Shadow Thief - Eva Chase Page 0,73

much like ours.

She was lying on her back on the bed on top of the covers, one hand behind her head and the other resting on her stomach. Her coppery eyes were open, contemplating the ceiling with that haze I’d come to recognize meant a person was thinking of something farther away. She didn’t look upset, at least, only thoughtful. A crease had formed between her eyebrows.

Nothing about her appearance had changed that I could pinpoint. I’d always found her enjoyable to take in with that ruddy hair against her creamy skin and the vibrant glint that so often lit in her eyes. Much more interesting than a peach, as delicious as the fruit might be. But now, ever since that unexpected development during our hasty getaway…

My gaze veered across her body, over the curves of her chest and hips that drew my attention much more intensely than they ever had before. She shifted up on one elbow, and I couldn’t help following the sway of her breasts. Then the way her thighs slid against each other as she stirred again.

A strange, heated sensation unfurled through my being with the urge to find out if those parts beneath her clothes would be as soft to the touch as her hair was. To discover how her expression might change if I gave in to that urge.

I turned my awareness away, back to my own room. It was easier to master the emotions flowing through me when I couldn’t see her. Beneath the heat of the impulse, a chill shivered through my nerves.

Somewhere in the longing I could taste the start of a headlong fall. Would I be able to pull back from it if I let myself tumble?

If I couldn’t… The one time I’d careened past the point of control before…

My mind shuttered against the memories.

The new feelings hadn’t emerged out of nowhere. They’d risen from the physical body that let me interact with this realm. If I understood why, how it all connected, what it meant, maybe it wouldn’t be so unnerving.

Our bathroom door was already closed. I pulled myself out from the shadows there, the air settling more solidly around my form. Only a little city glow carried through the small window beside the sink, but I didn’t want to turn on the light and make Ruse wonder what I was doing in here.

The appendage between my legs lay flaccid in my pants now. I let one hand drop to it, but it didn’t stir at the contact. I hadn’t thought much about that particular part since we’d first passed over to this realm with Omen, other than the occasions when I’d spent enough time outside the shadows that I needed to relieve myself using it—and during Thorn’s initial, stern reminder that if we got into a physical fight, I should be careful not to take a blow there, or the pain would be temporarily disabling.

It had never become so taut before, or lifted the way it had in the car, even though Sorsha’s bottom had been pressing down against it—

The memory of that firm yet pliant roundness, of my arm around her back and her hair grazing my cheek, rushed through my mind like the scent of her had filled my nose. And what a scent it was: sweet like the honey I’d sampled at the market but with a sharpness as biting as the flames she’d lit in the wake of our first escape. I wondered if I flicked my tongue against her cheek, not with any power but just to taste in the physical sense, would her flavor be as intoxicating?

And then that appendage, what I’d heard Ruse refer to as his “cock,” had twitched and stiffened with a flood of pleasure totally different from any I’d felt before, hot and hungry and unsettlingly forceful.

Like it was stiffening against my hand right now in response to those memories. I swallowed hard and ran my fingers over it experimentally. Thinking back to Sorsha lying on the bed as I’d seen her just now…

It rose even higher, straining against the fly of my pants. With each brush of my fingertips, ripples of pleasure and the hunger that came with it radiated through the rest of my body. I closed my eyes, caught again between the longing for more and the terror that quivered up from deeper within me.

There had been a sort of pleasure in my first—and only—devouring. A cold, bottomless hunger that sucked in and shredded, and