As she sat all the way down on him, their sexes joined, she pulled back a little.
Their eyes met, and neither of them moved.
And that was when it happened. Somehow, her thoughts and memories became his own. He didn’t mean to get into her like that, but he did, the connection between their bodies so seamless that it melded their minds as well.
What he saw consumed him, and he opened his mouth to speak.
But then she started moving, her hips riding his pelvis, his cock going in and out of her to the motion she set.
That was all it took. He tightened his hold on her ass, cupping her, squeezing her, moving her up and down on his shaft. There was so much to see where they were joined: His erection glistened every time she lifted herself up, and each time she sat back down, the visual of him disappearing inside her body made him crazy with lust.
He started coming. He couldn’t help it, didn’t want to.
Things got a whole lot more slick.
And then he couldn’t see anything anymore because his eyes closed on their own. That was okay. He could hear her moan and then feel her go tight. After that, the rhythmic, milking grip of her sex on his cock teed off another round of orgasms for him.
It was all so perfect.
Just like her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
By the time Erika left her townhouse, it was past eleven a.m. She knew that Balthazar was not a fan of the departure, but she had to get her unmarked back and she wanted to check in at headquarters: The former was because the sedan was municipal property and she’d left it by that bookshop in an iffy part of town. The latter was because, as much as she had loved the time she’d had down in that cellar, as close as she’d become to the man—male, she meant—she felt the need to keep a foot in her own reality.
The silver Honda was where she’d parked it, grill-in to her closed garage, and as she got in behind the wheel and drove off, she was on autopilot. The traffic wasn’t bad, except for getting on the Northway, and as soon as she was cruising at a smooth sixty-one m.p.h., her thoughts returned to Balthazar.
She told herself she wasn’t falling in love with him.
“You’re just not,” she said as she hit the directional signal and changed lanes to get around a slowpoke eighteen-wheeler. “I mean, you can’t be.”
Yes, they’d been through all kinds of crazy stuff together, and yes, they’d had some incredible sex.
Reaaaaally incredible sex.
And yes, she had revealed the deepest part of herself, a part that she didn’t even visit, and he’d handled it in a way that she hadn’t known she’d needed.
But that wasn’t “love.” That was sexual attraction fulfilled. A sensitive moment shared. A surprising compatibility.
It wasn’t love. People like her didn’t fall in love—unless she thought that shrink she’d gone to her senior year in college had been lying about the attachment disorder diagnosis? And to think she’d gone to the guy herself, not because a roommate or school administrator or professor had made her go. She’d known that she was out of sequence compared to her peers and she’d wanted to know why and he’d told her.
She still was out of sequence.
For chrissakes, the fact that she was sleeping with a vampire was actually right up her outlier alley, wasn’t it. Everybody else was engaged, married, married with babies, or married with children. She was seeing Dracula.
“Stop it,” she muttered as she got back into the middle lane.
Balthazar was so much more than that. He had accepted her scars. He hadn’t judged her darkest secret, the thing that stung her right to her soul. He had cherished her and held her, and when they’d fallen asleep together for a half hour, he had kept a gun right under their sofa in case he had to protect her.
She’d never felt like all parts of her were accepted before. Right as they were. And the irony was real.
All it had taken… was a member of another species.
As her downtown exit arrived, she cut in front of a Mustang and descended the ramp that dumped her out on the edge of the business district. The route she had to take to get to the Bloody Bookshoppe was inefficient, but that was the way of one-ways. Pulling up in front of the little store, she stared at the door and remembered stepping through it… into another world.
Police tape, as familiar to her as her own face, crisscrossed the inset stoop, and there was a seal on the jamb.
The sight of it made her wonder what they did when they “cleaned up a scene,” as Balthazar had put it. Did they lift evidence if it linked them or suggested their presence? Or just get rid of the metaphysical stuff? They’d certainly removed anything that proved she’d been there.