Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows) (39 page)

"Tell me what it means, Sio," the voice that slipped her lips had a metallic resonance that overlaid her own.

A smile ghosted across his bedroom pout, incongruent with the amount of heat in his eyes. He looked at her as if he had no doubt she was still in her own body, like he could see straight into her and was unfazed by the fact a deity was riding shotgun. Tian could feel the demented inhuman energy radiating from his body in waves all the way across the room.

"It means that I'm yours, Tian."

Danu. The distinction buzzed around her brain like an electric current and the Goddess receded. He'd enunciated every syllable without hesitation. Her organs contorted in her ribcage.

"I'm terrified of my heart," she answered. "It wants so much."

Even to her own ears the sentence was practically inaudible. Sio must have heard her though, because his pupils contracted; the shock on his face was unmistakable.

"I'll do whatever you need," he told her.

He meant it.

Tian bridged the gap between them and Sio let out a violent exhalation. He watched her without moving, all coiled tension and otherworldly focus. She padded barefoot through the grass while the long blades whispered against her ankles, trying to cool the fluttering blaze that had set up residence in her flesh. She got close and stopped moving. Sio's nostrils flared as if he knew the effect he had on her, but he didn't reach out.

"Forever is a long time," Tian said.

"I believe you."

Sweet mother, was she really going to do this?

Yeah. Fuck.

Yeah she was.

She placed a hand on his chest and was rewarded with a groan that spilled from his mouth around clenched teeth. The contact exploded with an insane level of voltage. The velvet rasp of masculine skin against the pads of her fingertips was white hot, dizzying. The touch held a terrible significance. She traced the blackened scar on the muscular plane of his left pectoral. It was raised, shaped like a jagged snowflake and radiated with elegant crystalline symmetry from a small area where the iron bullet had hit. Iron...Queens tits.

"Tell me what it means again then," she said, laying a gentle kiss over the scar.

Her lips tingled where they'd come in contact with his chest as if he 'd done something to them. Sio looked at her, eyes blazing, half swallowed by the darkness of dilation. He was strung out like a high tension wire, pulse racing under her palms. The steam he was spilling rolled off of him in waves, sliding in the aphrodisiac caress of a thousand miniature lightning strikes against her skin.

"It means I'm yours. Forever."

His voice was hoarse as if it were taking the heaviest toll under his warring desire for restraint. The words hummed along her spine, causing the moisture of her own arousal to burn its way down her thighs. The steam drifting off her skin took on a golden sheen.

"Then I want all of you, not just the Waltons version you use to keep yourself safe."

Pot, meet kettle. Sio pulled back, exhaling as if she'd punched him in the solar plexus. He settled into an obscenely tight reigned stillness and looked at her. The loss of physical contact was jarring.

"You asked me what I needed," she said. The admission was almost as terrifying as he was. A strange ripple distorted the air around him. She balled her hands into fists to keep from reaching out. He had her in knots waiting for a response.

"I need you to know that I'm in love with you," Sio said.

"I know."

Sio's pupils were fully dilated. The pale rings of color that remained were glowing, blazing outward like the white hot embers of some lunatic beacon, dying stars wreathed in black flame. The binding was slipping. It had to be, or else he'd earned all of the deranged lust, and devotion, and the love that kept tripping over one another in her head. He slid his hands up the sides of her neck. The sudden connection caused her to sag against him.

"If I'm not careful you could get hurt," he said.

Careful is coupon clipping and chronic masturbation.

"Your soul isn't a cruel one. Let it go."

"You don't know that."

"Yes, I do."

Sio didn't move as the minutes ticked by. Then he leaned in, dragging her in flush with the front of his body.

****

The press of her mouth was shocking. The kiss that followed was molten hot, an orchestra of searing pleasure pain that jolted through him in near orgasmic waves, running in electric blue lines of flame through his arteries. He devoured her, working himself deeper past her lips as if he could consume the breath in her lungs.

Your soul isn't a cruel one.

To be able to believe that was too much to hope for.

