Grave Secret (23 page)

And how many times had I rebuffed him, in spite of everything I felt? I let my mind wander, closing my eyes and playing with the hair curling at the nape of his neck. It was soft and slid smoothly between my fingers.

“I’m afraid,” I whispered.

He laid a gentle kiss on me cheek, not pushing further.

“We’ll get through this,” he promised. “You know you’re only scared because you don’t want to lose control.”

“No one wants to lose control.” We stopped dancing, and I pulled back slightly. “Do you want to lose control?”

Holden stared at me for a moment. “With you, Secret? I want to lose everything.”

The nameless fae woman returned Holden and me to our room, and the wall shut seamlessly behind us. After showing off our fancy footwork and making the fairy king agree to a second promise in one night, we were
persona non grata
for the remainder of the festivities.

Holden came up behind me, and we both stared at the bed. “How do you feel?” His mouth was right next to my ear. I twisted so we were face-to-face and found myself unable to meet his eyes.

“Very bizarre.”

“But do you feel the influence anymore?”

I expected to detect the lingering traces of Aubrey’s spell, something that would make me feel unnaturally attracted to Holden. I still felt the attraction, but this time it wasn’t strange or unwelcome. It was just the old desire that had been between us for years. In some ways it made me more uneasy than if the attraction had been manufactured.

“I feel…fine,” I said.

He brushed a strand of hair off my cheek and cupped my chin, angling my face upwards so I was looking at him.

“Just fine?”

My pulse tripped slightly, and I let myself lean into his touch, my hand covering his on my face. “As fine as I can given the environment.”

“Still beats being thrown in a pit,” he reminded me, alluding to our experience of being trapped by swamp werewolves.

“Most things beat that.”

Holden dropped his hand from my face, then kissed my forehead. This time his lips lingered longer than they had during the dance, and when he pulled away, we stared at each other for a long, breathless moment.

“Sit down,” he told me, nodding towards the bed. His tone was suddenly very serious.

“Why?”

He gave me an arch look, and I knew arguing would be pointless. Besides, it was just a bed. Sitting on a bed didn’t mean I was automatically agreeing to anything. He only wanted to talk.

Who was I kidding?

“How’s your arm?” I asked, pointing to the bloodied shirtsleeve covering the place where Desmond had bitten him. It was an obvious attempt to distract him, though I wasn’t sure why I was trying to.

“It’s healed.”

“Let me look.”

Hesitantly I sat on the bed, and he stood in front of me. I lifted his arm with my hands cupped under his elbow, rolling up his soiled shirt. The sticky residue of old blood made my fingers gluey, making them stick to the cotton fabric as I turned up the material. When the crook of his arm was mere inches from my lips, I shifted my gaze from the still-damp blood and back up to his eyes. His pupils had widened, turning his irises a dark, fierce black. The hunger that twisted his features had nothing to do with a need for feeding. I recognized the look, and it was pure sex.

I stared at Holden, his bloody arm right under my mouth, and I voiced a question both my rational and monstrous selves wanted the answer to. “What are we doing?”

“Whatever we want. It’s just you and me right now. Whatever we do is up to us.”

My internal debate was between the consequences of our actions and rewards. Which was greater? I had wanted to sleep with Holden for so long I’d lost track, and our chemistry was undeniable. First I’d been afraid I only wanted to sleep with him because of Aubrey’s spell, but now all I felt was him and the unique hot feeling that made me want to rip his clothes off. That wasn’t magic. That was just Holden.

Why was I
thinking
so much about this?

Having lived a life of consequences, both good and bad, I decided it was time to do what
I
wanted. Damn what the fairy king thought he knew about me, damn the guilt of the human world and the people who said I shouldn’t. I didn’t owe anyone anything.

But maybe I owed Holden and me this night.

Chapter Thirty-One

“Are you sure?” Holden asked as I stood, and my hands went to the buttons on his shirt. “I mean really
really
sure?” His eyes were dark, and I knew there was a fine line of self-restraint holding him back. One nudge was all it would take, and I wanted to give him that nudge.

I thought about it, though, as much as I was able to think in our current situation.

“I want to do this,” I replied, unbuttoning his shirt fully and pushing it off his shoulders.

He stared at me long and hard, and I met his gaze steadily, without batting an eyelash. “I won’t be able to stop once we start,” he said.

“I know.”

Without waiting for him to make a move on my own clothing, I pulled my sweater off and threw it next to his shirt on the bed.

For a man who had already seen me topless, the look on his face when he saw me in my bra was more appreciative than I’d expected. He touched each of my bare shoulders with his large, smooth hands, his skin soft and almost cold, but not quite. I shivered, but it was more from excitement than the unexpected coolness of his touch.

He caught the belt loops of my pants with lightning-fast fingers and tugged me towards him so I was standing and my stomach was flush with his. My skin felt surprisingly warm against his. I thought he might say something when his lips parted slightly, and opened my mouth to protest, but he took that opportunity to kiss me.

Releasing my belt loops, he lifted his hands to cup my face with such gentleness I almost swooned. He held me like I was precious and breakable, but he kissed me like I might destroy him.

His kiss was tentative at first, testing me for hesitation, like he thought at any second I would pull away and change my mind. He was probably waiting for me to do what I did every time he kissed me. I always told him to stop. Told him I couldn’t do what he wanted to do. But I’d been denying myself then because my decisions had been based on what I thought was right.

Now there was no right. There was no wrong. Just
want
and
need
and all of it was
now
.

