Page 34 of Great Falls Cadet
My heart stops, my body freezing like a trapped rabbit. I can’t face him. Not now. Not like this. The path to the rune-inscribed tablet isgone, and with it, my hope of reversing the males’ memories. This Coal who is now shaking my shoulders knows me as little as I know him—or thehimhe thinks he is—the void between us as vast as any realm. A fury to echo Coal’s surges through me. Fear. Hate.
I hate Coal for letting me leave. Hate him for following. Hate him for forcing me into that stream. For making my heart beat harder just with his mere proximity, the intense gaze of his blue eyes.
“Are you listening to me, damn you?” Coal’s face is inches from mine, every ounce of intensity focused on me alone. Without even the sky to dilute the force of Coal’s attention, I feel as though a thousand tiny claws grip every part of my body.
My thighs tighten. So do my fists.
Coal grabs my right wrist just before my knuckles can hit his jaw. Forcing my arm back and against the stone, he captures my left hand as well. “In case you’ve more brilliant ideas.”
I pull against the restraints, their lack of give somehow reassuring. As if I matter enough to bother holding. My chest tightens, my throat thick. “What are you doing here?” I demand. “You wanted me gone, didn’t you?”
Coal’s jaw tenses.
“Then you win,” I shout, throwing my weight against his hold. Again.Again.The male’s grip doesn’t waver. My heart quickens, pounding harder and faster until I’m certain it will bruise my ribs. “What more do you want from me?” I shout into the male’s face.
Coal leans farther into my space, violence shimmering beneath his skin. With wet black clothes clinging to his body, his every lithe muscle is on display as surely as if he were naked, power coming off him in dizzying waves. It’s as if the very elements of weather that turned me into a drowned rat have enhanced the male. When Coal speaks, his breath is so close and hot that it runs tingling wisps over my skin. “The truth. What the hell were you buying yourself time to do on that overlook? What’s the bloody game you’re playing at?”
“Nothing.” My voice is hoarse, broken.
Coal growls. “Stop. Lying.” He shakes me again, hard. “You’re hiding something, Cadet.”
“I told you, I’m not a cad—”
Coal pulls me even closer, his grip on my wrists white-hot steel.
Too close. He’s too close, the heat and power of his body washing over me, waking too many senses. My blood quickens, my muscles fighting his unyielding hold even as unwelcome wetness slickens my folds. I can’t think, not with Coal’s body an inch from mine, his eyes pinning me as surely as his hands hold my wrists. Worse still, the magic inside me thrashes against the shackles of the mortal world, pulling so hard that it hurts. As a human, I felt the male’s power wash over me like a great wave, sweeping away every hold and shield. As a fae, the sensation is tenfold. A hundred. For the power comes not just from Coal, but from my own rebellious body that can’t be this close to the male, this insanely tangled with him, without rousing.
Coal doesn’t know he’s my mate, but my damn body does. And it cares little for anything else. Not that Coal is all but a stranger now. Or that he’d forced me into an icy stream until my lungs howled and my very blood slowed. My male—my precious, violent, terrible male—is still mine. With a snap that’s as vicious as a whip’s crack along my core, a cord of power inside me snaps free and rises to the challenge of Coal’s body. My own budding magic, perhaps, or an echo of Coal’s, or something else entirely. I don’t know. Don’t care. For it fills my every fiber with an ache that wants what it can’t have. My words fight their way through a storm just to escape, my sharp canines bared. “Go. To. Hell.”
The male growls, and there is nothing human, nothing mortal in the primal power of the low sound, which rumbles through his whole chest. The vibrations rake through me, lighting each ridge inside my soul. Inside my channel. My need.
My sex clenches over the emptiness inside it, each unfilled throb sending a fresh wave of anguish through me. The shivering in my body morphs to a tremble that has nothing to do with the cold.
With a strength that is too great to be my own, I rip free of Coal’s hold, my elbow cracking into his ribs with enough force to send a distant echo of pain through me.
Coal grunts, the surprise in his eyes flashing once before transforming to an inferno. Grabbing my shoulders, he throws me onto the ground, heedless of the stones. Heedless of anything. When his hands grab the top of my shirt and rip the fabric in a single vicious pull, the bite of cloth only drives the roaring need inside me higher and higher. The amulet bounces along my skin, shivering with a magic that Coal can’t see.
Blood pounds in my ears and clenching sex until I want nothing but to feel Coal inside me. Filling me. Pressure builds with each second that I’m denied his cock, fueling the raging storm inside me. And yet, yet, the male still hovers above me, his arms trembling beneath his wavering control.
“No.” He shakes his head as if fending off dizziness, his voice escaping a stranglehold. “I don’t bed cadets.”
Hooking my arm under Coal, I knock his body into the side wall with more strength than a human female should have. The male’s eyes widen as his back strikes stone, the fire in them flashing all the way down to my screaming sex. Arrows of gripping need shoot through the insides of my thighs, my legs, my damn toes.
I tear open Coal’s fly with the same ease with which he’s destroyed my shirt, my strength—and somehow, his strength—twining through my muscle fibers.
Coal’s cock is so hard as it springs free of its confines that it jabs my abdomen. The male’s control snaps with a grunt as he binds me with his powerful legs. This time when Coal throws me down, I’m on my belly, the scent of wet earth and Coal’s metallic tang filling my nose. A jerk at my hips bares me fully, my wet skin tightening as cool air brushes along it, the hot wetness coating my folds so at odds with the chill that I can feel the steam rising into the damp air.
I buck, seeking Coal’s cock in blind need.
The male grips my hips roughly, his knees pushing apart my thighs just before he thrusts in all the way to the hilt.
I gasp. My slick channel captures Coal greedily, only to clench in fury as he pulls back, the pulsing tip of his cock just filling my entrance.
Coal’s breath is ragged. He waits, torn between his need and his stars-damned principles.
I little care. Whipping my head around, I skim my teeth into Coal’s forearm, my canines breaking skin.
He roars. Jerking his arm away, he slams it down between my shoulder blades, flattening me against the ground so hard that my ribs compress all the air from my lungs. Forcing my thighs even farther apart, Coal thrusts into me again and again, and this time, this time it is the full great length of him over and over and over.
