Devon #2
He was cooler than human, but heat lived under the skin like banked coals.
I wrapped my fingers around him and felt him give—silk over steel, thick and solid in my palm.
The weight of him made my wrist ache in the best way.
He twitched when I stroked him, a little involuntary jerk that answered some impish, powerful part of me.
My slick made the glide salt-smooth; I slid my hand from base to crown and back again, twisting just a little at the top the way instinct told me would undo him.
His eyes went heavy-lidded and predatory.
His hips rocked into my fist without his permission, slow, then harder when I tightened my grip.
The breath he dragged in sounded like it scraped his ribs.
I loved it. I loved that I could wring noises from him that he didn’t make for anyone else.
He covered my wrist with his big hand as if to slow me, then didn’t slow me at all.
“Devon,” he said, and my name in that mouth felt like a ritual.
“Inside,” I whispered, guiding him lower. “I want to feel you.”
He shifted, bracing a forearm by my head, and followed my hand with terrible concentration.
The blunt head nudged at my entrance, slick and hot, and every muscle low in my belly tried to drag him in.
He pressed forward a fraction, and the stretch lit up nerves I didn’t know had names.
I hissed; not pain exactly, but a full ache that demanded breath and attention.
He stilled immediately. “Tell me.”
I breathed through my open mouth and met his eyes so he could see the truth. “It’s good. It’s… a lot.”
His forehead rested against mine for a heartbeat like a prayer. He pushed another inch, and I felt myself open around him, my body solving for him, deciding yes. The urge to clench and to relax fought inside me and then resolved as my hips tilted, offering him the angle I wanted.
“Don’t go slow,” I heard myself say. I wasn’t sure if I was brave or foolish, but the hunger riding me didn’t care.
His control snapped like silk. He drew his hips back a breath and then drove into me in one long, sure stroke, seating himself all the way.
It stole my sound and gave it back louder.
The sensation of being filled like that—stretched, claimed, completed—made my vision pulse.
The look on his face went from human-beautiful to inhuman, to something that had found a home after starving for centuries.
We froze, locked together, and I felt something click in the space behind my breastbone. Not a sound. Not even a sensation I could describe to a mortal. Just a current completing a circuit, a hummingbird wingbeat that belonged to a bond I’d tried not to believe in until it was too late to doubt.
“Look at me,” he said.
“I am,” I answered, and it was the truth.
He started to move. Slow at first because I needed it; the stretch was a living creature now, purring and baring its teeth.
He pulled out until the wide head almost slipped free and then pushed back in with a roll of his hips that dragged along every place I could be sensitive.
My body took him differently each time—as if learning him, customizing him, drawing a map in wet heat.
I clutched his shoulders, nails for a moment, then fingers.
He didn’t flinch, only thrust harder, like he wanted reminders.
“Beautiful,” he said between thrusts. “You are… impossibly beautiful. You feel like you were made to take me.”
I was not offended by the possession in his voice. I wore it like I’d been born to it. “I was,” I panted, meeting him. “More. Don’t stop. There—like that—God, yes.”
The bed complained softly under us, a rhythm of wood and breath, of skin slipping and catching.
He adjusted his angle and hit a place inside me that made my toes curl and my throat tighten.
Pleasure arrowed up my spine; I arched to chase it; he followed, unerring.
The sound of him filled the room—his breath stuttering, the faint grind of teeth when I clenched around him.
He reached down and hooked my knee higher over his hip, opening me impossibly wider, and the drag of him got deeper, a delicious bruise pressed against something that begged to be pressed.
I was not quiet. I didn’t know how to be, not with him putting me back inside my own skin like this, not with my whole body singing in a language that had been beaten out of me and now re-learned with every thrust. Words tumbled out.
Praise and filth. “Perfect.” “More.” “Yours.” “Please.” Prayers to a god I didn’t know how to believe in and to the monster I did.
He bent and took my mouth, swallowing my cry as he drove in hard enough to make the headboard knock the wall once.
The slick, obscene stretch of me around him drew a raw sound out of him that fed me straight back to the edge.
He broke the kiss only to mouth along my jaw, down to the spot he’d studied earlier at my throat.
My pulse pounded there like it wanted his name stamped over it.
He slowed. Not his restraint—his intent. His hand slid under my back, lifting me into him until we were welded together, chest to chest, heart to heart. He rested his lips where the beat hammered.
“My mate,” he said, so low I barely caught it. “I will love you as long as I am allowed to walk this earth. I will guard you with what remains of my soul. I will choose you, in blood and in shadow, every dawn that tries to take me. Do you hear me?”
Everything in me answered before my mouth could. I nodded, frantic. “Yes. I hear you.”
“Then I take you,” he whispered, and his fangs slid against my skin.
The pierce wasn’t a stab. It was a double-awakening—sharp and sweet, twin hot kisses that broke the surface and sank into heat.
Pain flared quick and bright, and then turned, instantly, into a bloom of something that wasn’t quite pleasure and wasn’t quite hunger.
It was both and more, a dizzying rush that stole the feeling from my fingers and set it on fire somewhere low in my belly.
He drank slow, reverent pulls that I felt everywhere. There was a thread from my throat straight to the place where our bodies met, and every swallow tugged it taut. I clenched around him without meaning to; he hissed against my neck and drove into me again, deeper, and my world folded.
The scars on my back woke like struck flint.
Not pain—spark. Heat shimmered under the skin there, a thousand pinpricks of electricity racing along the phantom lines where feathers should have attached.
The sensation spread outward in invisible wings and then snapped back inward, no place to go yet, all of it channeled into the pitch and roll of my body taking him.
I came the way a tether snaps. There was no build left, only a violent, exquisite detonation.
My cries turned into something wordless; my clenched body tried to pull him farther inside as if there were any farther to go.
The bite sweetened and burned and lifted me so high I lost the outline of my edges.
Everything brightened. I felt too big for my skin and too perfectly contained.
He didn’t stop moving. He fucked me through it, careful and relentless, murmuring things against my neck that might have been endearments or might have been curses in a language older than shame.
Vision flashed white; the room went far away; I held on to his shoulders like driftwood and let the undertow take me.
When the wave finally eased, it didn’t let me go so much as set me down gentler.
I was still trembling around him, every little aftershock milking him, every breath a prayer that he would never leave my body again.
He pulled his fangs free at last, slow, and lapped at the punctures until the sting faded, and my heart could stand the beat of itself.
I didn’t know if the night outside moved or if the world paused to watch us. I knew only this bed, this man, this breath syncing to mine while the echoes of us went on and on under my skin.