Odd Melody (Odd Series Book 2) (26 page)

When those hands slid lower, a sigh escaped.

“You can’t possibly drive me as near to insanity as I can drive you. I can control your body. You are…” He paused and nibbled his way down my ear to my neck. “You are weak.”

I caught my breath. Part of me, a tiny rational part, understood that he baited me. But only a tiny part of me could handle rational. The larger part of me ached. Emotionally and physically, I had grown ragged and hungry and…terribly feral. And that wild, raw part of me accepted his challenge. I wriggled in his arms. “I can do anything you can do, even half starved.”

“Prove it.” He bit my shoulder. His teeth then grazed lower.

My eyes closed without conscious thought, and my breath steadied to a slow even pace. I slid my hands down his sides, barely grazing his heated flesh. My lips moved over his collarbone. I licked the power from his skin. Just enough so that I could see clearly and fight back. And then, when I had enough strength to use my arms correctly, I pushed off and arched over him. I gazed down at him. His eyes glittered at me, challenging me. He still had not breached my shields. I wondered if I could shatter his.

I decided to try. I would demolish them. I slid my hands down his body intent on driving him mad. I coerced him with hands and mouth and tongue. I drove him with the promise of skin and flesh and what was to come. Then I pulled back.

Finally when he was gasping, when his hands groped, and his eyes glazed over, only then did I take his lips with mine. I allowed him to press his power into my mouth. His hands clenched in my hair. He nearly forced the pure energy down my throat. I heard a sound and realized he had yelled, but our mouths muffled the words.

My shields crashed when his power hit me like an avalanche of white-hot heat. My eyes went blind from the light. So much of it came all at once, that I wondered if I would ever see again. He linked to me with a mental shout to match the verbal. His joy and relief washed over me as if it were my own. I could also feel the reverberation of the terror, the fear of losing me that he’d hidden.

Again, he tried to shut me off from all of his emotions but the barrier had fallen. He shifted and rolled on top of me.

My hands, though, clung to his head. I clung like a briar. I fed. I clung and fed.

I felt Chance putting up barriers to replace the ones that had fallen, creating space between our minds. But I needed him. Without thinking through my motives, I pleaded for him to stay…
No, don’t leave me. I let you in. Don’t leave me when I let you in
.
I don’t want to be alone anymore.
 

He stilled. The road went two ways. He slanted those lips across mine and turned the motion to a kiss. His clever fingers slid over my body, building the fire between us to a higher level.

I gasped. I had not expected him to take my surrender and build on it. My eyes flashed open, and I released his head. He backed up and met my gaze. I breathed fast. Light flickered and the cocoon surrounded us.

“Chance.” I streaked a hand into his auburn curls so I could see him more clearly. “What are you doing?”

“Mine now.” His guttural voice sounded as primal as his thinking at that moment.

“I have to get back.” I tried to stroke and soothe the beast I’d unwittingly awakened. “I fed. You have to get me back to my engagement party.”

“I
will
claim you.” His hand shaped the curve of my face, thumb stroking. “Soon. Now.”

“No.” My breath sped and my heart raced despite my protest. My hands on his body could feel the thrum of his pulse.

“Soon. You can feel it. Our time is close.” His breath stirred my hair as he whispered the words in my ear.

I shook my head.

His body and skin pressed to mine. The only thing separating us was sheer force of will. But as my reasons against him dissolved, so did my willpower. Vance chose Julia. He did not want me. Chance was mine. My very soul answered to his. My pulse beat in tune with his. My breath came in time with his.

Not yet. I am not ready for complete surrender yet.
I pushed on his chest.

His eyes pressed closed, and he pushed up and off of me. He seemed angry. “Yet. Fine. Not
yet
.” He glared down at me. “Admit I am right, at least.”

“I feel something building. I don’t know any more if I will be able to stop what is happening. I don’t know how much I ever had a choice in anything between us.”

He clenched his jaw. “I wish you would admit something more appealing to my ego. Like you couldn’t resist me.”

