3. Chapter 3
Rory
I am kissing a gargoyle three hundred feet above Saltford Bay, and somehow he is still flying.
His mouth is on mine, his eyes are mostly closed, and we are very high over some very cold water. None of that seems to concern him. His wingbeats keep rolling through his body, steady and powerful, while he kisses me like he could do both forever.
I have no idea how. I find that I don’t care.
I've gone completely crazy. Somewhere below us is the town where I am Ms. Hale, licensed professional, owner of color-coded files and one firm, sensible rule about dating coworkers.
Thing is, Ms. Hale is not on this flight. Twenty-six years of little miss perfect, always careful, always reasonable, always earning it are out the literal window. Tonight, for once in my life, I am going to do exactly what I want in the exact moment I want it.
And what I want is currently holding me like I weigh nothing and kissing me like it's his second language.
The wind roars past. His arms don't move an inch. I knot my fingers into his collar and kiss him back harder, and I feel it when we start to descend, my stomach going weightless, his wings tilting us down through the dark.
We land on a porch with one soft boom of displaced air, his knees absorbing it so smoothly I barely feel the impact.
I get a two-second impression of a nice-looking little Cape Cod, cedar shingles silver in the moonlight, white trim, woods crowding close on every side, before his mouth leaves mine and finds my neck.
"Door," I manage.
"Working on it." His voice is pure gravel against my throat. He shifts me to one arm, holding me there like it's nothing, and unlocks the door without lifting his mouth from my neck.
Inside smells like cedar and woodsmoke and that distinct mineral scent of rocks.
That's about as much attention as the house gets.
He carries me down a hallway and I get my coat off one shoulder before I give up and he peels it off me and it lands somewhere behind us.
My purse goes with it. His shirt requires teamwork, careful maneuvering around his wings until a seam gives with a rip neither of us bothers to acknowledge.
My shoes drop one at a time, little punctuation marks on the floorboards.
He never bumps me into a single wall or doorframe, and then his hands find the zipper of my skirt and I stop noticing the house entirely.
By the time we reach the stairs I've lost the skirt. By the top of them, the tights, which do not survive and honestly were never going to. He walks me backward into a bedroom that runs the whole length of the house, rafters overhead, moonlight coming through wide glass doors and lying across the floor in long silver bars. The air in here is genuinely cold, much colder than any interior I’ve ever been in. As cold as outside.
I barely feel it. I press both palms flat against his bare chest and I feel the heat coming off of him in blazing waves.
"Your skin," I say. "It feels so hot."
Granite, warm as a sun-baked wall in July, under my hands. All that cold carved stone I've watched across a staff room for a year, and it's burning.
"You're the reason I'm on fire." He says it low and rough and completely without armor, and then his hand comes up and cradles the whole side of my face.
Those green eyes move over me, standing there in the moonlight in nothing but my underwear and my wrecked lipstick, and he says, "You're beautiful. Perfect."
Oh no.
The words hit somewhere much more dangerous than lust. I do the only sensible thing available to a woman in my position, which is refuse to look at that too closely.
"So," I say, tipping my chin up at him, sweet as whipped cream. "Given up on your threat, Coach?"
His face changes.
The smirk arrives slow, one corner of that carved mouth curling, and it is not the staff-room deadpan and it is not the pie-dispute scowl.
It is purely, gorgeously predatory, and every drop of blood I own reports for duty at once.
A new kind of heat spreads between my legs and my clit pulses to life.
"No," he says.
The world rotates. One second I'm standing; the next I'm over his shoulder, upside down, with a truly premium view of the small of his back, yelping like I didn't spend the whole flight over asking for exactly this.
Three unhurried steps. A bed comes into view beneath me, an enormous timber four-poster, and then I'm rotating again, and I land face-down across his thighs with my pulse trying to punch its way out of my throat.
His palm smooths over my backside, slow, taking its time. My underwear goes south with zero ceremony and then I’m completely bare.
"Last chance to apologize for the pie," he says.
"It was delicious," I say, "and I'd do it again."
"That's what I thought."
The first swat lands.
It's a big hand. It is a very big hand, and the sound of it cracks through the cold room, and the sting blooms hot and bright and goes straight to my clit.
I gasp into the quilt and my hips move on their own, and beneath my braced hands his thigh is scalding, stone gone furnace.
Knowing I'm the reason he's this hot sends another rush of wetness straight through me.
Another swat. Then another. He's unhurried about it, rhythmic, giving me time to feel every one, and between them his fingers trail down and dip between my pussy lips, light, teasing.
I'm already soaked enough that the first touch makes me shudder.
Each pass of his fingers pulls a sound out of me I've never made in my life.
Each swat lands a little lower, a little better.
"You're dripping," he observes, his tone gone thick and smug. His fingers slide through my folds, from my clit all the way to my opening, unbearably slow.
"You're gloating."
