Page 41 of Watch Me Burn
The words slam into an invisible wall.
I love you.
The declaration hovers there, desperate to escape, but speaking it now would detonate everything between us. “I’m crazy about you?”
“Damien.” She breathes my name, and her entire face transforms, her eyes going soft and liquid, and pupils expanding until they swallow the hazel.
“I don’t care what people think, Luna. I’ve been dying to kiss you all night. Since you walked down those stairs in that dress and made me forget how to breathe.”
A war plays out across her face. Her lips part on a shaky exhale, her tongue darting out to wet her bottom lip. Want radiates from every inch of her. Every line of her body says yes, but something invisible holds her back, some chain of guilt wrapped around her conscience. She thinks she’s betraying him. Her wolf.
You’re not betraying anyone, little doe. You’re kissing the same man.
Her fingers clutch my shoulder. The air between us hums with electricity, stretched so tight one wrong breath could shatter it. Then she lifts her chin, eyes falling closed, lips parting in unmistakable invitation.
I don’t make her wait.
My mouth finds hers. The kiss begins soft, a question more than a statement, but she answers by pressing closer, and the careful restraint I’ve been clinging to dissolves. Her lips are warm silk, sweet with champagne and the unique taste that belongs only to her.
A sound escapes her lips, and my body responds like she’s thrown a switch. Arousal slams through my system like a sledgehammer. Blood rushes south so fast it leaves me dizzy. That tiny, breathless moan rewires every circuit in my brain.
Her soft curves fit against my hard lines, silk and heat melding to me until there’s no space left between us. Her heartbeat hammers against my chest, rapid and wild, matching the chaos in my own veins.
This. This is what I’ve kept from us with my masks and lies. The knowledge sits like acid in my stomach. I’m the architect of my own hell.
I keep the kiss as gentle and controlled as I’m capable of, but a wild current of need pulses beneath the surface, a riptide that could pull us both under if I give it an inch. I can taste her want. It’s there on her tongue, sweet and desperate. I feel it in the bite of her nails into my shoulder and the way she tilts her head and opens for me, inviting me deeper into the wet heat of her mouth.
I deepen the kiss by degrees. A gentle pull of her bottom lip between mine, the slide of my tongue against hers, and the change in angle that lets me explore the corners of her mouth. Every small gasp she makes, every shift of her body closer to mine, stokes the fire building in my chest until it threatens to consume me.
When we finally surface, the world feels different. Her breathing stutters out in quick, shallow pants that echo mine. Her mouth looks claimed. Swollen, darker, and thoroughly kissed. The sight of them is so beautiful it’s hard to look away. The war I witnessed play out in her eyes has ended, leaving only molten desire, hot enough to reduce me to ash.
“Wow.”
The single syllable floats between us as she lifts trembling fingers to her mouth, like she needs proof of what just happened.
Wow, indeed.
Chapter twelve
Luna
Istep out of the ladies’ room after freshening up, my mind still spinning from the evening—the opulence, the people, the way Damien kept me tucked against his side all night. The way other women looked at him. The way he looked only at me.
The gala is winding down, but as host, Damien needs to stay until the end. After our first dance, dinner was served, giving me space to pull myself together and quiet the heat still burning under my skin. But then he asked me to dance again after dinner and kissed me a second time, deeper and hungrier than the first. When the music stopped, I fled to the bathroom, my composure hanging by a thread.
Damien kisses me like he wants to consume me. No one’s ever kissed me like that. A deep, soul-consuming kiss that leaves a person breathless and weak, trembling with aftershocks.
I can still feel it, still taste it. The man kisses how I imagine he fucks. Slow and tender. So very different from my wolf.
“There you are.”
I gasp as Damien’s lips and warm breath brush against my ear as he steps up behind me.
“I was beginning to worry. You’d been in there so long.”
I turn to find his blue-gray eyes studying me with an intensity that quickens my pulse. “Just needed a moment to myself.”
With his hand on my lower back, he leads me out of the hallway and back into the ballroom. “Did you enjoy the gala?”
