Dark Possession - Aja James Page 0,53

taste and fullness of his cock. Most of all, Eveline had essentially been barred from access to him.

The unguarded, unrestrained version of him that she’d glimpsed so rarely.

But heavens above! When he did show her, however involuntarily, she’d been mesmerized, hypnotized, irrevocably bespelled. She’d wanted more of those moments, more of the unfiltered, unguarded Ramses.

So, she pushed for what she wanted. She couldn’t even help it. She couldn’t hold herself back if she wanted to.

Apparently, she pushed too hard.

She was extremely resistible to him, even though she found him quite the opposite.

Logically, his blunt, categorical rejection should be taken at face value—he wanted to keep his options open. She didn’t tempt him to change his usual behavior, not even for a short while. Exclusivity with a female wasn’t his thing. And while he might “like” her well enough to play her body like Orpheus played his lyre, easily coaxing three orgasms from her in less than ten minutes, she was nothing special.

Eveline curled more tightly in on herself and hugged a giant, king-sized pillow between her legs, against her chest, hiding her face in the yielding, goose-down softness.

Involuntarily, she sniffed, her throat feeling unpleasantly tight.

Surely, she wasn’t disappointed by his refusal, was she? He wasn’t even her type!

Another sniff.

She must be missing the Shield, Eveline told herself. She was nostalgic for her friends and comrades amongst the Dozen.

The sniff turned into a sniffle and a series of hiccups as tears leaked unbidden from the corners of her eyes.

Orgasms were awful things, she thought. They unbalanced her hormones, shook her equanimity. The abduction, subsequent seduction and blood consumption by the beautiful, sinful, powerfully magnetic Dark King finally took a toll on her. Her emotions merely caught up with her, that was all. There was nothing wrong with crying; it was simply a release of sorts.

Telling herself this, Eveline let the tears flow, closed her eyes, and fell into a fitful slumber.

As usual, when she dreamed, the same ancient world unfolded before her eyes. So vivid and real she felt like she was right there in the middle of it.

He was there too.

Except in this world, his name was Prince Hulaal…

First Cycle of the Dark Queen Ashlu, sixth millennium BC.

It had been ten summers since the Elemental prince lost his innocence to the beautiful Dark Queen.

Since he’d died for his love of her.

As his body broke down over the course of thirty excruciating days during the Decline, she’d held him in her arms through most of it, murmured words of reassurance, and stroked the sweat-matted curls from his ashen face.

“It’s not that I don’t love you, my little prince,” she’d told him. “I do love you. Of course I do. You mustn’t ever doubt me. It’s just that Dark Ones and Pure Ones aren’t meant to be together as Mates.”

“W-w-why?” he’d gritted out through tightly clenched teeth, his jaw almost breaking with the effort to hold in groans of ravaging pain.

He didn’t want to appear weak by voicing his agony. He might only have been eleven summers, but he wanted the queen to see him as a grown male. Love him as a grown male. She’d taken his manhood into her body, after all. She’d chosen him that night. Just as he’d always chosen her.

He loved her desperately.

“Hmm?” she murmured, cushioning his face against her generous bosom, “why aren’t Dark and Pure Ones meant to be together? I don’t know. It just is. The Dark Goddess deemed it to be, and so it is. But all is not lost, my darling. At the end of these thirty days, you can choose to become like me. Then, my gorgeous prince, we can be together at last.”

He’d believed her every word.

He hadn’t known that the choice between death or becoming a Dark One wasn’t guaranteed for every Pure One who suffered the Decline when they gave themselves sexually to the one they loved, but who didn’t or couldn’t love them back in the same way. He hadn’t known that some Declines lasted less than thirty days, because his own took every moment of that duration. Until his bones stabbed into his internal organs like serrated daggers, and when he breathed, he choked on his own blood.

In the end, the Elemental did receive a choice, and he clung to the hope that when he became a Dark One, he would finally be worthy of the Dark Queen who had become his entire universe.

During the ten years that followed, Ashlu was more careful about taking other