Chapter 10 #2
Laughter shakes through him ever so quietly. It surprises me so much that my own smile changes from something forced to something genuine. He makes it that easy. How does he do that?
“What? Tell me?” I press.
His eyes close, and he suddenly can’t look at me. Oh my god. Is this beautiful, immortal vampire … embarrassed ?
“Tell me!” I’m smiling so hard now, and it keeps building the more he laughs.
“You said the strangest . . .”
I nod. I wait. I fucking die wanting to know.
“Um—” Why can’t he meet my eyes right now? “My fae magic... it—it changes parts of me to better... comfort my... mate.”
I blink at him for a long, long moment, but as hard as I try, I have no fucking idea what he’s trying to say.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“It’s—nothing. Never mind.”
“No! Tell me! Please!”
“No.” He shakes his head and pulls back from me as if he might just walk away from the most enthralling conversation that we haven’t even had yet.
“You have to! Please!” I pull him back to me, our arms bumping slightly and sending a fluttering sensation all through me.
I blink through the strange feeling of attraction. Jesus, I cannot have a crush on my kidnapper! I’m better than that…
Kind of.
The moment my shining eyes meet his, he breaks with a boyish smile that melts my entire soul.
“When my dick gets wet, it changes sizes to completely fill up who I’m fucking!”
My lips part with silence and awe.
“Oh,” I say for the thousandth time.
“Yeah.”
“What happens when it rains?”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I blink at him innocently for a few seconds and pretend like his cock doesn’t need a special umbrella of its own.
I swallow hard as the idea of that fills up my mind. My thighs shift, and the open shirt I’m holding tickles along my skin there.
I try desperately to stop thinking about how good that must feel. I try. And I fail.
Finally, logic slips in. He still doesn’t meet my awestruck gaze.
“I—I didn’t mean to press you. I’m sorry. I just wanted a distraction, I guess. I feel—I feel too fucking much right now,” I confess on a sigh.
There’s a lingering quiet before he meets my eyes once more with a heavy stare.
“I can fix that,” he whispers.
My brows lift high, and several steady beats of my heart pass the time as we stare at one another. I realize he’s still holding my hand in his. It’s an easy intimacy I hadn’t noticed until now.
“Um—”
“I can read people’s reality. And I can also manipulate their reality. I can bend what you perceive as real.”
“Oh. Right.” Of course. Yeah. Why would I think he’s offering to fuck me when he’s just showing me the kindness of scrambling my mind?
The words fill up continue to chant through my thoughts over and over again. Like the harder I try not to think about his magical cock, the more it thrusts its way into my imagination.
“Yeah, um, I think I’m good on the reality manipulation right now.”
Dimples frame his smile in the sexiest way possible. Along the short cut of his dark brown hair, I note how slightly tipped his ears are. A lotus flower and vines are tattooed at the very edge at the peak of the point. It’s a subtle image of thin inking lines, but it holds beauty.
Subtle beauty: that’s exactly what Seven is.
“What if it was just for a moment?” He arches a dark eyebrow at me and... wait, is he offering to fill me up?
“How does that work?” I ask skeptically.
“It’s my magic that I gift to you. You do with it whatever you want. I won’t control your mind.”
The way Rorrick’s voice entered my head earlier crosses my thoughts. He helped me.
And this man, I think he wants to help me too.
“Okay,” I whisper with far too much uncertainty for someone who just agreed to be the next test subject in MK-Ultra.
He turns our hands, his thumb brushing back and forth along my knuckles. He has nice hands. Deep veins line his forearms down to long steady fingers.
I’m seriously attracted to this vampire’s hands now? Okay. The bar for men is set so incredibly low. Show me some sexy hands, and my panties are coming off.
“Close your eyes, Crymson,” he says on a gentle command.
My lashes flutter closed, and I have to be out of my fucking mind, but I want it. I’d choose a mental break from reality over this nightmare I’ve landed in.
“Good girl,” he hums the moment I do it. The shiver that flits through me from his words alone tells me I shouldn’t be as trusting as I am with this man or his magic.
I’m alone in a bedroom with an admitted vampire. And now I’m trusting him with literally everything I have.
I have got to fix my fucked-up life at some point.
“You can trust me. And you should know you can trust me, because I didn’t have to ask your permission to change your reality, Crymson.”
Alarm bells ring out in my mind.
“Wait. What . . .”
