Page 66 of Liars and Liaisons

Grayson just meets my gaze from between my legs, continuing his ravishment. “Gonna watch me when you come?”

I’m beyond words at this point. Everything from the lake expunges from my mind, and all I can think about, all I can feel, is how fucking goodthisis. The fact that I waited so long to let someone do this blows my mind; I gave up religion long ago, but I could live the rest of my life like this, with Grayson James worshipping at my altar.

“Of course you are because you want that A. And the only way you’re gonna get it is if I see those beautiful brown, smoky quartz eyes when you ride my tongue to oblivion.”

A third finger plunges into me without warning, and then he’s curling, stroking something that makes me feel full and wound tight, all at once.

“You,” he pants, licking and stroking in tandem, “are so”—lick, stroke—“fuckingsweet.”

It’s that single word, the reminder, that does me in. My mouth falls open and locks on a broken gasp, and my hips buck up, seeking more of his touch, his words, his hunger. The sound that shreds through my throat is unholy, something caught between anguish and a plea for more, more, more until I’m chanting exactly that, my hands threading through his hair, as if I might be able to extract maximum pleasure that way.

He keeps his lips on me as he pins my hips to the piano with his forearm, my cries joining the macabre tune that comes only from playing a handful of keys at once. His free hand snakes up my sternum, skating between my breasts and covering my mouth with a firmness that startles me.

“I know, dirty girl. I know it feels good, and you just want to tell me. You have no clue how badly I want to hear you, but we do have company in the next room. Be a good girl and stay quiet, and I’ll give you your real reward later.”

On instinct, my teeth sink into his flesh. I bite down with as much force as I can muster, not even thinking when it happens because of all the sensations flooding my body at once. My eyes roll back, and the tang of copper reappears on my taste buds.

Eyes wide, I search his gaze for signs of anger or retaliation, but he just keeps going. Keeps sucking and plunging andeatinglike I’m his last meal.

Tentatively, my teeth retract, and my tongue sweeps across his skin. Cleaning, tasting… savoring. I’m barely thinking about anything but how primal, howwrongall of this is when the orgasm shoots through me.

If this is what wrong feels like, I don’t want to be right ever again.

22

I fucked up.

And it has nothing to do with the fact that Nathaniel now wishes to vacation at the James estate. To relax, he says, though we all know it’s because he’s the only one who took my joke from the night of my “intervention” seriously and now doesn’t want me out of his sight.

Nor does it involve the missing person report Priya just slapped down on my desk or the overly familiar photograph of a man I last saw outside my barn a few weeks ago.

Jason Keller. A top-performing grad student who inexplicably crossed paths with Sydney Scott a few months before her descent into utter madness. According to my sources, he played the main role in leading her down that path, into my family’s greedy hands.

Into Nathaniel’s arms, where she inevitably found herself dead.

It doesn’t even have anything to do with the fact that I never went out to check the scene where Violet had unleashed herself on an unsuspecting trespasser, and by the time Arsen found Janus and went to the lake, the body was gone, the blood cleaned up.

As if it’d never happened at all.

No, my fuckup stems entirely from the fact that I crossed that line with Violet over a week and a half ago with no plan whatsoever in mind. I brought her here to get under my brother’s skin, to make my family mad and worsen my reputation, and now, I don’t even want them toknowshe’s here.

I no longer wish to share any part of my life with them and certainly not the only part that makes me feel alive.

Even that isn’t the greatest issue though. It’s that the succulent taste I got of the vixen has fully bewitched me. I’m addicted, scarcely able to think of anything other than her sweet tang and the noises she made. How soft and pliant she was, even while angry, and how I almost came in my slacks the second I felt her teeth pierce my skin.

The glow in her eyes when she realized it too. How she embraced the little drops of my blood rather than running in disgust.

I had known of course, that something dark existed within her. Like calls to like after all.

And I’m going to enjoy unraveling the threads holding her sunny exterior together.

As soon as she stops avoiding me.

Of course, she’s locked in her room right now. As yet another weekend party rages on under the moonlight outside, I can’t have her mingling and getting into trouble. Who knows what she might think she sees there and what carnage she might cause if she beats the wrong person to death?

“It really concerns me that you don’t seem to think this is a big deal.” Priya crosses her arms over her chest, shaking the long black hair off her shoulder. “Like, I know you’re living in this fantasy world out here in the mountains, but this isreal, Grayson. People are really looking for this man.”

“They can look all they want.” I shrug, squinting at my computer screen as I try to configure a new score. With the mouse, I set a couple of markers within the software and let my fingers dance over the keys as I sound out what I’ve been playing on the Baldwin for days. “They’re not going to find anything.”

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