Page 99 of Her Dreadful Will
“And there it is. Classic Elena.” David sneered in her face. “You’re a contradiction. You don’t make sense. You want me to respect women, and then you—”
“Shut up!” screamed Elena. “Shut up, or I swear I’ll—”
“You’ll what?”
Elena dove in, kissing him savagely and biting his lip. Soleil gasped at the bright spot of pain, at the taste of salt and copper flowing through the tethers. This wasn’t right. She shouldn’t be able to feel the smooth coolness of the sheets under the mayor’s palms, or taste the blood flecking his lip. She shouldn’t be able to feel the slide of Elena’s skin, or the waft of cool air from the air conditioning vent overhead.
“You’re disgusting,” Elena gasped. “I hate you.”
David gripped the back of his wife’s neck and dragged her mouth back to his for another hard kiss. “I hate you too.”
This is so unhealthy, Soleil whispered to Achan.Should we—
Sshh,he replied.
David seized Elena’s negligee and ripped it from neckline to waist. She shrieked, pummeling him, tearing at his T-shirt. “Bastard! I love this nightgown, and you ruined it!”
A twitch from Achan’s mind, and David’s shirt shredded easily beneath his wife’s nails.
“I’ll buy you another one,” David gasped, and then their mouths met again, a frenzy of teeth and tongues and bruised lips. More clothes were stripped away. Soleil couldn’t see anything clearly now, just flashes of thigh and chest and gasping lips and closed eyes. But oh, she couldfeel. Her pulse thundered in her wrists, in her throat.We can’t be part of this, Achan. Not without their consent.
Because you always ask for consent before you delve into people’s minds and wills.
Shut up. It’s not the same thing and you know it.
Achan tossed back a mental pulse that felt very much like a sneer, but the next second Soleil’s vision of the Brownells’ bedroom shattered and she was whisked back into her own body, back into the workroom.
She lowered the hyacle to the floor, her fingertips grazing the braided surface of the rug, sensitive to every rugged fiber of its weave. Everything in the room was sharper, clearer. The scent of lavender and roses bathed her nostrils. The lamp overhead glinted off the green bottles along the windowsill and shattered in Achan’s matching irises. She could hear her own breath, a series of harsh pants, and her heart swelling and thumping under her ribs. Achan’s heartbeat was discernible too—a rapid double-beat punctuating the surge of his lungs.
A smile parted his lips, showing the glint of teeth. He looked altogether savage and satisfied and unrepentant. As if he sensed nothing wrong in what they had just done, in the emotional carnage they had wrought together.
Part of Soleil was just as awed as he was, but she couldn’t extrude the splinters of guilt piercing her conscience. She wouldn’t bear them alone, either. He needed to feel them, too. But how to begin, when he was looking at her—glowing at her—as if he was a bare second away from springing across the rug and closing the distance between them?
“That was a mess,” she said, tentatively.
“It was clumsy, true,” he admitted. “We can’t be sure what the final result will be. But at least the two of them—reconnected. That’s worth something, right?”
“Only if you believe that sex isn’t just sex.”
He laid aside his necklace of teeth and inched a little nearer, so that his knees touched hers. With her senses heightened, those two points of contact with him enflamed the entire lower half of her body.
“It’s never just sex for me,” he said. “I don’t get turned on by anyone I don’t honestly care about on some level.”
Why did that arouse her even more? “So you’re demisexual.”
“What?” He cocked his head.
“You experience sexual attraction to someone until you’ve formed an emotional connection,” Soleil explained. “That’s demisexual.”
“I never knew there was a label for it. But okay.” His tattooed fingers crept over her knee, quickening Soleil’s pulse.
She had to distract herself, or she was going to kiss him again, and she didn’t want to keep throwing herself at him. “What if the Brownells can’t make each other happy? What if we’re pressing two people together who don’t really belong, who will make each other miserable?”
“It’s in the town’s best interest to have a stable mayor with decent morals, right?”
“Yes...”
“So keeping him with his wife, controlling his lust for money and for other women—it’s the right move. The greater good is more important than individual happiness, don’t you think?”