I grinned at him.

He glared at me.

“I can’t resist you. You are a hunk, a hunk of burning love.” I continued to keep a straight face for most of a moment. Then I sniggered.

He glared harder.

Laughter burst from me, clean and healing.

“Really?” He tried to sound admonishing, but his eyes crinkled with laughter. “I can at least be serious.”

“Yeah, you are the epitome of seriousness.” I laughed harder and shards of the light that surrounded us fell as I messed with his mojo. But as I laughed, the whole scenario replayed in my head.

He had saved me, again, when I had chosen to be stubborn and stupid. I couldn’t starve myself. It served no purpose. It wouldn’t make me less a monster, all it would accomplish would be to make there be one less monster on the earth. I was not sure I was selfless enough to do that for the good of the world. So, I owed him one. But, really, how much of his behavior was for me? Chancellor was not anyone’s definition of selfless.

More of the light shards fell, and I could see a range of emotions on his face. I could almost see him plotting ways to distract me from thinking things through.

Chance only did things that at the end of the day benefited Chance. So how did saving me save Chance? He admitted he had become addicted to me…what did that mean, exactly? And that yell, right when I had begun to feed in earnest…I narrowed my eyes.

He ducked his head and didn’t meet my stare.

“You are enjoying it, somehow. The feeding…it does something for you.”

It wasn’t a question because our minds were linked and as soon as the thought formed, I knew the answer.
Yes. It felt good. It provided a release.
He built up power, too much power. He had always had power…like some kind of living generator. That’s how he popped in and out. Chance was living energy. And since he had started feeding me, his levels had increased to meet the increased demand.

If I didn’t feed, he had nothing to do with the excess power, so it backed up. He had become more addicted because I had been feeding regularly and now he did not know how to stop making the extra go-go juice, so to speak. He needed me to feed to take the surplus. When I fed, it pleasured us both. What had started as something out of crisis, something he did to meet a need, had shifted to a necessity for us both.

I shoved him off me and pinned him. “Did you know it would work like that?”

“Do you think I would have tied myself to
this
if I had known?”

Had he intentionally created a need for me? Tied himself to my weakness on purpose? No. That didn’t fit his profile at all. Chance didn’t want to need anything. He had bound us by mistake.

It was one hell of an error.

“Do you get off on it every time I feed?”

His eyes closed.

“Answer me!” I hit him. If not mostly naked, I might have seemed more threatening.

His eyes peered up at me. He grinned slowly and took me in, as if my nudity had not occurred to him until I had thought of it.

“Well.” He licked his lips, finally. “You can’t say you don’t enjoy the process, Janie.”

I huffed a breath. That wasn’t my fault. I stood and began to dress.

He came behind me and kissed my shoulders, and I went still. “If I tell you there is no one I would rather be tied to…that the more I am with you, the more I know you, see you, hear you, smell you, I am glad it is you, would that make it any better for you?”

I breathed. Slowly in and out. If I just breathed and didn’t speak, perhaps for once I wouldn’t say the wrong thing. “Why?”

“I like that you’re so stubborn, that you fight and question everything. I like that you want to be good and help people, even if it doesn’t always work. I like that you’re brave. I like you. I like to touch you and look at you. If I have to be tied to someone, Janie, I am glad it is you.”

I turned in his arms and kissed him.

The thing about Chance, about this thing between us, was that he hung out inside my head. He saw the dirty bits, but he liked me anyway. Well, it became hard to think he didn’t know the real me. Especially since I could see the real him, and he sometimes wasn’t as awful as I might have thought.

 “I like you, too.”

“Progress.” And with that, he helped me button my blouse.

CHAPTER Fifteen

I burrowed into Chance’s warm neck and shivered slightly. “Couldn’t you have popped us back inside the Winery?”

“It isn’t always easy to do that without attracting attention, especially when traveling with a ‘princess’ and besides it is not ‘popping’ no matter how often you refer to it as such. It is not popping or beaming or—”

“Do you have a better word for it?” I tilted my head back to gaze up at his disturbing eyes and one of his red curls brushed my forehead.

