Blood Spells

He knew the taste of her skin and the way she arched against him as he spiraled soft, licking kisses inward along one breast, knew the fascinating transition of textures where velvet skin went exquisitely smooth at the edge of her areola, then became crinkled as he worked ever inward. He knew her gasps of pleasure, the rhythm of her hands as they slid to his shoulders and trailed across the ticklish spots along his rib cage. And he knew the aching pleasure-pain of being hard and full to the point of bursting, throbbing and dying to pound himself into her, yet holding back, knowing it would please them both more to wait and take it slow. Even if it killed him.

But then she fisted her hands in his hair and tugged, raising his head from her breast, and he didn’t recognize the gleam in her eyes. It called to the hard, hot thud of “want to hit that now” resonating through his system, tempting him to put her up against the nearest wall, mirrors be damned.

He didn’t, though. She deserved better than the hard, fast rut his body demanded, and he knew she liked it slow and easy.

“Too fast?” he asked, voice grating from deep in his chest.

She shook her head. But the ripple of surprise brought by that negative was nothing compared to the hot, greedy shock that pounded through him when she turned around, bent slightly at the waist, and braced herself against the bedpost. The mirrored headboard gave him a delicious view of her round breasts, her taut belly, her parted thighs, with a neat triangle of darker blond between—and his own expression going from a dropped jaw to fierce heat when she looked back over her shoulder, eyes smoldering, and said, “Let’s take one for ourselves before we try the magic.”

His body tightened on a howl of yes, yes, yes, hard and fast, yes! But he held himself in check as he moved up behind her, curled his body around hers, and went still for a second, absorbing the sensation of her skin against his. He knew he should stroke her, knew he should take care of her before himself, but he was already on a knife-edge of control.

Gritting his teeth at the effort it took to move slowly, he reached down to rub the head of his hard, aching cock against her moist opening, hissing at the spear of sensation that pierced him, making his stomach muscles tighten against the press of her round, firm buttocks. He’d meant to move up and forward to tease the soft flesh at her front, but she shifted as he did, rolling her hips to accept the blunt tip of him.

Wet warmth slid around him, surrounded him with a sledgehammer of pleasure that had him surging forward with a harsh, primal growl. He thrust once, hard and deep, seating himself fully with zero thought for her, only for himself.

Slow down, damn it, said the gentleman within him, the one who knew how she liked it. Realizing he had one arm banded across her stomach, the other pressed flat against that enticing blond triangle, in a hold that pinned her back against the pressure of his hips, he eased up. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. And don’t hold back.”

The husky, unfamiliar timbre of her voice had his eyes opening. It took him a moment to focus, surrounded as they were by reflections of themselves from all different angles, the blend of his skin against hers, and the shadows they made together. Her face was flushed, her eyes gleaming. Belatedly, he noticed that her arms mirrored his, snugged tight atop his grip, holding him tight against her.

Their eyes met in the reflection, and hers blazed. “Take what you want. It’s what I want too.”

Lust roared through him like fury, but he managed to rasp, “Tell me you mean that.”

In answer, she fisted her inner muscles around him, so hard that the pleasure edged toward pain when she shifted back against him, inviting him to do more, to do everything. A whole-body shudder rose up from the soles of his feet as he locked his arms around her, his body into her. And he began to move.

The first stroke wrung a groan from his chest and battered his defenses with lightning-bolt lust; the second blitzed through the tattered remainder of his analytic self and left him in the throes of instinct, and the blind quest to possess the woman in his arms, and the power that sang in the air around them.

He held her, surged against her, pounded into her in a frenzy that went beyond emotion to pure action and reaction. He wasn’t fucking her, wasn’t making love to her; this was mating, pure and simple, the primal drive to lose himself in her, fill her with his seed. Even the distant knowledge that all the magi had undergone fertility- blocking spells to avoid complications in the final years before the end time didn’t diminish the imperative to plant part of himself inside her and mark her as his own in a place beyond marriage and the jun tan mark.

On some level, he was aware of her escalating cries, the graceful curve of her neck as she pressed her face to her arms and gave herself up to his hold and thrust. Her hand atop his urged him inward, until his fingers were tight against the hard bud of her clit as he rode her from behind.

Her pleasure, though, was far secondary to the need that consumed him, the pressure that built within him, tightening the muscles of his abdomen and ass. One second he was breathing hard and deep; then in the next he stopped breathing entirely, as oxygen became so much less important than the rushing tingle that started at the bottoms of his feet and the tips of his fingers and raced upward and inward, warming and tensing each individual muscle until his whole body felt the pleasure that had previously belonged solely to his cock.

A groan reverberated in his chest as he bowed his body to match hers, thrusting again and again in search of the pinnacle, helpless to do otherwise in the face of a gathering orgasm of unparalleled intensity.

Patience shuddered against him, said his name in a passion-strangled voice, and went over the top of her own climax.

He felt the hot, moist pulse on every inch of his skin, felt her pleasure as his own. Sinking himself deep within her, beyond all thought of control or finesse, he stroked again and again, then roared as his vision went white and he locked himself against her and came.

He flashed outside himself with a lurch of magic, and suddenly he was above, looking down on the two of them, suspended in a vision, yet not.

He saw them surrounded by a pearlescent gray dome, a shield unlike any other he’d ever sensed before. Within it, their images were strangely distorted, refracted, as though together they formed the pieces of an incomplete whole. Somehow he was certain—gut-deep certain—that the pieces they were missing could be found just beyond the dome, that he and Patience could be whole again if he could only breach that gleaming shell.

Then the vision shattered and he was back inside himself, losing himself to the rush of pressure and pleasure, the pulsing throb of ejaculation as he emptied himself into her. He held her tightly, binding them together as his vision grayed and time seemed to slow, measured only in the pulse of their joined flesh.

Even after the intense wave passed, he stayed still, absorbing the moment, the sensations.

Then, inhaling a huge draft of air, he pressed a kiss to her nape, where damp tendrils had escaped her beleaguered ponytail. As he eased out of her, he was all too aware that he’d taken her standing up.

And he’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Feeling that he needed to say something profound, he started with, “That was . . . wow.” Okay, not so profound after all. Magic danced invisibly across his skin, making him conscious of the warmth of his jun tan mark, the faint sense of connection where they had been apart for so long. Trying again, he said, “I think—” Dropping her braced-arm stance, she turned and silenced him with a soft brush of her fingertips across his lips. “Don’t think. For right now, let’s just leave it at ‘wow.’” Instead of arguing, he kissed her.

He set a soft, slow rhythm that was the diametric opposite of the hard and fast, borderline-rough sex they had just shared. He’d meant the gesture to soothe, to wordlessly apologize if that had been too much for her, to thank her for the gift. To his surprise, she met him more than halfway with an inciting nip of teeth and tongue, and a shudder-inducing drag of her fingernails down his ribs.

Heat flared as he took the kiss deeper. Magic hummed anew, wrapping around them both and making him think of the shell that had surrounded them in his vision-flash, and the sense that good things were waiting outside that shell, that things would get better, not worse, if he could manage to break through the barrier blocking him from the Triad magic.

Or was that just wishful thinking?

It doesn’t matter, his conscience warned. You don’t have a choice. And it’s time.

So he ended the kiss, stepped back, and held out a scarred palm. “Lie down with me?”

Her eyes held a shadow of resignation as she took his hand, but she smiled. “With a brothel bed like this, how can I say no?”