Free A Novel Seduction by Gwyn Cready

her.
    “Would you like to try my tongue instead?”
    He didn’t wait for an answer. He pulled her toward him and began a practiced exploration that made her cry out, back arched hard. He was nothing like the boys she’d bedded before, and when he added his thumbs in a swirling, heat-inducing complement to his mouth, she felt she would die.
    She braced her knees, pressing her palms against herforehead, too dizzy to think. Those twinkling eyes were as potent as any drug, and trying to ignore the danger they represented was impossible. She was falling over the edge, for him and for this. The quake began in her thighs, rising through her belly and chest, and he plied her until she called out, shamefaced, for him to stop.
    He gave a rumbling laugh that tickled her skin, then rolled her over.
    “Now I can proceed at my pace,” he said, kissing his way up her stomach and pausing to suckle each nipple.
    He lowered himself between her thighs and entered. The smell of their joining hung on him, making her woozy with desire. He moved with care, pleasing himself with each stroke. He gazed into her eyes as he moved, and she found she had no barrier to raise.
    “Would you like this each night?”
    “Yes,” she whispered.
    “I would too.”
    He worked slowly, moving when she did and smiling at her throaty gurgles. The aftershocks were quickening, and she could feel her still-tingling flesh tighten around him. She stretched her arms as far as they would go, wiggling her fingers as he plucked her nipples. The earth was moving again, and, sensing the shift, he lifted her knee and changed his gentle thrusts to a hammering.
    Lava bubbled deep within her, and she flung her head back. The silvery clouds wheeled and turned in the private heaven they’d created, and her fingers stretched along the bench’s length to reach them, as if the magic they’d conjured would allow her to command the sky. Then his measured blows unleashed her. He bucked hard, drivingthe liquid fire from her belly to the top of her head, and she jerked wildly under his shuddering weight.
    “Oh, Axel.”
    He settled against her and held out his hand. “Friends?” She laughed. “Better.”
    Looking into her eyes, he made a low, contented noise. “Indeed.”

C HAPTER T HIRTEEN

     
    Offices of Vanity Place magazine, Present Day
     
    Axel sat in an empty cube, gazing at the LCD of his camera and fast-forwarding through the shots still carefully preserved even after all these years. The edge of the bench just protruded into the lower left of the frame, and the first four hundred or so shots were nothing but a montage of slowly tumbling flashes of Mylar, beautiful in themselves but nothing compared to the last thirty. He’d set the automatic repeat on the shutter for ten seconds that night and forgotten it. It wasn’t until they finished the shoot and retired to his place that he’d even thought to look at what he’d gotten. He still remembered sitting at his desk, listening to the sound of her soft, sleepy exhalations and gasping when he’d realized what he had.
    He looked at the shot numbers. Three ninety-three, three ninety-four, three ninety-five. This is where it began, though the sequence ran for hundreds of pictures. He let the memory slip over him like an old sweater. There they were. Her hands. Stretching into view, palms up, fingersflexing and curling as the clouds of silver danced overhead.
    He watched the shots roll by, thinking about that wonderful joining and the time that followed. He’d felt like a vampire himself, his veins infused with this heady new life force. God, he and Ellery had barely left the bed the first few months. It was a wonder
City Sill,
the name she’d given her paper, had ever launched at all. But it had. In fact, it had sold quite well its rookie year—that is, until the end, when everything that had been magic between them died.
    He opened another album in his camera’s memory, the one entitled “Ellery Before.” It