Tian's mouth on his own was demanding. Her tongue plundered him around the sharp groans of pleasure that welled up in his chest. Her touch battered at the cracks in his emotional dam. A hot sweet ache bloomed in his skin as if they were already fucking and it was too tempting to give her exactly what she'd asked for.

Careful, Jesus. How was he supposed to pull that off? He didn't trust himself. And still, he wanted what she was offering more than he'd ever wanted anything in his life, which made him a selfish prick. He broke the kiss on a ragged inhalation. He wanted to bend her backward and crawl down her throat, see himself from the inside as he made love to her. The crush of her breasts against the wall of his chest was making him psychotic. He felt too much when he was with her.

Sio let go of her in the futile hope of gaining some lost perspective. Not only did that squeamish impulse fail spectacularly, he lost ground when she slid the ruined fragments of her blood-soaked shirt over her head. She discarded it behind her, but damned if he knew where it went. His palms itched so badly to reestablish contact he had to glance down at the bastards to ensure the skin was still attached.

"Sio."

His cock jerked in a sick Pavlovian response to the sound of her voice. His eyes shot back to her where she stood ankle deep in a sea of emerald green grass. The golden coils of steam spilled up around her taut curves, gliding over her skin until it glistened as if she'd been coated in diamond dust. Her hair was wild and her eyes burned in all sorts of cliched ways that he was too hard up to make allusion to. The whole scenario was beautifully evocative. Tian's fingers slid under the waistband of her jeans as she popped open the top button closure of her fly.

"Get me naked," she said.

Christ.

He shook his head trying to clear it. "I think you should ask nicely."

What the hell was he doing? Stalling? He'd asked for this. Fuck, he'd practically begged for it. If he got any hotter he'd be nuclear.

A wry smile played itself over her lips. "Stake your claim, Changeling."

He was frozen for the space of a heartbeat. When the lust enraged organ reset, the contraction pulverized his lungs. He shucked her out of the jeans, tearing them to pieces in the process.

Sio kissed her slowly, savoring her taste, savoring every nuance and sensation, until he was dumb with desire and couldn't stand the mounting tension in his cells. He broke himself on it, grabbing her with both hands around the waist and hoisting her above his shoulders. He tried not to throw them both against the nearest wall, but they hit audibly anyway and left a dent in the wall. Tian let out a soft moan that slid down his spine and made his joints melt.

He was dimly aware of adjusting his grip, of Tian spilling her legs over his shoulders so she was spread open in front of him. He couldn't think straight. The storm clean incense of her arousal permeated everything. It was maddening, so goddamned hot it was unbearable. He left a trail of slow, hard, wet kisses up the inside of her thigh. Tian's breath caught in a hundred little places as her hands roamed, outstretched, over the walls desperately seeking an anchor.

Bits and pieces of words and images that didn't feel like his own clattered around his skull like objects caught in a tornado. Those fragments whispered all sorts of things involving need and passion. They showed him dark deeds done with the sort of savior-faire that he'd been built for. They whispered of love and absolution.

Absolution, Jesus. He wanted it more that he was willing to admit, had given up hope that the stain in his skin would ever come clean. He sure as shit never thought it would come in physical form. He looked up and caught Tian staring at him. The expression on her face turned him inside out. He stared back at her, trying to find a way around the tightness in his chest. Desire was a chronic ache in the marrow of his bones.

Absolution, fuck me.

He gave into it. Sio dipped his tongue into the smooth folds of her core without breaking eye contact. The sparks under his skin reacted, ricocheting through his body in an erotic chaos of motion. The amber hue of her irises flared as she choked on a word that was hard to distinguish between a prayer and a curse.

Sio pressed his mouth into her, sucking her, working her open with his tongue, and delving deeper. Tian's head lolled back, landing hard against the wall as she gave herself up to him. The submission cut loose something rabid in the dark recesses of his psyche. He pushed her harder, faster, until he was utterly saturated in her, as if they were both in a fever dream. He couldn't have stopped now even if he'd wanted to. His whole body was vibrating, every molecule so hard he thought he'd explode, the pressure just shy of intolerable.

