Windfall Page 0,13
of the way. His mouth found the side of my neck, licking and sucking, so fierce that it was right on the skin-thin border between pain and pleasure. His hands slid up to skim lightly over my breasts. "I need you."
"I-wait, David, I don't-are you sure you're-" Feeling up to this was a straight line waiting to happen. "-strong enough for-"
"You give me strength." His mouth was doing absurd things to my self-control.
"You give me life." He murmured it against that incredibly sensitive spot just at the base of my ear. "You give me peace."
Which might have been the sexiest thing any man-or male Djinn-had ever said to me in my life.
"We going to talk all day?" I asked breathlessly, and felt him laugh. Not a nice laugh, and there wasn't much amusement in it, either. It was the kind of deep, rippling chuckle you might hear from the devil right before he let you see the fine print of your contract on that condo in Aruba, and dear God, it made my spine turn to water.
"That all depends on you," he said, and the hands reversed course, moved in and down. Demanding. Skimming up the thin fabric of my skirt in handfuls while he pulled me back hard against him in the same motion. "Are you in the mood to have a nice, long chat? Have some tea and cookies?"
It was not what I wanted to do with my mouth.
We fell onto the bed with a bouncing jolt. I didn't need to undress him; where my hands landed, his clothes just misted away to reveal an incredibly beautiful expanse of flawless golden skin. His eyes turned vague, half-lidded, as I stroked my fingers over his chest and down. His muscles tensed underneath them, corded cable.
He rolled us over, his weight balanced on top of me. I couldn't stop an involuntary arch in my back, and once I saw the answering glitter in his eyes I kept moving my hips. He moved back. Long, slow, hot torture.
"Yes," I whispered.
He kissed me. Not romantic, this time. Demanding. Driven by something I didn't fully understand. I'd never seen him like this before, full of a kind of frantic hunger, as if he wanted to consume me, possess me.
Own me.
This wasn't equal. It couldn't be equal, because I still held his bottle, and I'd claimed him. It was a master-slave relationship, no matter how nice the master, how willing the slave. It bothered me.
Just at this moment, I wondered if it bothered him, too.
He was too weak. If I set him free, he'd fade into smoke and hunger. Lose himself.
I couldn't let that happen. Right or wrong, I couldn't let it happen.
Chapter Four
I lay awake, later, curled against his warmth as he drew lazy magical patterns on my back. They must have been magical. Every place his hand traveled left pools of pulsing silver light inside of me. Parts of my body ached. Other parts tingled and burned. There was a bright, sun-hot throb on my neck, and another several on the insides of my thighs, and I felt as if I'd been completely, breathtakingly destroyed. If that wasn't being totally possessed, I couldn't imagine how much more I could take without shattering.
His hand glided down to the small of my back and stayed there for a couple of beats, and I felt a very, very small stirring inside.
I turned my head and looked at him. He didn't meet my eyes.
"We need to talk," I said.
"I know."
"I don't understand how this is supposed to work." I rolled over, took his hand, and placed it over my womb.
And we both felt the stirring inside. His eyes flared, then went dark.
"It's been three months," I said. "Nothing's changed."
"You're not-" He stopped, shook his head, and those long, gorgeous fingers stroked gently over my skin. Caressing me, but caressing inside me, too. "It's hard to explain."
"But I'm pregnant. Right?"
"That's what's hard to explain. She won't-grow like a human child. She's like a seed, waiting for the sun. Just... waiting."
"For how long?"
He didn't answer that one. "I should have asked you first," he said, and his hand moved again, drawing silver.
"It would have been polite, yeah."
"I did it to protect you."
"I know." At the time, it had been the only way he had known