoke, and Hazel took the opportunity to run her eyes up and down his lanky frame, lingering at the spot where his robe no longer fell smoothly. “Would you?” she asked and turned toward the door.

Ligat laughed as he followed her in.

* * *

Following Hazel was almost like being in the ethereal again. The rest of the world faded around her, not actually immaterial but certainly unimportant. Ligat was vaguely aware of the hall and the kitchen asthey moved through the rooms, but he couldn’t have described them, any more than he could have taken his eyes off the taut curves of her backside as she walked.

They halted in a small room with white plaster walls and a gray stone floor, one methodically stripped back until it was even emptier than their temporary shelter in the abandoned city, with no remnants of its previous nature or inhabitants left. A faint smell in the air suggested pine but was actually chemical. It might actually have been the least romantic place Ligat had ever considered for a liaison, and he didn’t give a damn.

He reached for Hazel as soon as she stopped, and she stepped into his embrace at first, only to duck away before he could kiss her. “Wait.”

“If you’ve changed your mind—” he began, reminding himself that she had the right to do so.

Thank God, she shook her head. “No. Wait here.”

Ligat did, standing in the middle of the floor and watching as she darted out of the open doorway. He wondered if the medium’s invitation might have been a trap and decided he didn’t much care if it was. Listening to Hazel’s footsteps in the hall, he pulled off his high boots, then began to undo the buckles on his robe.

He’d reached the middle of his chest by the time Hazel returned, her bare feet making almost no sound on the floor, and she stopped with her arms full of blankets to stare at him. Ligat knew what she saw: the pallor, the slight silver tinge, the winding crimson sigils. He didn’t know what she thought of it and didn’t trust himself to read her face. Wishful thinking had clouded his judgment before.

“Let me help you,” he said, falling back on chivalry to break the tension.

“Thanks.” Hazel flashed him a smile. “I’m too old and too paranoid to bring you into my bedroom, and I’malsotoo old to fool around on a bare floor more than once a year or so.”

Their hands brushed as she passed him a thick yellow blanket,a fleeting touch that sent a thrill through Ligat nonetheless. He felt his awareness shifting again, refocusing on Hazel and his own body, making him conscious of each movement either of them made, no matter how minute.

It wouldn’t be fast this time.

He laid the blanket on the floor and covered it with a star-patterned comforter, one he’d glimpsed briefly through Hazel’s window on the first night of his mission. The familiarity stung. Ligat had thought he’d forgotten shame, left it behind as useless in the dark years of his servitude, but as he looked up at Hazel, he felt himself flush.

“I always turned away if you were undressed,” he said, “or asleep.”

Hazel met his gaze, hers calm and dark and thoughtful, and Ligat cursed himself for an idiot.I spied on you for a demon, but I never endangered your modesty.If he were lucky, she’d just laugh at him rather than slap him or throw him out of the house—and he’d have taken a slap, gladly, if it meant he didn’t have to leave.

“Thank you,” said Hazel, with no trace of sarcasm, and stepped forward to kiss him.

Her lips were soft, even gentle at first. She slipped her arms up around Ligat’s neck for balance, bringing her body flush with his, and the light pressure of her breasts made him forget both shame and foolishness. As his hands settled on Hazel’s waist, her tongue slipped into his mouth, and the kiss, still slow, became a demand.

Ligat gave her what she wanted. He couldn’t have resisted if he’d wished to, not when she was supple and warm in his grasp, only a whisper of fabric between her and his hands. Up close, she smelled of pine, lemon, and some sweet soap, mingled with clean sweat, and her fingers felt like silk against the back of his neck. Those sensations alone would have been overpowering. He could have gotten lost there, buried thought and let impulse drive him, and when Hazel traced her fingernails up his spine, he groaned aloud.

She was the one to step back, though she clearly did so reluctantly,trailing her hands down over his shoulders and chest to find the first of the buckles that was still fastened. Ripples of desire followed through the heavy cloth of his robe; her fingertips against his bare chest nearly made him dizzy.

She hesitated before she made contact with one of his tattoos. “These don’t hurt, do they?”

“No,” he said, though nobody but he had ever touched the marks. He was eager to extrapolate and willing to risk being wrong—and he waited with far more anticipation than wariness to find out if he was right.

It didn’t hurt when she brushed her fingers downward. It sent an intense shock of pleasure through him, stronger perhaps because Ligat’s tattooed skinwasmore sensitive or perhaps because of the way her slim fingers looked against the crimson sigils, and that itself was almost pain.

He reached for Hazel almost blindly, and she batted his hands away. “Hold still,” she said, punctuating it with the click of metal as she opened another buckle.

“You’ve been waiting,” Ligat accused her, “for the chance to give me orders.”

A smile curved her lips, darkly sweet and challenging. “You’re flattering yourself,” said Hazel, and kept going.

Ligat had learned some arts of self-control: patterns of breathing, ways to switch his concentration, the odd mantra to repeat when needed. He’d had occasion to be glad about that before, but he was pleased in an entirely new and better sense that hecouldhold still while Hazel went about her mission. He could resist the urge to pull her back into his arms, or to throw her down onto the makeshift bedding, and simply savor the shift of fabric as she undid his robe or the gloss of her black hair as she bent to see what she was doing.

When the last of the buckles opened, she stepped back again and appraised him, eyes bright.