Chapter Twenty-Three #3
Then I slide my tongue down to her clit, and anything she was about to say slips from her lips instantly with a moan.
I work slowly at first, reading every shift in her breathing, every involuntary movement of her hips, every tightening of her fingers in my hair, until I have a thorough and working understanding of exactly what she needs.
Her blood is still warm on my tongue, threading through everything.
It makes the hunger and the wanting entirely indistinguishable, two things collapsed into one single, overwhelming drive that has only one name, and that name is Calypso.
Then I apply that knowledge with focused precision, centuries of patience narrowing to this moment.
My tongue moves in slow, deliberate strokes, and I keep the pressure steady until the sound she makes against her wrist tells me to change the angle, and I do, and the next sound she makes is louder than she clearly intended it to be.
She is trying very hard to stay quiet. I feel it, her legs bracketing tighter, her hand pressed to her mouth like she’s attempting to keep control, and something in me latches onto that hard.
Not a chance.
I seal my mouth around the most sensitive part of her and apply exactly the right pressure in exactly the right rhythm, and just like that, she stops trying.
The sound she makes lands in my chest and resonates outward into every dark and quiet place in me that has been silent for too long.
I want more of it.
I slide one hand up the inside of her thigh and press two fingers slowly inside her, feeling her contract around them, and she gasps above me, sharp and unguarded, her hips tilting up to meet the movement.
I work them in a slow, curling rhythm, deliberate, thorough, my tongue maintaining its pace against her.
At the same time, my fingers find the place that makes her thighs shake and stay there, merciless, because I want every sound she has been keeping carefully behind closed doors and professional distance.
I work for them one by one until she is pulling against the grip my other hand still has on her wrists, and the sounds are coming freely now, the version of her that nobody else gets to hear.
She is shaking, her hips rolling toward me in a rhythm she is no longer controlling, chasing every movement of my mouth and fingers.
I can feel the edge she is standing on in the way her thighs have clamped around me and her breathing has fragmented into something that barely qualifies as breathing at all.
I hold her there, not cruelly, not even deliberately.
I hold her there because I want this to matter when it breaks.
I want it to be the kind of thing she carries, and then I curl my fingers, increase the pressure of my mouth, and take her over it.
“Scar!” My name leaves her in one syllable, stripped of everything, no edge, no armor, just the sound of her wanting, receiving, and coming fully undone. It moves through me like a current that finds every dark and unused place in me and lights it briefly on fire.
She comes apart beneath my hands, and I work her through every second of it, keeping the rhythm until she is pulling at my hair to draw me up, oversensitive, wrecked, and still somehow managing to look at me with an expression that contains both devastation and something dangerously close to wonder.
When she finally breaks the surface, dragging in a hard breath, her free hand planted against her chest like she’s checking that her heart is still where she left it, I lift my head and look at her with an expression I know for a fact she’s going to hate.
She opens her eyes and confirms it immediately. “Don’t.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re thinking it loudly.”
“I have no idea what you’re referring to.”
She uses her still-captive wrists as leverage to push herself upright, which should not work as well as it does, and levels me with a look that aims for severity and lands somewhere considerably closer to wrecked. “Release my wrists.”
I do.
Her hands go straight to my belt. She is focused and practical, like this is just another problem she’s decided to solve.
By the time I think about helping, she’s already got it handled, because that’s who she is.
Half drowned, breathing hard, still recovering from what just happened, and somehow she’s still the most capable person on this roof.
The woman refuses to fall apart, hand her problems to somebody else, and be anything less than exactly who she is, no matter what the situation throws at her.
And somewhere in the middle of all that stubborn competence, I realize I’m in serious trouble. Because I’ve spent centuries around powerful people, but I’ve never found anything half as attractive as watching Cali be herself.
“These!” she says, meaning my jeans, with flat, practiced authority, like giving orders is second nature.
“Ask nicely.”
She meets my eyes with an expression that says she will absolutely not be doing that, then she hooks both legs around my hips and rolls us in one fluid movement. A heartbeat later she’s straddling me, both palms spread across my chest as though she’s pinned me there by force alone.
I let her.
Not because she’s beaten me. She hasn’t.
We both know exactly how this ends if I decide otherwise.
But there’s something about watching the hunter forget she’s climbed on top of a centuries-old vampire that keeps me exactly where I am.
She wears that certainty like a second skin, completely convinced she’s calling the shots.
I could prove her wrong.
I don’t particularly want to.
“Better?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.
“Infinitely,” I tell her honestly.
Cali reaches down and finishes what she started with my belt, shoving the denim off my hips with the same decisive efficiency she applies to everything.
Then there is nothing between us, and the night air is irrelevant because she is straddling my hips, and the heat of her is the only temperature that exists.
She holds herself above me, her hands braced on my chest, and for one suspended second, she looks at me—really looks, the way she looked at me earlier on the parapet, reading the scene before she commits to it, and I look back and let her see everything.
No careful management of what my face does, just eons of emptiness, looking up at the one thing that’s made it feel like a problem worth solving.
Something in her expression settles. Then she reaches down, wraps her hand around my cock, angling it up to meet her, and she sinks onto me in one slow, deliberate movement that neither of us rushes.
The sound that leaves her goes straight through me. And I feel it, too, the sharp inhale I don’t need to take but take anyway, involuntary, my head dropping back for just a moment before I find her face again because I am not wasting a single second of this not looking at her.
“Christ,” I breathe the word out, and it comes rough and unplanned.
She exhales slowly above me, her lips parted, her eyes closing briefly before they find mine again, and what’s in them when they do is not composure. It is not the careful, measured look she gives the world. It is something wide open, a little undone, and entirely, devastatingly real.
“Yeah,” she says softly. Just that. Just ‘yeah,’ in a voice that means considerably more than the word.
And the feeling?
I have no reference point for this. All these centuries, and I’ve got nothing that compares.
It’s more than the physical reality of her pressed against me, more than the heat of her skin or the strange pull of her dhampir blood meeting mine. Those things hit hard enough on their own.
This is something else.
Something that feels like finding a part of myself I stopped looking for a long, damn time ago. Like I’ve been carrying around an empty space for centuries without realizing how big it was until now.
The feeling hits deep.
Deeper than I know what to do with.
And for the first time in a very long time, I can feel every part of myself again.
“You all right?” she asks, and there is something almost careful in it, something underneath the question that is checking on me.
The fact that she is checking on me, now, like this, makes something in my chest pull tight in a way that has nothing to do with want and everything to do with her specifically, this woman, this particular version of stubborn, fierce, and quietly, relentlessly kind underneath all of it.
“No,” I tell her honestly, holding her gaze. “I don’t think I am.”
Her brow creases slightly.
“I think…” I say, my voice rough, “… you just tore down centuries’ worth of walls.” My hand slides along her jaw. “And the crazy part is, I don’t want the damn things back.”
The crease softens. Something moves across Cali’s face, quick and unguarded, there and gone, and then she leans down until her mouth is close enough to my jaw that I feel her breath when she speaks.
“Good,” she says quietly. “Hold that thought.” Then she moves, and the last of my coherence goes with it. This—the word lands in my chest like a struck chord—this is what I forgot.
My hands find her hips and hold, not gently, because gentle is not what either of us is interested in tonight, and she has made that abundantly clear.
She rolls forward over me, and the sound that comes out of my chest is rough enough to surprise even me.
It drags itself loose from somewhere deep, from a place that’s been locked down for so long I’d almost forgotten it was there.
Years of discipline, restraint, and keeping a tight grip on every damn thing, and she cuts straight through it without even trying.