Page 10 of Cold-Blooded Creatures
Warm breath rained below my ear. “All alone deep in the forest.” His low growl curled my toes. “Someone might just snatch you away.”
I rubbed my clammy palms on the loose black pants I’d put on before leaving my apartment. Only the slickness hadn’t originated from fear. His musing had painted a fantasy that hitched my breathing.
“I will chop their heads off if they so much as try.” I shoved at his wide chest.
“What if that is exactly what they want?” A guttural hum vibrated under my palms as he nuzzled my neck. “For you to fight, flee, and be caught?”
My pulse roared in my ears despite my dry mouth. An onslaught of tingles spread along my limbs, contrary to the thorns of disgust jabbing my nerves when I doled out my favors, whether to one person or four at once, depending on what I’d purchased and from whom.
“Then I will enjoy licking their blood off my teeth after I rip their throats out,” I spat out, acting as if his nose skimming the column of my neck had no effect on me. His barely-there touches had lit my skin on fire.
“So feisty.” He kissed behind my ear, an inch lower, another inch, an increment of it, and sunk his teeth right underneath my jaw.
I jerked from the shock.
As he continued down to my shoulder, the blooming pain rushed straight between my legs, the ache melting into the need for more, and my thighs clenched.
An instinct to be still and not resist had ingrained itself deep inside me. Some liked a fight, and I loathed how that would drag out the payment transfer—if you could call it that.
Yet the person I had named my shadow…
I didn’t want him to stop, however messed up this was.
Although he wasnibblingon my flesh, it hadn’t awakened any panic or instilled revulsion in me. His bites hadn’t rung any alarm bells. At all.
What they had done was shrink the forest to the sensation of him so close to me.
He toyed with the hem of my t-shirt, exposing my belly to the late summer’s chill, and I yelped from his cold skin grazing mine.
“Get off of me.” Finally, some sense had knocked into my awareness. I twisted to the side to duck away from him, and his thumb dug into my stomach, locking me against the cracked bark of whatever tree was behind me and stealing the air from my lungs.
“Not until I have marked you.” He licked the hollow of my throat and nipped at my neck. “Tasted you.”
Lifting my t-shirt up, he tugged the thin bra I was wearing down, exposing my breasts, and pinched my hardened nipple, twisting and pulling. My back arched, and I fisted the cool material of his worn leather jacket, silently begging for more. Because his touch burned, it burned to the depths of my core; it pushed my nightmare away by erecting a wall of flames around me.
His hands weren’t like those I bargained with—a favor for a favor; no, they felt…safe. As safe as his gaze when he’d watch me from afar. When I’d dream of him coming closer.
“Claimed you.” He hooked the hem of my pants and dipped into my underwear, spreading me apart, and half-hummed, half-chuckled. “You’re wet.”
“I am not,” I scoffed.
But he was right. Those bites of his had done it.
He settled on slow, teasing circles around my clit that called out the first trembles in my legs. “I punish liars.” Roughly plunging a finger into me, he grunted as I clenched around him, then began pumping in and out. “But tonight, I will let you off. I will make you come so hard you will dream about me this night and the rest to come.”
The heel of his palm came into contact with my clit, and he quickly figured out a rhythm that made me clutch his jacket so tightly my muscles went numb.
He added a second finger, and I parted my legs, leaning into him, grinding on his hand, not caring that he was an outsider anymore. I needed a release. A moment of oblivion. A second of the all-consuming blaze to take me away from this world.
A third finger joined the other two, curling together with his thrusts and pressing against my inner wall. My knees buckled.
He caught my waist and pinned me to the tree, holding me up. His bruising grasp pushed me right to the edge, and I swayed over the abyss, about to fall,right there, right there, right th?—
“Come for me,” he ordered. “Now.”
His icy tone broke me right down the middle. My mouth opened in a soundless gasp as the world dissolved and pulses of pure pleasure surged through me. He sought out each wave, prolonging them to the point I squirmed, unable to take more. Legs quivering, I panted, with my forehead resting on his shoulder.
“So beautiful,” he murmured into my ear.