I swept my tongue across his, and his fingers twitched against my cheek. He let out a small noise, and I wasn’t quite sure if he was protesting my invasion or inviting more. I started to pull away from the kiss, but he buried his fingers in my hair and kept me in place. The next time he kissed me I felt the brush of his fangs on my swollen lower lip, and another shiver careened through me.

This kiss had none of the gentleness of its predecessor. His mouth was hard and demanding, his tongue coaxing my own with rough, tangling strokes I could feel all the way down to my toes. My knees went wobbly, and I tried to guide us back to the bed, remembering it had been right behind me only a moment ago. I went to sit and missed the mattress completely.

So involved were we in the kiss it barely registered that we had collapsed onto the floor, the wonderful, comfortable weight of him on top of me.

I had brief flashes of memory, the times in the past I’d felt his body from this position. The last clear one I could recall was when he’d been accused of betraying the council, we’d fought and he’d knocked me flat on my bed. I had a chance to wonder at myself over all the times I
could
have had him, but didn’t. Recalling the night in the Louisiana bayou we’d almost died, I thought about the regrets I would have had if I’d never let myself experience him the way he’d made me promise we could.

One night was all he asked for.

He was going to get his night.

After we’d fallen, he’d released my hair and set about exploring the exposed parts of my body, the only places available to him until he let me up to divest us both of our pants.

“I remember you like this,” he whispered, tilting his head so he could gaze down at me, watch his own hands cup my breasts through the satiny material of my bra. He looked lost and wild, and seeing him admire my body amped up my excitement.

“You’ve never seen me like this,” I corrected.

“I have.” He took one of my hands and held it to the side of his face, our mated fingers resting at his temple. “But all in here.” He touched my forehead. “And here.”

“You’re not dreaming now.”

He kissed me, deep and slow. If I wasn’t already on the floor, that kiss would have toppled me there. “Aren’t I?”

“What’s the biggest difference between your dreams and when you’ve
really
kissed me?”

Holden brushed a stray curl off my forehead and gave me a sad smile. “In my dreams, you never tell me to stop.”

Running my hands over his bare back, trailing my fingers down the dip of his spine right before it rose up into his ass, I returned his smile, but there was no sadness in mine. “Then maybe you are dreaming. But I won’t be the one to wake you up.”

“Good.” He moved off me, placing one knee next to each of my hips and letting his gaze linger on me briefly as he set about whatever he was planning to do. He unbuttoned my jeans and lowered the zipper before I stopped his hand.

“Yours first.”

“Bossy.”

“Yes.”

First he undid his belt, looping his fingers under the brown leather and unhooking the long metal tooth from its notch. With painstaking slowness he pulled the belt free from his pants, and the sound of the leather against cotton made my pulse kick up a beat. The belt dropped beside me with a jangle, and I flirted with the notion of suggesting he keep it around to tie me up with, but cast the idea quickly aside. If tonight was all we got, I wanted to touch him. A real memory of the way his body felt would be better than a million dreams.

His pants came next, and it took all my restraint to not yank them off. He got to his feet and pulled the trousers free of his legs, tossing them away before straddling me again. The strain of his cock against the thin material of his briefs—how European of him—was all I could pay attention to. I wondered how accurately my dreams had represented that part of him.

My distractedness had not escaped him. “Your turn,” he said, shifting his weight off me so he was outside my reach.

Since my pants were already undone, I arched my back to lift my butt off the floor and pushed the denim over my hips, wondering why it was I always chose such damned tight pants. Sure they made my ass look great, but they functioned like a booty-enhancing chastity belt. Tight pants were fashion’s way of saying,
Look but don’t touch. No, seriously, you can’t touch because I’ll never be able to take these off.

Since I was trying to maintain the appearance of being sexy, I was grateful to be on the floor because it made peeling the denim off much easier. Once I’d kicked my legs free, I was down to my violet-colored bra and a mismatched pair of yellow polka-dot panties. They weren’t even the same material. I obviously hadn’t dressed for this trip with sex in mind, but I was regretting my choices now.

Holden smirked and ran his index finger under the elastic waistband of my underwear. “Cute.”

Just what every girl longs to hear when she’s mostly naked in front of a man who should exist only in marble-statue form.
Cute
.

He continued to play with the elastic, first along my waist, then switching to where the underwear met my inner thigh. His finger followed the trail from my hipbone along my thigh and stopped before making contact where I most desperately wanted him to. Instead, he cupped my pussy, his index finger stroking at me through the wet cotton. His gaze locked on me intently, and he nodded at my chest.

“Take it off.”

It was difficult for me to focus on removing my bra with him toying with me. Each new brush of his fingers, even through the cotton, was torturous. I ground my hips upwards to meet his hand, wanting more than what he could give me with my underwear in the way.

The bra was gone, and so my part of the bargain was fulfilled. It was my turn to make demands. “Touch me.”

“I am touching you.” The smirk on his lips was ruthless.

“More.”

He hooked a finger around the side of my underwear and sank it deep inside me, feeling me from within. I gasped.

“Touch you like that?” he asked.

“
Yes
.”

He withdrew his finger and pulled my underwear off. “Then I won’t need those.”

I expected his finger to resume its previous endeavors, but instead he moved lower down my body and nudged my thighs apart, settling himself between them. If his previous smile had been ruthless, this grin was downright cruel.

The first lap of his tongue took me by surprise. It wasn’t as though I didn’t know what he was planning, the way he’d wedged himself in front of my pussy made it pretty evident, but I still wasn’t expecting the first lick. His tongue was cool, the way it had been in my mouth, and I groaned at the surprising way it felt against my own hot center.