Page 61 of The Fantastic Fluke

I full-body shivered at the praise, and the reaction felt ridiculous, but he didn’t comment. He just grabbed my ankles and pulled me flat onto my back, then used the grip to spread my legs wide. Then he coated two thick fingers in lube and met my eye as he slid between my legs and pushed his fingers into my ass. Not one at a time, and not slowly, but both, in a steady, inexorable slide.

I let out a whine at the overwhelming sensation of Gideon inside me, and my head fell back against the mattress.

“Look at me, Sage,” he instructed, and I couldn’t deny him, lifting my head to look him in the eye again. “This what you wanted? This why you spent all day researching your grandmother’s books?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Say it.”

If he’d thought my pride was going to slow us down at all, he was greatly mistaken. I opened my mouth and offered anything and everything I could think of that might convince him to stop fooling around and just fuck me. “Please, Gideon. Need you. Want you. Spent all day trying to make it so you could touch me. Would have kept going till I figured it out, no matter how long it took. Need you inside me.”

He thrust his fingers all the way into me, and it lit up every nerve ending in my body. I arched up to meet him, whimpering. “Gideon!”

“Be patient, sweetheart. I’ve got you.”

I was about to tell him I didn’t damn well feel like being patient and he’d better get his dick in me, when he moved forward, filling the entire space between my legs.

The second his fingers slid out of me, everything disappeared but the feeling of his huge, blunt cock pressing into me. He must have lubed it when I was distracted by his fingers, because it was enormous, but the glide was smooth and even despite being so fucking much that it verged on painful.

“You okay?” he asked, voice tense and even more gravelly than usual. He was struggling to go slow, I realized, and that was the opposite of what I wanted.

“Fuck me, dammit,” I ground out, wrapping my legs around his ass and trying to pull him in deeper.

He groaned, bent over me, head buried in my neck, and didn’t move for a moment. Then he pulled himself up, staring down at me, his warm brown eyes smoldering with heat. He grabbed one of my hands in each of his own and pressed them into the mattress to our sides.

Finally, he shoved forward with enough force that if he hadn’t been holding me down, I’d have slid halfway up the bed.

“Fuck, Gideon,” I whimpered. “So deep.”

“You wanted it all, sweetheart. You’re gonna get it.” He pulled out and thrust in again, slow the first few times, but increasing in speed until the only sound in the room was the slap of skin on skin, and my ragged whimpers as he hit all the right places with every thrust. I pushed my hips up to meet him at first, but when he hit his rhythm, I couldn’t keep up, and simply let myself be swept away in the raging storm that was Gideon.

My cock, squeezed tight between our bodies, found friction against his silky treasure trail, but it wasn’t quite enough to drive me over the edge. Until he leaned down and bit my earlobe, then whispered, “Been wanting this since the minute I saw you.”

That was all it took. I bucked up against him, vision whiting out and fireworks going off behind my eyes as I came between our bellies. My whine of, “Gideon,” was lost entirely in his deep groan. He thrust hard once more, twice, and then his whole body tensed over me, squeezing me tight between him and the bed.

He didn’t pull out or roll away from me, just turned us on our sides, facing each other, and left his arms wrapped around me as we lay there, our breathing and heartbeats slowly going back to normal.

It felt like forever and no time at all when he finally let go of me and pulled away to stretch. He smiled down at me, and I couldn’t help but return it.

Until he reached down to stroke my cheek, and his hand slipped right through me.

Chapter Twenty-Three

When I stumbled out of the bedroom in the morning, Gideon was sitting on the couch waiting for me. He was fully dressed, and of course, fully incorporeal again.

His face was blank in a way I’d never seen before. It wasn’t the emptily pleasant social face he’d given Iris at first, or the dead-eyed stare he’d given my father. It was much worse than that, and it mirrored my own feelings.

It was like that day in the eighth grade when I’d gone in for testing, convinced I was about to discover what made me good, and useful, and maybe even the son my father wanted. More specifically, it was that moment when the magister told me that I was nothing. Twos across the board. Not destined for greatness. Not even destined for mediocrity. I had no destiny at all.

I sat on the coffee table across from him, looking into his eyes for just a moment. It was like a stab in the heart. It was everything I was feeling.

How could I miss a man who was still sitting right in front of me?

I considered, for a moment, just how much energy it would take for me to keep him corporeal all the time. Considering how hard I’d crashed the night before, sleeping through the whole night and not waking until after nine, it was probably more energy than I could afford.

For a second, he looked like he was about to smile, but he tamped it down. “I can see the cogs working in your brain, Sage, but we don’t have time for that.”

I shot a scowl back. My scowl wasn’t as good as his, sure, but I was working on it. “We’ve got plenty of time. There’s no reason you need to hurry off anywhere, is there? Got a hot date waiting in the afterlife?”

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