Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,46
blew open pathways through his nerve endings he hadn’t known existed.
The noise he made reverberated so deep in his chest that the fire flickered.
Lana reared back, straddling his thighs and breathing hard. “Oh god, did I zap you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?” He stared down his body. “I’m tingling all over, from my lips to…there.”
The leggings she’d given him to cover himself had been strained as soon as he put them on. Now, the fabric between his legs was bursting upward as if he’d captured one tentacle from a boundary beast in his borrowed pants and it had decided to set itself free.
A soft, wild smile curved her lips. “Oh, I did that to you, did I?”
“Or perhaps an allergic swelling in response to the cookies?” He wriggled his hips. “It’s never happened before.”
“Never happened…” Her smile faded. “Sting, you’ve never had an erection?”
“Erected what? Ships? I was never part of any shipyard construction crew. I was only ever intended for destruction.”
“No, I mean, erected…yourself.” She gestured at the burgeoning part of his body. “I just assumed a…a certain physiological compatibility.” She frowned. “Marisol and Ridley certainly made you Tritonyri seem compatible.”
“I am Titanyri,” he reminded her. “Made, not born. Marked for killing, not life.”
As she lifted her turbulent, fire-touched gaze to his, her frown turned infinitely sad. “Sting, the Tritonesse don’t control you anymore.”
“They never controlled you. But still you left.”
Her stroking hands, which had stoked such a blaze in him, tightened around his flanks, as if she were holding him in place even though he’d never been one to leave, no matter the risk or price or aftermath. “Maybe…maybe for right now, none of that should get in our way.” She gazed down at him. “Maybe our past left us fucked up, but we might—”
“Fuck each other?”
Her lips quirked to one side. “I’d use a different word there, but…yeah, that.”
“Would the word matter?”
The flames flared in her eyes again. “The only word that matters between us right now is yes.” She brought her hands up to his chest again, resting lightly. “Or no, if it doesn’t feel good. Or say wait, if you’re not quite sure.” She spread her fingers wide over his pecs. “You can also say faster or slower, harder or softer, up or down or all around, depending on what you feel.”
He bit his lip. Where the sweetness still lingered, not the cookie anymore—her. “They told me I couldn’t feel.
“Those tingles? Do you like them?” She lifted her hands just a bit, not abandoning him just letting her fingertips glide over his armored skin. “Do you feel that? Like that?”
Afraid of what urgent sounds, indecipherable by any technology, might burst from him at her touch, he bit down harder on his lip as he nodded. “I feel that. I like that.”
Her lashes dropped halfway over her eyes, shadowing them from reflections of the flame, which somehow only fanned the fire within him. “Tell me more or less. Tell me duration, pressure, velocity, trajectory, intensity. Tell me what you like, what you want, what you’ve dreamed of. Tell me now.”
With each mesmerizing cadence, her hands circled, as if his little nul’ah-wys was conjuring fire out of his skin and bones. Creature of the darkest depths he might be, but he would burn for her. “Now,” he rasped. “I tell you now.”
When she crashed down upon him, he realized she’d been holding back. Though there was no electrical charge in her touch besides the power between the two of them, rousing every nerve behind the thickness of his skin and sending his pulse into overdrive centered around the ever-thicker jutting from his loins as she stripped him bare, which he liked. The tingles weren’t her devastating zaps, but somehow left him even more vulnerable than being blown over a ledge or out a window.
And he liked that too, he liked it very much. Her mouth slanted hard across his, and though she had yet to manifest any Tritonan gills, somehow the ways she breathed—in circles, in aroused gasps that both fed him and fed from him. It seemed only fair to make her naked too, to expose her skin, to feel what he was feeling.
This power rising between them was wilder than any ocean and fiercer than any flame. It swirled more tempestuously than any tornado and rocked him deeper than the ancient stones at the core of any world in the universe. This was an elemental power that wove them together that could not be engineered or