Chapter 3 #2
I throw my head back and laugh. "Knowing you, everything is always dirty.
But do tell, what exactly you have planned for me?
" "Well," he says, and his voice drops to that low register that turns my insides to liquid.
"I like to feel how silky your skin is in the water.
It makes it so easy for my hands to slide up your body.
" As he speaks, he does exactly that. His hands traveling up, running along the curve of my waist, sliding underneath my breasts.
I gasp again, and he grins wider.
"You see, I love it when you make those sounds," he murmurs. "Because it tells me I'm on the right track."
I swallow hard and look down at him. My breathing has become uneven. "And what track is that?"
"Well," he says, "it's better if I show you."
He captures one of my nipples in his mouth.
Slow. Deliberate. His tongue is warm and wet and maddening.
He crawls over me, and the water crashes over the edge of the tub, flooding the floor, and neither one of us cares.
His mouth finds my neck, kissing along the line of it, his hands firm on my hips, his thumbs drawing slow, agonizing circles against my skin.
He smells of mahogany and something dark and deep. Something that is only him, only Kaelren, a scent I could find blindfolded in a room full of people.
He comes up to my lips and captures them in a kiss. Slow and deep and thorough. When he pulls back, he licks his lower lip.
"Raspberry and chocolate," he says. "My favorite."
The kiss goes on, long and unhurried, the kind that exists in its own pocket of time where nothing else matters and nothing else exists. When he pulls away again, his silver eyes are dark.
"You know what goes best with dessert?" he asks.
I laugh breathlessly. "No, please do tell."
"It's this wonderful treat I've learned about. Called whipped cream. And it comes in a machine of some sort—"
"You mean whipped cream in a can."
"Yes. It's almost like magic how it comes out."
He produces a can from somewhere and tips it slowly, drawing a line of whipped cream along my collarbone and down between my breasts.
He lowers his head and licks it off. Slow. Takes his time. Comes back up and grins.
"Delicious."
He squirts another line down the center of my stomach, his eyes never leaving mine as he follows the trail with his mouth. His tongue traces the line of whipped cream lower, lower, and I know exactly where this is going.
I'm panting. Even after all this time, after everything we've been through, after watching seventeen timelines worth of us together, this man still works me up like no other living creature in any realm has ever managed.
He's between my legs now, his arms hooked underneath my thighs, water lapping around us. He looks up at me with that wicked, devastating grin.
Just as his head dips under the water—
Something tugs sharply at my chest.
Not in the tub. In the space between my ribs. A sharp, insistent pull from somewhere deep inside me.
I look down and frown. What the hell was in that whipped cream?
Another tug, harder this time. More violent. A yank that rattles through my ribs like someone has hooked a chain to my breastbone and is pulling from the other end.
"Kaelren," I say, and the pleasure in my voice has been replaced by something closer to alarm. "Something's wrong."
He comes up out of the water, hair slicked back, confusion on his face. He reaches for me—
And I'm yanked.
Violently, like a fish on a line, ripped out of the warm water. The bathtub dissolves. The house dissolves. Kaelren's face, that beautiful, impossible face, fragments into nothing.
I'm back in the void. The blackness presses in. But something is different now. The threads of timelines that have been floating peacefully around me are whipping and twisting, agitated, tangling together in ways that look wrong.
Another yank. So hard it feels like my chest is going to cave in.
I clutch at my chest, gasping, and reach for whatever's pulling me. Through the chaos of timelines and the roaring darkness, I feel it. Faint but unmistakable.
The bond.
Not the thin, stretched-spider-silk version I've been feeling for however long I've been here. This is stronger. Brighter. Concentrated. Someone is pulling it from the other side with everything they have.
And somewhere, impossibly far away and impossibly close, I feel the warmth of the locket.
He found the locket.
The pull becomes a wrenching, brutal force that tears me out of the void and into something else entirely. I'm being dragged through it at speed, faster than falling, faster than the lightning that brought me to Wynmire in the first place—
I try to scream his name, but the sound is swallowed before it leaves my mouth.
The last thing I feel before everything goes black is the vial in my pocket, burning hot against my thigh. And the flower, pressed flat and dry against my hip.
Both of them humming. Both of them awake.
You'll know when to use them.
Then everything goes dark.