He seemed thoughtful. “Not really.”

“Well then.”

He opened the door for me as none of the door holding people seem to have noticed we’d arrived. I entered and headed down the hall to the party. The building no longer blurred and wove around me, so I noted the lovely aspects of the Winery. We stepped down three stone steps into a wide room that had a slate floor polished to a mirror like finish. If anyone fell on that floor, they would win a trip to the emergency room. The insurance premiums on the place had to be enormous…booze combined with a big death floor struck me as a bad idea.

We went down a wide hall, one side all glass, the other painted with classy portraits of area landscapes. Oversized potted plants provided bits of color sporadically and doors led into rooms with names that amused me like the Merlot room and the Current Corner. Of course, Chance, far classier than I, and not interested in reading doorplates, continued on. Perhaps the room at the end of the hall with the double doors that led to my mother’s torture de jour simply did not intimidate him.

My engagement party, which had not seemed daunting when I was semi-conscious, now had me twitchy. Fully with it, so to speak, I became aware that I had danced with Chance in a way not done by sober people in a place like that, not to mention he had looked like Vance at the time. Then we had disappeared.

Although I had planned to behave badly, gyrating with a hot guy, other than my fiancé, went far beyond what I had intended. I didn’t want to be on the fairy council. However, I also didn’t want Mother’s people to see me as a complete…words failed me.

Chance opened the doors to a party in full swing. Then again, my mother, the queen, would have covered for me as well as possible.

I froze.

Chance held the door for a moment and waited for me to enter ahead of him before he realized I had no intention of moving. He took my arm and led me in. His arm tightened around me to snuggle me close. The warmth of his body seeped through my thin silk shirt. I glanced over to see what he wore, curious.

I guess when we had gotten dressed would have been a good time to notice such things, but my focus had been on repairing my own damages.

Chance in evening clothing could only be described as a treat to the eye. Auburn curls were tamed and hung in a neat swing around his patriarchal face. In an outfit nearly as simple as mine, he wore a plain black shirt that probably cost as much as I made in a week, but collarless, buttoned to his neck. As he was neither deathly pale, nor tan but more the color of peaches, the shirt showcased his color nicely. Black dress slacks topped shiny black shoes and, other than that, he wore nothing in the way of accessories. He was the man in black, a Johnny Cash made of power and life.

He caught my study and quirked a brow above those amazing green eyes. All that black emphasized the brightness and intensity of his emerald eyes. I suddenly wanted to kiss him for no reason other than because of his raw beauty. That was something new. I frowned at him instead.

He lingered in my head, not a full connection, but a slight brushing of our minds. If he could not decipher the exact train of my thoughts, he got the gist. He smiled slightly and kissed my forehead. “You worry too much.”

“Or not enough.” But then we had company.

“Where have you been?” My mother glared at me. Her filmy skirt floated below a tight fitted bodice. Diamonds iced her swanlike neck. Like a tiny gothic queen, she was a portrait done in black and whites. She had dressed royals in black, and I wondered if the fact some in my group wore black or bits of it went against her plan. Then again, she hadn’t invited most of the people I brought.
Oh, well. It’s my party, I can Goth my friends if I want to.
 

“Out.” Monosyllabic conversations. Again, always a friend.

“This I noticed.” She raised a hand to touch her perfect hair. “What were you doing to everyone before you left? Everyone was in an uproar.”

Chance tucked me closer to his side. “We had business to attend to, your Majesty.”

I frowned up at him. For one, I did not like him answering for me. For two, I did not like him kissing up to my mom.

He pinched my side. Not gently either.

“Well, I hope you will behave better. This is not a good example. They will make some allowances due to your dual nature, but really, Janie.” Her stern expression did not match her festive garb.

Temptation prompted me to say many things however, another pinch made me yelp instead.

My mother eyed Chance suspiciously.