“Oh!” she cried out, and though she couldn’t remember thinking that her toes needed to curl, now they were, and her heels were sliding up to dig into the muscles flexing in his ass. He drove deep again.
“This, Ash.” His fingers interlocked with hers, he drew her hands over her head, stretching her body upward even as her flesh stretched to receive him. “Deciding what matters. You do, more than anything. Being a Guardian does. But there’s more than that.”
“I can’t . . .” A long thrust drew the thought to nothing.
Again, and her only consolation was that his voice was as tortured as hers, his breathing as ragged. “What was that, Ash?”
“I can’t imagine . . . what more.”
He dipped his head, and she opened her mouth for a kiss. His tongue swept up the length of a fang. Body bucking upward, she cried his name as the movement drove him deep, hard. He caught her hip up off the bed, thrust again. She couldn’t stand any more.
Hooking her leg around his, she shoved at his shoulder, pushed him over, and straddled his hips. Sank deep.
Head thrown back, Nicholas arched his long body, lifting her, driving deeper. His muscles locked in stark relief, he hung there. Ash battled between the need to remain still and absorb the sheer beauty of him and the urgent need to move; urgent need won.
Hands braced on his chest, she rolled her hips. Nicholas’s breath hissed from between clenched teeth. His fingers gripped her thighs, swept inward. His thumb found her clitoris, began a slow circle.
“Oh, God.” Fire coiled through her, a heated twist of every nerve. “That’s . . . so evil.”
“So good,” he countered.
Yes. She couldn’t stand it. The fire burned hotter, sizzling inside her, white-hot.
“Nicholas . . . Harder now. Now.”
The world spun wildly as he turned, pushed her onto her back again. Hooking her leg up over his hip, he drove forward, deep. Ash cried out, her nails digging into his shoulders.
“Again.”
“For how long?”
He had to ask? “Forever,” she said.
“Please, God,” he groaned, and when he raised his head, his eyes shone full blue. “Because there’s more.”
Chest heaving, he angled her hips up, thrust hard again. Her body bowed, a scream locked in her throat. How could she survive this?
Only over and over again.
“More.” It emerged on a sobbing breath, and he obeyed, until she burned, burned, clinging to him as it raced through her, screaming as it left. Nicholas’s mouth crashed down over hers, and his tongue thrust with the stroke of his body, until he suddenly stilled—shook. Wings erupted from his shoulders in a long, elegant arch. Heavier, suddenly blanketed by feathers, he settled over her. Still inside her, and despite his orgasm, still hard.
Oh, she could become used to this. She wrapped her arms and legs around him, wouldn’t let him move.
“I love you,” she said, in case he hadn’t realized it yet. “I came here to tell you, but I was distracted by the sex.”
His kiss was long and sweet, and muffled her noise of protest when he began to roll over. He didn’t stop kissing her until she lay atop his body—with him still hard inside her, and so she was satisfied.
“I don’t need to breathe,” she reminded him.
“That’s not the point.” His new wings vanished, but a single feather lay on the sheets. She picked it up as he said, “I don’t want to ever hold you down in any way.”
“I think I’d like you to hold me down and just fuck away sometime. We could play ‘demon almost broke the Rules.’”
“Only if we follow up with ‘Guardian almost broke the Rules,” he said, but the stirring of his flesh told her that a part of him wasn’t averse to her idea now. His expression turned serious, however, so she assumed that wasn’t in store just yet. “That’s not what I meant, though. I can’t bear the idea of you beneath anyone, Ash.”
She didn’t really want that, either. “Unless I’m beneath you, and you’re inside me.”
“That’s different. Sex and play are different. But this is . . .” His brow furrowed slightly, as if trying to find the right way to express it. “This is the more, Ash. What I’m waiting for—what I might always be waiting for, but that I’ll do everything I can to get there.”
“Where?”
“To become the man who deserves you. Who is worthy of you.” When her mouth fell open, he shook his head, swept his thumb over her lips as if to seal them closed. “You can’t say anything. I’ve hurt you, Ash. I can’t take that back. And you might have forgiven me, or you might say that the grenade made up for it—”
“I did. I would.”
“But it’s not yours to give. Not this one. It has to be me, doing my damn best to be the man I think might deserve you—not just some bastard who got lucky enough. As it is, it’s almost impossible, but I’ll spend forever trying.”
Well, Ash thought that was totally unnecessary, but it obviously made a difference to him, so much that during his explanation, the determination filling his words seemed to fill his physical form, too, shifting and changing his—
“Oh,” she gasped at the same time his eyes closed, a tortured moan rising from his chest. The feather fell from her suddenly nerveless fingers. “Nicholas, you—I think you shape-shifted. Not much, you just became . . . more.”
Monstrous.
Stretching. Almost painful . . . but not. She sat up and cried out as his cock pushed deeper. Her nails dug into his chest.
His eyes were already shining. His hands moved to her hips, tried to lift her off. “I’m hurting you.”
“You’re not hurting—” She broke off as he managed to slide her up over his length. Ecstasy shot through her veins, sparking new fires. Her inner muscles clamped around him. Her head swam with the unexpected, overwhelming pleasure of it. “Oh, my God. Stop.”
He froze. Already needing more, she pushed down, and his entire body clenched, a groan ripping from him. Trembling, she waited for him to recover.
He looked up at her. She leaned forward, braced her hands, and gave him her wickedest grin.
“So, Guardian. Let’s see just how long you can hold on.”
Nicholas could hold on for a long time, as it turned out. He’d adapted well to his heightened senses, though his glowing eyes and abruptly appearing wings showed the same lack of control that Ash once had.
She’d never experienced Enthrallment, though, and had only sensed it once, when a novice became fixated on the fragrance of baking bread wafting from a sandwich shop near the warehouse. That Guardian’s psychic scent had gone into a long, slow spin—as if he were dizzy, and the bread formed his only remaining anchor.
When it happened to Nicholas, that anchor was the taste of her, as if his world had narrowed down to her flavor against his tongue. Ash held onto him through each searching lick, crying out again and again, and though her body remained strong, inexhaustible, by the time he came back to himself she was wrung out with the ecstasy of it.
Then he lifted his body over hers, pushed deep inside, and wrung her out again.
When they finally emerged from the bedroom, night had long since fallen and the fire had died down, leaving the cabin stone cold. From her rocking chair, Ash watched him lay the kindling in the stove, the lamplight playing over the muscles of his back.
He had gotten bigger. Not in any one direction, but overall taller and wider, and proportioned in exactly the same way. Without anyone standing next to him as comparison, the difference was hard to immediately see. The only evidence of it was in the tighter fit of his pajama pants, the higher hem.