Tian was gasping, flushed from head to toe, steam slicked, shuddering violently, and clawing at the walls to the point where her nail beds were in bloody ruin. She came hard, arching and nearly throwing him off balance from where he was kneeling on the chaise. The insanely aphrodisiac taste of her burned as it spilled down his throat. He felt the force of her release as if it were his own, and he felt it all the way down to the soles of his feet.

Sio climbed up the front of her body, exploring her with tongue and teeth without marking her, even though he had the not so subtle inclination to do so. He lingered over her breasts, laving the tight peaks of her nipples, sucking on them, grazing them with his teeth, indulging that forbidden fantasy he'd been denied the first night he'd seen her floating in the fireplace. Soft cries were spilling from her throat, and then she was wrapping her legs around his torso, balling her fists into his hair. She wrenched his head back, prying him away from her body. Tian flashed him the kind of languorous unfocused soft smile he hadn't been aware she was capable of.

It was dazzling and unguarded. He was unable to do anything, but grin stupidly in response. She unwound the miles of satin skin in the guise of her right leg and used it to topple them both off the chaise and into the grass. Sio landed none too gently on his ass, arms flat out to brace the hit, with Tian kneeling on top of him.

She prowled down his body, leaving neon kisses in her wake while he transcended a higher plane of existence. Tian took the flesh of his hip between her teeth, her hot little mouth teasing as she applied enough pressure to leave a mark in a sharp burst of pain. She could have removed a chunk and he wouldn't have cared. Hell, he probably would have enjoyed it. Electric ambrosia sent sparks of sensory overload straight to his groin. He bowed up off the ground, balling his fists in the grass. His breath came out in ragged bursts. He barely noticed when she slid the track pants off.

A series of runes twined like wire mesh in front of him, a hazy smog like peripheral afterthought in his field of vision. He would have said something if he'd been able to pull off coherent speech or thought. He wasn't. Six months ago if anyone had told him that a woman would have been able to possess him this completely he would have laughed, but they would have been right. The sensations were too vivid, too saturated for it to be anything else.

The vibrations in his cells were getting stronger, as if the fuckers were trying to absorb her. Be absorbed by her. Who the hell knew anymore? Tian's tongue slid up the underside of his shaft and he could feel himself coming unglued. A wild breeze spun up around them like a twister. He couldn't remember when it had started or where it had come from. She swallowed him and he could feel the head of his cock nudging the satin heat at the back of her throat. The orgasm built.

"I won't last..." he said, dragging her up his body. He dragged them both to their knees. "I want it to last."

She leaned in until their lips were brushing one another.

"Make love to me then."

What else could he do? Nothing. Anything, but what she was offering was unfathomable. Sio slid his hands over her body. He luxuriated in the feel of her skin, in the look in her eyes as she watched him. She slid onto his lap easily when he tugged her to him. The sparks that shot up his erection as it grazed the slick electric heat of her core were fabulously obscene. The sensation caused him to bury his teeth into her collarbone to keep from groaning out loud. The satisfied mewling sound she made when he did it nearly saw him lose it. He was still close...too close. The smog patterns were snapping back across his skin like steel chords pulled too tight. They were flaying him even as the pleasure haze of dark ecstasy ran rampant through his system. The only thing that was holding him together was the searing heat of contact where Tian's hands rested lightly on his jaw.

The binding.

The words were crystal clear, looming like outsiders in his brain. They didn't belong there. He froze wondering if Tian could actually see what was wrong with him, wondering how in the fuck he could hear what she was thinking. How he even knew that the thought was hers.

"Sio."

Her voice still had the metallic resonance of a golden bell. It wrenched his focus around, trapped him like an insect in the amber of her irises. The pull was inexorable. So was the compulsion to get inside of her. He undulated, rocking himself against her core without penetrating. Tian came apart, red faced as the flush of climax spread through her skin again. She sat down on him hard.

He came screaming her name, locked into her gaze and buried in her body. Screw that, he broke. The release literally felt like it was tearing him to pieces. A deep spark of ancient recognition flared between them, spilling up from the earth. It filled him up and burst outward, slamming against the suffocating tension of the hazy mesh constricting his skin. Nameless wild energy was roaring in the back of his brain, roaring through the room, spinning up or leveling everything around them.