Chapter 17
Baneful
Boneless, Malachy thought as he laid beside her, brushing hair back from her drowsy face. If only he could say the same for himself.
He adjusted his erection. The honeyed musk of her on his tongue, the sweet agony of her moaning his name... He could watch her come like that for the rest of his life.
When Cora fell asleep within a few minutes, his masculine ego was as swollen as his cock.
Careful not to wake her, he extracted himself and traversed into the bathroom. Bracing an arm against the closed door, he released his rigid length and bit back a loud groan. Christ, he was close.
Her arousal slicked his fingers as he slid them down his shaft, pumping in long strokes. His thumb slipped in the moisture beading on the tip, his juices and hers.
His favorite fantasy took off. Gripping her hips and taking her from behind, watching himself disappear inside of her from every angle before the beveled mirrors of the vanity.
Her moans joining the lewd symphony of wet, slapping flesh.
Crying out as she came around his cock, milking every drop from him as he filled her up—
“Fuck,” he groaned. Fisting his cock, his release spilled in hot spurts.
He rested his forehead on the door and released a shuddering breath. Jesus, he hadn’t come that hard in… a while.
Gathering the tatters of his self-control, he cleaned himself up and slid back into bed, curled around her warm, slumberous body.
Sleep found him with a smile on his lips.
Malachy awoke to languorous golden sunlight and a beautiful woman pressed against him.
Chestnut hair spilled across silk sheets still damp in the light of morning with had been done in the dark of night. He hadn’t slept that well since the last time they had slept together, before Moneta and Ishtar had nipped Cora’s trust in him in the bud.
The only bud he was currently concerned with was at the apex of her thighs. His fingers ached to touch her.
He turned on his side to face her, kissed by morning sunlight on rumpled sheets. Slowly, his hand slid down her stomach, through the thatch of dark curls, to tease what he had tasted so thoroughly last night.
She stirred with a low sound from her throat that wrapped around his cock like a fist. His groan was lost in her hair.
“Dreaming of me again, love?” His lips caressed the shell of her ear as his thumb circled her clit. When his hand drifted lower, her thighs parted for him. A long finger coaxed apart her lower lips, stroking through slickness, painting her with her arousal.
“Malachy,” she breathed. “I want…”
“Tell me.”
Her hand covered his, pressed against her core, guiding him to her entrance. “Slowly.”
“Slowly.” He dipped inside her wet heat, and she tensed. “Look at me.” She met his eyes as his finger eased deeper, slowly sinking in. The trust in those blue depths, the flare of her pupils as he filled her.
She threw her head back on a thready moan. Her inner muscles fluttered around him, squeezing.
“Jesus, so tight,” he rasped in her ear. “So perfect. Just feel it, Cora. Does it feel good?”
Lips parted on a gasp, then softened on a sigh. “Yes.”
With each sigh, each moan, he calibrated the angle and pressure of his touch. Light circles and slow, deep strokes. Teasing her swollen bud, gentle at first, then firmer, faster. He curled against a spot deep inside her that made her clench and kept stroking, feeling her every muscle tighten.
Gaze rapt on her face, he watched all the nuances of her pleasure. “That’s it, love.”
Her nails followed the contours of his chest, raking across his shoulders and back. He sank into her, into the softness of her body, the warmth of her panting breaths, the exquisite feeling of her long, smooth body wrapped around him, tangled in a breathless knot.
She hitched her leg over his and rocked her hips, riding his hand, sinuous at first, then she was writhing against his body, rubbing against his cock until he was desperate to fill her, stretch her, claim her for his own.
“Malachy,” she breathed, and his cock leaked at his name rolling on her tongue. “The pressure…”
“Feel good, love?” He dragged her ear lobe through his teeth.
“Oh, god, yes.”
A second finger teased her entrance. “Another?”
“Yes,” she moaned.
She tightened as he slid another digit into her slick heat, her thighs clamped around his hand. His thumb stroked her clit in soothing circles, easing her back open.
Bending his head, he lightly pulled her nipple between his teeth. She moaned, loud. The only encouragement he needed. He sucked her nipple into his mouth and bit.
Cora cried out, her lips shaping his name as she arched off the bed. She clenched around him in undulating waves of pleasure, pinching his knuckles together.
By the light of the rising sun he watched her come undone. Christ, she was beautiful. He stroked her through her climax, his cock throbbing with each pulse of her cunt.
