I gently hold his palm in mine, and then trace over his lines like a palm reader might. Except, instead of looking to tell his fortune, I just want to feel his presence. I want him to feel me, right now, and not have any doubts.
As the pads of my fingertips softly trace his hand, I smile when I see him shiver. I brush a single finger across his palm again and then start tracing the edges of his fingers and thumb. “I wish I could make fire like you,” I muse. “I’ve been a proper Nihil demon for a full two days now, but I still haven’t done any cool tricks,” I say, slightly put out.
He stops my palm petting by taking my wandering hand and threading our fingers together. I love the feeling of him taking my smaller hand in his, clasping me in his heat. “You don’t need fire power of your own. You have me,” he states matter-of-factly.
I smile shyly at him, and then I turn and swing a leg over his hip, straddling his lap. He pauses and looks down at me as I sit on him, and in the firelight, his eyes look like they’re practically glowing. “Do you know what you’re doing, Warrior Princess?” he challenges me.
“Yep,” I answer without hesitation as I thread my fingers around the back of his neck. “I’m playing with fire.”
His lips notch up an inch before dropping back down, and I shift on his lap, noting that he’s hard as a fucking rock. No half hard-on here. Jerif is like a steel rod beneath my ass.
I’m no longer slaphappy from the demon spirits. Instead, I simply feel uninhibited. I want Jerif. Badly. I want to combust just like he promised. I want to light up what we have and let the ashes of our passion rain down on us as we claim a permanent place in each other’s existences. I want to pull him into this moment with me, but he’s not there yet. I can feel him holding back, doubting, and there’s just no place for that between us anymore.
A flash of Jerif methodically being stabbed and cut as he battled to get to me in the Vestibule flickers through my mind. I play with the hair at the back of his head and release a deep breath.
“I thought I’d lost you,” I confess, closing my eyes as I try to chase the rush of images and sounds away. “I hated myself for running, for not being tougher and better. For not being the kind of demon who could stop all of the bad shit from touching each of you.”
I open my eyes to find Jerif’s flickering flame eyes studying my face, like he’s trying to see where I’m going with this. My fingertips skim the back of his neck, but I focus on my words and not the rightness I feel in touching him so intimately.
“When I woke up in Nihil, I thought I had died. All I could think about was the fact that I had failed all of you...and myself. I had spent too much time seeing all the ways being a demon and a Guardian would change who I was and the life I had built. But when I woke up alone that morning after the Vestibule, I realized that I didn’t let myself see that I was better with all of you. That each of you, in your own way, helped me find parts of me I’d always wanted to have but didn’t know I possessed.”
My gray eyes settle on his, and I stare into him, latching onto all of his tension and making sure he’s hearing my every word. “I want who you are at the core. I need every gruff, brutal, sharp-tongued, unforgiving, self-sacrificing, honorable part of you. I want you, as is.”
Jerif’s gaze flits back and forth between mine for a moment before he snorts. “So only my soul will do then?” he teases.
My lips curl up. “I mean, I am a demon.”
“That you are,” Jerif confesses piously, bringing one hand forward and threading his fingers through my bright violet locks.
“I hated that I had to tell you to run.”
I get lost in the look in his eyes and the intensity of his words as they slip like silk out of his mouth. Time to fix the cracks that the battle caused. Time to reinforce ourselves and come back better and stronger because of what happened.
I lean forward and kiss him, taking his top lip slowly and then dropping to his bottom lip, sealing our fates and letting him feel what I’m offering him. And then he offers something right back.
Our mouths start out chaste as we taste and tease and learn the curves and edges of each other’s lips. His tongue is warm as it flicks out to test mine, and it’s like sinking into a perfectly warm bath at the end of a grueling day. Inch by inch, I lose myself to his warmth, and we open up and remove all the doubt and hesitancy between us.
His kiss owns me in all the best ways that a glorious kiss can. Heat pools in lapping waves through me as his soft palm skims under the hem of my shirt and splays across my lower back, pressing me harder into him. His other hand fists in my hair as our kisses get more fevered and need spreads out between us like molten lava.
I move against him, the friction between my thighs the perfect complement to the way my peaked breasts press against the hard planes of his chest,
