gesture with my tongue. It was like licking frost from a steel pole in a Wichita winter - an icy, tingling shock.
Well, he wasn't a vampire. That was a dead issue. I felt his heart stumble and then jackrabbit under my palm.
Did he feel the pleasure effect, though? Or just shock?
"Second Circle of Hell, woman," he muttered, his voice soft but so deep in his chest that my hands sensed its breath-catching vibration.
Oh, he did feel it. I had what every woman in Vegas and beyond wanted. I had Snow in the palms of my hands.
My heart was beating pretty wildly by then. Triumph almost felt like erotic excitement. I was the puppet master here.
I ran my lips and tongue diagonally across his chest from rib to opposite nipple. His audible intake of breath tautened his pec for my attack. His hands were digging into my shoulder blades, pulling me closer.
That was ballsy, Irma gasped.
She was right. The scars made a giant X on his torso, but the nipples weren't part of the zone. I just couldn't resist payback for how he'd pulled my gown down to my waist so unnecessarily during the Brimstone Kiss.
This really was rather fun, salving my conscience while driving a sex symbol crazy. Any way you want it ...
I opened the one button on his blazer and unclasped some way-too-Texan silver belt buckle courtesy of the Emerald City makeover attraction.
I was expecting his knees to buckle at any moment, but no such luck.
"Pleasure," I pointed out rather redundantly, "for pain. I can offer it in equal parts. Have I made up for one whiplash yet?"
He was breathing hard, but still able to speak. "Oh, Delilah," he said putting his mouth on the hair covering my ear. "Do you think I'd be crazy enough to let you cut my hair, or tell you that?"
I'd heard that rumble with my cheek and ear pressed against his chest.
"Do you feel like this onstage?" I asked.
"Like what?"
"Like they're all in the palm of your hand?"
His soft laughter stopped when I applied my tongue again and ran it down to his navel.
"How far do these lightning scars go?" I asked, parting the zipper on his pants.
"From Heaven to Hell and back again. How far are you going to go?"
He sounded amused now, and more in control than I wanted, but his breath was coming quick and shallow.
I took stock. My cheeks burned and my lips tingled. It was either go down, to Hell, or up, to Heaven. Low road or high road.
I'd proved my theory. The silvered tissue of scarred skin was subject to my healing, soothing, and even surreal sexual influence. So I'd also proved that I could undo Snow as much as he had undone me. We were tied at the moment. His hands shifted to the top of my shoulders, ready to assist me in sinking to a new level of competitive sensuality.
Instead, I surprised us both and went up, my fingers ripping open his top shirt buttons and pulling the string tie loose and his collar agape to tilt my face sideways and suck vampire-hard at the hollow of his throat.
Who was helpless and exposed now? I wanted to ask as his head reared back. He would have spoken, maybe even objected, but I breathed - or hissed - shhhh without missing a beat. So he let me have my way with him.
Only ... his hands fanned on my bare lower back and tilted my strong, silver-laced, satin-clad pelvic bones against his.
To feel every throb of his climax.
That forced me to break my punishing kiss and stumble back to establish my balance in every way. I kept my head tilted at an inquisitive angle. "One? Maybe two lashes paid for now, would you grant me that?"
Snow had let himself sink onto the narrow hard arm of a theater chair, his clothes still split open a provocative smidge down the middle, from the pulse visibly galloping in his throat to Gehenna. Not a bad look. I'd have been a killer GQ advertising director too.
So.
Delilah, the small and meek, had just had a very personal peek behind the façade.
The Great and Powerful Snow was just another man behind the curtain in need of a really good blow job.
Chapter Twenty-five
AFTER THIS PIECE of impromptu performance "art," I was more than ready to retreat behind the closed door of the suite's powder room off the entry hall.
The last time I'd made a pit stop on the way out of a