Page 66 of Saint of the Shadows

She bucked into him, knocking him on his back. “You didn’t wait for my command.” Sitting on the ledge, she dug her boot into his shoulder. “I’m not pleased.” Her pursed lips hid a smile. “Put your hands against that wall and don’t move.”

He moved to the HVAC unit and put his palms in place. She took the moment with his back to her to wriggle out of her boots and unbind her ankles, adding jeans, socks, underwear to the growing clothes pile. She approached him and reached down his leg. He twitched. She steadied him with a hand to his back and used the other to unzip his boot at one calf and then another. “Take off your boots.” He stepped out of them. Her fingertips glanced across the brawn of his shoulders and back. At his back, she peeled the rest of his suit away to expose his beauty in entirety.

She marveled at his buttocks with a sculptor’s caress. Her hero. After a massage with her thumb, she swung her hand back. The villain she’dconquer.Crack!Her hand landed against his backside. His abs pulsed and flexed as he took deep breaths. He turned his head, his profile to her. His aghast mouth closed into a grin. She could face her darkness and create pleasure from it.

Crack!He laughed, deep and haughty. That won’t do. The other spanks landed harder and louder until her hand stung. Until he grunted and shuddered. Until he rutted against the wall.

The marks on his skin faded into the unsullied ivory skin of a statue. She tugged at him to turn around. When he did, she licked her lips at the sight. She hadn’t really known what to expect from a 500-year-old dick. He had deprived her of it long enough that she wondered if his sculpted, godlike body came with one of those disappointingly flaccid penises that adorned otherwise gorgeous statues. But it was perfectly normal, as in, dusky red, erect, pointing to his navel. Most importantly, ready for her.

She leaped onto him, and he collapsed onto his back. She straddled him, dragging herself over his length. “You want this?”

He hissed out a “Yes.”

She crossed her forearms over his chest, digging her elbows into his muscles. “Say please.”

“Please.”

At his word, she guided him inside her, using the strength of her legs to roll her hips. He pulled her down as he thrust up into her. An ecstatic gasp left her mouth like a ghost in the frosty night air.Her body spasmed from the deep and full sensation, reveling in another boundary pushed, another dose of his perfection.

He squeezed her fleshy hips with one hand while the other pushed her bra over her breasts. Sitting up, he licked and sucked at each nipple with a hungry lack of precision—slippery and savage.

Another deep thrust, and Marisol flung her head back. Her hair danced around her face.

Between rough breaths, he said, “You’re beautiful.”

Her silken strands snaked over her lips and brushed across her shoulder blades. Her gaze seared into his. “I know.”

Marisol shoved Vincent’s mouth away from her breasts and pried his hands off her body. She slid the rest of the way out of her bra and ran her hands over her breasts, delighting in the cooling traces of his saliva on them.

His thumb flickered over her sweet spot, and she writhed backwards, clawing into his thighs. After a few pumps with her hips, she adjusted her weight forward and pinned his arms overhead. “No. Watch me.” Her hands glided down his arms and over his chest. She caressed her thighs and dipped a hand between them. At her heated apex, her strokes matched the frantic pace of her rolling hips. “Beg me to use you.”

His gaze fixed to where their bodies met. “Use me.”

She pulled him out and restrained herself from grinding and rocking. “I said beg.”

Lightning forked from the sky to the ground. The slick underside of his cock pushed against her, hoping to return to the snug place deep inside. The tendons in his neck strained as he groaned out, “Please.”

She sank down on him. Her thighs slapped against his as she rode him. He inched closer and closer to release with every wild buck of her body. His lips parted in a sigh. There it was—the agony. Now for the ecstasy.

The pressure grew inside her. Every nerve wired into her pleasure. “I’m so close, Vincent. I’m so—”

Something guttural rumbled from his chest to his throat, as if it was the only thing to keep him from exploding apart. She stuck her fingers inside his mouth to muffle his sounds. She couldn’t hurt him, but her masked side desired to delve inside—to gag, to mangle, to make him beautiful only for her. Destroying and devouring him passed his power to her. Now she knew why people ceremoniously ate their gods.

His teeth crushed her fingers. The pain challenged her to ride harder and harder. After another squeeze and a moan, his eyes rolled back as he died a little death for her.

His lingering bite released another wave of ecstasy, bolting straight to her core just as lightning struck the spire of the water tower. Her cry blendedwith the thunder, ricocheting off the buildings until it disappeared into the night. She collapsed. Aftershocks tumbled through her.

A hole ripped into the sky, and rain poured down. Sweat and rain anointed them like deities as they shone in the city lights. Breathless and stunned, Marisol closed her eyes and rested her ear against his chest. For once, his heartbeat raced. For a moment, she had made him an ordinary man. Nothing stood between them now. Unbound and raw, they shared their bodies. And she wanted it again and again and forever.

He carried her inside her apartment and insisted she stay in bed as he cleaned up their mess. He moved around her apartment like he belonged there, like home was with her in the heart of the city, hanging their wet clothes and masks in her bathroom.

Together in bed, her fingers interlaced with his, she admired his soft, pink knuckles. She compared the top of her hand to his. Both belonged together now, lustrous with strength and the last vestiges of youth. How long would it be until her hand looked ridiculous in his? Until his agelessness became noticeable, and he’d have to recycle himself into someone new? Twenty years? Fifteen? Ten?

She wanted to tie him to her bed to stop time, to stop the outside world. Over centuries, she couldn’t have been the only one with a bed warm from his body with the sands of time sifting rapidly through her fingers. How did they handle it? “Whatabout other… lovers?” The word spouse itched her tongue, but it would’ve been presumptuous to speak it.

He kept his eyes closed and stroked the hair at her temples. “Some. None knew what made me different.” He opened one eye with a hint of a smile.

“Not even Staci?” Marisol couldn’t forget the picture of the timelessly beautiful woman with news reporter hair next to the Victor version of him in his ballroom.

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