She fell back, panting. She looked thoroughly debauched with her wet nipples and wetter thighs, her mane of hair tumbled around her. He wondered how many orgasms he could wring from her, how long he could worship her body, seeking absolution.
“Good girl.” Cradling her flushed face, he kissed her, slowly, deeply, as she melted into him. “Let’s see how good you come with my hands and mouth.”
“What about you?” she said, her throat raw from moaning his name.
“Don’t worry about me. We can take it slow.”
Malachy went very still as her hands trailed down his stomach and settled on his waistband. She met his gaze.
“What if I want to touch you?”
The wheels of his mind ground to a halt when she reached inside his trousers and stroked him. By her smile, she knew he was putty in her hands. A sharp inhale was all he managed before her fingers closed around him. Then, a groan of surrender, low and rough.
“Then I want you to.”
She took him in hand, silk over steel, and slowly pumped his shaft.
His thoughts scattered, lost to sensation. His hands traveled down the curves of her back, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips. He pressed his lips to hers, deepening the kiss with a sweep of his tongue, moaning into her mouth as she fisted his cock and—
A knock sounded on the bedroom door. They froze.
“Oi, Cora?” came Anita’s voice with barely restrained amusement.
“Just wanted to let you know that your, ah, clothes are in the hall, and there’s an angry Irishman getting real huffy downstairs.
If you happen to see Mal…” Her words trailed off with a throaty laugh.
Of course, the Sanguimancer recognized his heartbeat through the door.
“Tell him that his meeting apparently started half an hour ago.”
Fuck. Malachy had overslept. He never overslept. He’d also never had such an enticing reason to stay in bed.
“I’ll, er, let him know,” Cora called out in a strangled voice.
Anita’s laughter faded down the hallway.
Muttering curses, he disentangled himself from Cora and stumbled out of bed, trousers around his knees. She propped up on an elbow and watched him hunt for his clothes, strewn about in various states of dishevelment.
With effort, he fastened his trousers over his cock, weeping for more than one reason.
He shoved on his shirt, its buttons scattered on the emerald rugs in his office downstairs.
His jacket and tie were nowhere in sight.
Grand. Just fucking grand. He calculated how much later he’d be to this meeting by traversing home for a change of non-ravished clothing.
He turned when Cora laughed. “Enjoying yourself?”
“Thoroughly,” she said with a smug smile. “What’s an Irishman want with you, anyway?”
“Irish business.”
Her brow creased. “Are you in the IRA?”
“Everyone seems to think so.”
Before he left, he turned to admire her, tantalizingly nude in silken sheets. Malachy understood regret then. She was soft as a morning kiss in the spill of sunlight. Precious, like an illusion about to shatter.
Last night, he had come upstairs wanting to finish what they'd started in his office. Now that he knew the feel of her, how could he slake this need after so brief a taste?
Surely letting war rage in Ireland for a few moments longer wouldn’t hurt.
“Jesus.” He scrubbed a hand over the stubble darkening his jaw. “Just a second while I commit this to memory.”
Beyond the edge of his self-control, she waited.
And waited.
She didn’t blink, or breathe, or move. She was perfectly frozen.
“Cora?” His voice trickled down to silence. A goosefleshed premonition rippled over his skin. He whirled as the door swung open.
A sinister smile lit half of Alastair Ghose’s butchered face while the other half pinched in a grimace; a mismatched smile that spelled disaster.
A chill crawled inside Malachy’s bones.
“Caught with your trousers down, eh, lad?” The demon’s voice was the gravel of brimstone underfoot.
Ghose glided into the bedroom, his eyes glittering black pools of malice.
Clutched in the demon’s grotesque stump that Malachy was loath to call a hand was the Doomsday Watch, the pocket watch that had cost him everything.
Malachy’s gun had been lost somewhere in the disrobing frenzy, beyond the shimmering barrier of the time bubble, a world away. He had sixty agonizing seconds before time returned to its normal flow, a narrow window to save Cora and escape through.
“Ghose,” Malachy snarled, and launched himself at his former Master.
The demon merely smiled knives at him and raised the Doomsday Watch. Time slowed around Malachy, trapping him in its thickening sap. He moved at a fraction of Ghose’s speed. The demon sidestepped him to peer at Cora, frozen outside the time bubble, naked and vulnerable in the tangled sheets.
“Would you look at that.” Leaning over the bed, Ghose dragged a long, crooked nail down her unmoving cheek. Malachy struggled against time’s ooze around him, barely managing a half-step. “Look at that ring of hazel in her eyes. She did it. Zahra really did it.”