Call of Water (Madame Tan's Freakshow #1) - Marina Simcoe Page 0,68

wall at my back, I couldn’t escape him. But he didn’t kiss me, waiting instead for me to close the distance.

“You trusted me enough to jump into the Niagara Falls with me,” he whispered, his breath hot on my lips. “Please trust me to keep your heart safe, too, Ivy.”

Zeph proved to be a great negotiator. He started out by asking for just one night with me and ended up claiming my heart.

With him, I never stood a chance.

“Let’s refresh your memory, then,” I breathed out, swaying forward into his arms, as if jumping into an abyss.

He caught my mouth with his, eager and greedy, as though his restraints had snapped. Running his hands up my back, he fisted one in my shirt, burying the fingers of the other in my hair.

Bruising in its desperation, biting in its reckless passion, the kiss was nothing like the sweet, tender kisses he gave me in Paris. Arched backwards in his arms, I gripped his neck, struggling to stay on my feet.

The more he kissed me the more I wanted, returning every lick of his tongue and each nibble of his teeth. Heat pulsing in my chest spread through my body, filling my limbs and pooling low in my belly.

It was supposed to be just a kiss. Nothing more for now.

“You’ll have to stop this...” I panted against his mouth, holding him to me. “Because I won’t.”

Swaying on his feet, he leaned me back against the wall, propping us against it.

“Just a little longer,” he groaned.

I sucked on his bottom lip then grazed my teeth along the edge of his jaw before he nibbled at the skin on the side of my neck. Hooking my leg around his hip, I pressed myself to him. My body melted into his, with a shiver running through us both.

The fingers of my hand behind his neck slipped below the neckline of his t-shirt. I felt an odd movement under the skin over his vertebrae, as if something thin and hard tried to come up—the spikes of his dorsal fin.

“We’ll have to stop.” He tore himself away from me. “For now...”

Breathing hard, he slowly removed his hands from me, pressing them into the wall over my shoulders.

I refused to let him go, the tips of my fingers stroking over his spine just below his neck, until the pulsing movement under his skin there quieted down.

He found my eyes with his gaze. “Was it the same as you remember? The kiss?”

His lips glistening and red, his expression wild and unguarded, his eyes searching mine with hope and something else...yearning. It was the same feeling I had, and I recognized it in him without a doubt.

Zeph might weave fables with his words, but his kisses didn’t lie. They told me the truth I needed to know.

He felt, and it was real.

“No.” I moved my hands to cup his face, tracing his cheekbones with my thumbs. “It was so much better.”

Chapter 23

“HOW DOES IT WORK?” I trailed my fingers along the pale stripe of skin on the back of Zeph’s forearm, the stripe that hid his fin.

We were lying in bed. His arms around me, his chest to my back.

After everything that had happened last night and the short uncomfortable sleep we got after that, we were both exhausted. I had set up the security alarm in my mom’s house, just in case the bracks found their way here.

Knowing I needed to rest, I still had a hard time falling asleep.

“Your magic,” I asked. “How does the water obey you?”

“It becomes a part of me.”

“Like an arm or a leg?”

His chuckle sounded near my ear, resonating softly through his chest at my back. “Possibly.”

“What happened if there are several Water Fae in the same ocean? Who would have the power over the water then?”

“All of us, I guess. I don’t remember ever seeing another Water Fae in my life, not to mention going for a swim in the ocean with one. But I would imagine it would be like combining the power then. If we worked together, we could accomplish things on a larger scale.”

“And if you went against each other?”

“Then there would be a tempest.”

I stifled a yawn, sleep pulling me under, aided by his soothing voice. However, the topic proved to be too intriguing to stop talking.

“You said Lero didn’t allow you to use your powers as a kid, but did you ever try?”

“Lero actually asked me to use it once. Our washing machine broke, flooding the basement.