Page 74 of Serpentine Valentine
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I wrenched away from her and away from that damned statue, stalking across the room to the headless marble trio of the Graces.
“I could,” Luna argued, calling after me. “If you let me.”
I was grateful we were mostly alone because I was perilously close to losing my cool.
“Alexandra.” My full name in her mouth sounded like a poem. I had to close my eyes against the urge to claim it. “You can share your pain with me.”
“It’s all I have left,” I growled without turning to look at her, my shoulders hunched at my ears, my nails digging deep wells into my palms. “Excuse me if I want to keep something for myself.”
“Okay,” she said after a long moment. “I just thought it might be a…relief to share the burden.”
I turned on her there, my teeth bared, eyes burning in my skull like twin coals. “You couldn’t handle it, Lux. Don’t you get that? This anger burns in my chest like some eternal torch. This armor I have to wear everysecond of every day because I can’t handle even a single drop of more pain or I’ll overflow and drown in my own rage and hurt.”
I lunged for her, snapping my teeth at her neck, but she didn’t flinch.
“Do you want to be tainted with all this anger?” I demanded. “Do you know how close it comes to crushing my bones to dust beneath my skin?”
She held perfectly still, her throat exposed to my snarling mouth, one hand carefully braced on my hip. I could see the throb of her pulse beneath the pale skin, and my mouth watered with desire. There was something blatantly vampiric about my longing to suck her bright aura inside my hollow shell and allow it to bring me back to life.
“I’d like to help you move beyond it,” she said quietly. “I’d like to help you see the future instead of looking backward at the ugly past.”
“Oh?” I sneered cruelly. “And what does my future hold that’s so worth looking forward to?”
“Me,” she said, so quick, so easy that, at first, I thought I’d imagined it. “Maybe a future with me.”
It was me who froze then, both horrified and utterly beguiled by the thought.
She shifted slowly as if I was a wild animal she was afraid to startle. Her hands went to my hips, fingertips slipping beneath my sweater vest to press into my warm skin.
And her eyes were as green as freshly watered earth, lush and verdant. I wanted to plant myself in that healthy soil and watch how I could grow.
“You want to be a professor of the classics, right? Well, I’ve always wanted to go to Cambridge. I visited when I was a girl, and I thoughtyes,this is where I need to be. We could go to grad school there. Live in a little stone cottage with two cats and more books than furniture. I’d wake your lazy bones up in the morning with kisses to your pulse points. Here,” she said, pressing a kiss to the snake’s flickering tongue over my carotidartery. “Here.” Another to my wrist, which she lifted tenderly to her lips. “And while you were still half in a dream, I’d move my kisses to your pussy and make you come on my tongue. You’d go to your classes, and I’d go to mine, but every night we’d come home to each other.
“A simple life, maybe,” she breathed against my lips. “But it feels like a dream to me.”
And me, I wanted to say but couldn’t.
Even the last few days waking up beside this girl with sunset red hair and a smile even while she slept was too much to bear. The idea of more, offorever, staked me through the heart and threatened to kill the monster I’d become.
Desperate to end the conversation, I moved to the bare-chested female statue beside us and lifted my hands to her breasts.
“If you wake me up, I’d put you to sleep,” I continued her fantasy but perverted it. Stripping away the emotion and cranking up the lust. “I’d start with your sweet breasts.”
My hands cupped the statue’s chest, my fingers circling the space where her nipples should have been. I watched as Luna’s mouth parted on a heavy exhale, and her eyes went dark.
“Just my fingertips until you begged for more. Then I’d lick and suck the swells, love bites like love letters written just here.” My hands rubbed over the cool marble. “Only when you were writhing would I finally take your nipple into my mouth. I wouldn’t be gentle, Luna. I’d nip and bite and gnaw until you were swollen and red and whining like a greedy girl for more.”
“Lex,” she whispered, rubbing her thighs together in the little velvet skirt I’d let her borrow because I liked her in my clothes better than I liked wearing them myself.
I didn’t stop.
My fingers cupped the statue’s breasts, then smoothed down overher hips to frame the hidden apex beneath the marbled folds of fabric.
“Would you beg me for more?” I taunted, watching as Luna chewed at her pink bottom lip, leaving it slick as the slit between her thighs. “Would you ask me nicely?”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I’d beg.”
I loved her shamelessness. Luna had been with a woman for the first time in her life for all of a few weeks, and she’d totally embraced it like she seemed to embrace everything that came at her. With total enthusiasm, warmth, and a complete lack of reservation.