"Maybe." His palm cracks against me again, and my whole body jolts and clenches.
By the time he stops, I'm shaking, my backside on fire, my fingernails full of quilt, my dignity somewhere at the bottom of the bay, unmourned. His hand settles warm and enormous over the sting, holding it in.
"Well?" And I can hear the smirk without seeing it. "Learned your lesson?"
I turn my head and look up at him over my shoulder, hair everywhere, and give him my sassiest grin.
"Not even close."
The sound he makes is half growl, half something darker, and I'm airborne again.
He flips me onto my back on that acreage of bed like I'm made of paper, hooks my knees over his shoulders, and kneels down between my legs.
The sight of him there, all muscles and granite folded down onto his knees for me, wings rising behind his shoulders and green eyes fixed on mine, is going to be burned into the inside of my skull until the day I die.
"Hold on to something," he says.
I get one hand around the bedpost, and then his mouth is on me and I forget why I needed the bedpost in the first place.
He eats me slowly, thoroughly, like he has all night and intends to use it. The cold room fills up with sounds I will deny ever producing. I grip the bedpost. I grip his hair with the other hand. His growl of approval hums straight up through me and my hips come off the quilt.
"Bram." His name comes out broken in the middle.
He doesn't stop. He keeps the same maddening rhythm while I climb higher, my thighs tightening around his shoulders, my fingers pulling at his hair.
When I come, everything in me locks around the pleasure and then lets go at once.
I arch off the bed with his name spilling out of me, the orgasm rolling through me until the moonlight blurs white behind my eyes.
He stays with me through every aftershock, his hands firm on my thighs until I finally go limp beneath him.
My breathing comes back first. Then the room. Rafters. Moonlight. Bram lifting his head, chin shining, green eyes gone almost black.
He pushes his slacks down, and my mouth goes dry.
His cock is long and thick, proportioned to the rest of him in a way that makes seven feet of gargoyle suddenly feel very intimidating.
A thrill shoots through me, chased by a sharp flicker of nerves.
I want him, badly, but the thought of taking all of him is a little terrifying.
"I really want to fuck you now," he says. Rough. Frayed at the edges. After everything he just did to me, the fact that he says want instead of simply taking nearly undoes me again.
And my mouth, my incorrigible, doomed, undefeated mouth, gets there before the rest of me can vote.
"What are you waiting for, written permission?"
"That fucking mouth," he growls, and he climbs up over me, blocking out the rafters, the moonlight, the entire known world, and enters me in one long, deep motion.
The sound I make is not a word in any language.
He's huge. He is a lot, is what he is, a slow, overwhelming stretch that borders on too much and then simply refuses to cross the border.
He bottoms out inside me and he stills there, buried deep, every muscle in him locked and trembling with the effort of waiting while my body adjusts around him.
His forehead drops to mine. His breath is hot and smells of my own release.
His skin is blazing everywhere we touch.
"Okay," I whisper, when it turns from too much into nowhere near enough. "Okay. Move."
He moves.
Slow at first, long strokes that pull the floor out from under me, and then deeper, his hips settling into a rhythm with real intent behind it, and the four-poster starts knocking steadily against the wall.
I wrap my legs around him as far as they'll go, and dig my fingers into his shoulders like warm bedrock, and somewhere above us his wings unfurl.
All the way. Full spread, wall to wall, slate membrane with pale striations lit up silver by the moon, an entire private sky opening over me, and I forget how to breathe for reasons that have nothing to do with his size.
I reach up and run my fingers along the membrane.
He shudders. Every inch of him goes taut over me, his next thrust losing its rhythm as a groan tears out of his chest.
"The wings," he grinds out, "are very sensitive."
"Good."
I do it again. Both hands this time, fingertips trailing down the warm silk-thin membrane, and his control slips another notch. He swears into my neck and drives into me harder, and the discovery is intoxicating: this huge, controlled man comes apart when I touch his wings.
I stroke the membrane again. His mouth finds my throat. His hips turn rougher, deeper, and for a while neither of us says anything coherent.
The second orgasm doesn't announce itself. It just arrives, enormous, rolling up through me and clamping down around him, and I cry out and rake my fingers along both wings at once.
That does it.
He bottoms out and roars. Actually roars, a sound that shakes the rafters while his wings snap rigid above us. He pulses deep inside me, and I shudder around him with my hands still spread over warm slate membrane.
For a long time, neither of us moves. His weight comes down beside me, careful even now, one arm dragging me into the burning wall of his chest. The room is cold on my sweat-damp skin, and then it isn't, because his wings fold around me, both of them, a warm, dark canopy of slate and silver closing out the moonlight, and I am cocooned in gargoyle.
For once, I don't have anything clever to say.
His heartbeat is slow and enormous under my ear, his skin fever-warm against the cold air, and the last thing I register is the faint smell of hot stone as sleep drags me under.