But then it’s all washed away. I hear it even. Waves sweep in, and they pull away in a hypnotic rhythm of an ocean and nature and tranquility.
I can’t see anything but darkness. I still feel his touch though. I tighten my hold on him. My hands in his ground me. It’s a coolness that I cling on to. Maybe it’s some of my fear clinging to him. Because I may want to slip away into whatever magic this is, but I don’t want to do it alone.
The wind picks up violently, my hair slashing across my face. A hurricane of emotions threatens to spill into the tranquil setting he’s giving me, and it terrifies me that I might ruin this before it has even begun.
“Relax,” I hear him whisper.
“I—I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Just breathe.”
I shake my head back and forth with a jagged breath that only makes me more tense.
“I can’t,” I say on a shaking exhale. “I haven’t felt relaxed in ….” Possibly my entire life.
It’s starting to become too much. Everything keeps building up more and more and maybe that was fine when I was a little girl with little girl problems, but everything has just become entirely too out of fucking control now!
“Think of something else. Anything else.”
“Can I kiss you?” I blurt, and the moment I ask it, he fully appears.
The winds calm. The chaotic energy recedes.
His tall stature comes to life out of the darkness like I drew him from the shadows.
A shy smile curls Seven’s full lips. He leans in, his head dipping low as the feel of warm sand beneath my feet becomes a sudden reality.
Nothing else matters. The most beautifully broken man is holding me.
A perfect sunset that I can’t yet see warms my skin.
Cold water materializes. It slides up against my ankles before slipping back into an unseen ocean.
I want to fold into his arms and never lift my head again. Most of my life I’ve looked for comfort in someone else. I just haven’t ever felt it until now.
“Close your eyes, Crymson,” he commands confidently when his lips are just over mine, hovering but not quite touching.
Everything is intensified. It’s like my entire life, I’ve been feeling things at a lower vibration, and I’m just now experiencing the world as it truly is.
Shivers race up my arms the second his hands slide down my body.
My lashes close the moment he commands it.
I stand waiting. I’ve never felt so alive.
Every nerve in my body tingles with anticipation.
Or maybe that’s his magic.
“I can hear your heartbeat.” Those words kiss across my lips, but that’s all he gives me.
My throat tightens as I swallow hard, and still, I wait. I want to feel him closer. I want everything he can give me, if only for a little while.
“I’m not allowed to taste you,” he whispers, his words skimming along my jaw and throat.
His breath is a light sensation that shivers all through me.
My thighs press hard with a tingling in my core that I can’t ignore as his lips brush ever so carefully at the base of my neck.
“If I kiss you... I’ll want more. And that’s not allowed. ”
The solidness of his chest is against mine as I shift even closer against him, pressing myself against every hard part of his body.
“Who says you’re not allowed?” I ask, my lips grazing the shell of his ear. The slight tremble of his body against mine pulls a smile at the corner of my mouth.
He’s so stiff and quiet usually. It feels good to tear all of that tense silence away from him with just the flutter of my breath along his ear.
“Mmm, too many people.” His hand slides lower, and soon I’m arching against his touch before it firmly slips over the curve of my ass. The fabric of my button-down shirt wrinkles between long, exploring fingers.
I’ve played games for survival all my life.
I’ve used my body and my looks even when I was little and confused and scared in too many shitty foster homes.
It’s how I started dating Van. He took me in on my seventeenth birthday.
I thought he saved me. Really, he brought me right into his abusive, toxic love, and I was too damn young to realize it.
But right now, this doesn’t feel like a game. I’m not trying to survive.
I’m trying to escape. For a little while.
And I think Seven is too.
My lashes lift slowly, and I look up at those warm, brown puppy dog eyes.
“What if you don’t taste me?” I ask as I lean back into the trunk of a palm tree that abruptly appears.
The big leaves above rustle in the warm breeze.
The softness of his smile returns when he notices the tree I’ve grown from his magic.
I could get used to this. It’s kind of nice here in this psychotic break from reality that I’m painting to life.
“What do you mean?” He searches my face.
His quiet confusion is laced with a knowing look that feels far too intimate.
Sexy even.
With the support of the tree behind me, I lift my thighs against him.
I let him pin me there with just the weight of his hips pressing hard into mine as I ever so slowly wrap my legs around his waist. And he’s quick to grip me firmly against himself.
Sharp nails dig into my curves and he seems to force himself not to move an inch.