left my lips as both a benediction and a curse.
“I am helping you.” His thumbs found my tattoos, one per hip, one with each thumb, and rubbed, hard. Harder than Vance would have dared. Hard enough that it should have been painful. I screamed for him and wound my leg around his shoulder. “Yes, yell for me,” he ordered, his voice gone deeper and rumbling across my breast.
He dropped me, none too gently, to the warm grass by the sea of fairie and crawled up my body to pin me with the weight of his own. His jeans were rough on my flesh as he rubbed the heaviness and length of himself on me. He pressed my arms to the ground, pressed me down, and held me with both his power and weight.
I couldn’t think or speak. I stared at him. I wriggled my arms but he did not free me. “Talk Chance. We’re talking. I, oh, God.” His eyes, they glittered and begged and I couldn’t resist their call.
I writhed up against him. I needed to. I rose up of my own volition and shoved my tongue down his throat. He pinned me again and kissed me as he had before, taking control. I ceded it, ceded everything, feeding off the passion only he awakened. My brain ceased to be useful beyond thoughts of more , yes , and now .
When he came up for air again, I shuddered, quaking with the force of my growing needs. “When you kiss me like that, I feel like I am coming alive.” I pinched my eyes closed and turned my head from him. A few snowflakes of light fell like glitter around us. Saying it reminded me I should shove him away. How could I admit to liking kissing him? How could I be here, in his arms, doing this like a traitor? Chance didn’t force me. I allowed his touch. I practically crawled all over him, without thought of Vance, of the world, of anything but what we felt together.
Selfish. No matter how clearly I called myself selfish and evil and wrong, I wanted nothing more than to sink into the tempest and be lost forever to it.
Chance saw the light begin to crumble, or sensed me pulling back because he took my lips again, more gently. He rubbed his face on mine. “We should talk while we can hold on to the bond. You’re already trying to tear away from me.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak or look at him and not break the bond of light that kept the fairies out. He seemed to know, he probably did know.
“I still need your skin. I can’t hold the bond between us if you pull away and we don’t touch. You have to work with me.”
I closed my eyes tighter. “It’s hard. I want…” The last whisper trailed off to nothing. I had melted into a ball of need. What I wanted was not what I wanted. Not at all. But my body wanted Chance so badly it throbbed. It ached and burned. It wept for him. “I’ll try. It’s hard. I mean. You know. Vance.” Saying his name seemed like failure on my part.
“Vance. Of course.” A quiet edge sharpened his voice. I could sense his anger, this close, this connected. Not only did I refuse to be his, but I had brought Vance up, in a place that was ours, Chance’s and mine. That I could even think of the vampire inside that bubble pissed Chance off.
I couldn’t even blame him. I was the one who was cheating, leading them both on, I guess. I hated myself a little in that moment.
He turned me away from him, and cupped me in a spooning position. I molded into him as he ran his hands from one end of me to another. “What are you doing?” The question came out as a whisper. It was hard to hold onto my guilt with the shivering wonder of his touch filling my mind and wakening more hungers.
His teeth bit down on my shoulder.
I screamed again, and I nearly shattered against his hand as he pressed it into the most intimate bits of me.
He held me, and the light around us throbbed as I saw a thousand colors behind my eyes. He forced light and power into that bite. He had bit down on my third tattoo, the one on my neck. His hands roved my body, but I could barely reach him.
I writhed