Rage and Ruin (The Harbinger 2)

“You are considering it?”

I bit back a gasp when his finger glanced over my lower lip. “I didn’t say that.”

“What are you saying then?”

“I’m saying...” I lost track of my thought as his fingers slipped down my chin, over my throat and to my shoulder. A wake of shivers followed his touch.

“You were saying?” His voice threaded with amusement and something thicker, richer.

“I was saying that I have a problem with impulsivity and jumping into things without thinking them through.”

“Never.”

My lips twitched. “And I spend the other half of the time overthinking everything.”

“Never would’ve guessed that, either.”

“You have to be the reasonable one in this.”

“I can’t do that, Trin.” He toyed with the flimsily loose strap of my tank top. “I’m so damn tired of being reasonable, logical and especially responsible.”

I moved into his touch without intending to, lifting my shoulder as his finger slipped under the strap. “You’re no help at all.”

“No, I’m not.”

Stomach dipping, I willed him to do something. Anything. Either to keep touching me, or to back away. When his hand stilled but didn’t pull away, I wiggled closer, stopping only when I felt his steady breath against my lips.

His fingers became his palm, and his grip tightened. “I want you, Trinity.”

A swift swelling motion invaded my chest, and all I could say was his name, and it was both a prayer and a curse.

Zayne rolled me onto my back as he moved over me, the bulk of his weight on his arm as his hand slid from my arm to cup my face. I moved with him, kicking the covers down and reaching for him. My hand fisted his hair as I touched his face with my other, loving the feel of the stubble along his jaw.

His forehead dropped to mine, and the breath we took was shared. “Whatever happens, this will be worth it,” he said, and it sounded like a promise. “This is right, no matter what.”

I hesitated, fingers on his cheeks as I tried to search his face in the darkness. If we did this, could we go back? Would it be worse? Or would it be better once we sated this need? Would it be a one-time thing or would every night be like tonight? My toes curled at the thought, and the throb from deep inside, the purely physical response, was nearly painful.

Boundaries. Rules. Lines. If we kept this physical, then we weren’t really together. Semantics, whispered the surprisingly sane-sounding voice. But was it really? People did this all the time without letting feelings grow. I could do this. We could do this.

And I wanted this. I was ready. Ready for more than just kissing and touching. I was ready for Zayne, for all of him and everything that entailed. My heart raced at the thought of it. Being ready was a huge decision, a monumental one. There were things we needed, like condoms. Maybe not plural. Probably only one, but we needed that, because I had no idea if baby making was possible between us. But I was ready, and wasn’t that the strangest thing, to suddenly be so sure? To have woken up today not even considering the whole losing-my-virginity thing, and still be so damn sure, I wanted to shout it?

“Do you want this?” he asked.

God, did I ever want this—want him. So much so it was a little embarrassing. “Yes.”

A tremor rocked his body and his head tilted. His warm breath touched my lips—

“No kissing.” My hand tugged at his hair when he stilled over me. “Kissing...kissing makes this more.” My logic had so many holes in it, but it made sense to me. And not just because I’d seen Pretty Woman, but because kissing was... It was beautiful when it was right, and it would be too beautiful with him. “No kissing.”

Zayne’s chest rose against mine and then he shifted onto his side.

Pressing my lips together to stop the sudden urge to cry, I looked at him. I wanted to take those words back, but I couldn’t. It had to be this way—

He settled beside me and his fingers curled around my chin. For a heart-stopping moment, I thought he was going to ignore my newly established rule.

“We can work on that,” he said.

I relaxed and then tensed as his thumb dragged over my lower lip.

“I’m...greedy enough for anything.” His thumb moved along my chin and then the line of my jaw. “Or maybe it’s that I’m desperate for anything that you will allow.”

A terrible, insidious part of me broke through the surface, forcing words out of me that I hadn’t thought I’d dare speak. “It could be easier.”

“What could be?” His fingers made their way back to my chin.

“This,” I said, exhaling roughly. “You could do this with literally anyone else, and it would be easier.”

Zayne’s fingers halted. “You’re right. It could be. No rules. No complications.” He started moving again, tracing the line of my throat. “It would be so much easier.”

I thought about the waitress. “Not like there’s any shortage of willing participants.”

“There’s not.”

My eyes flew open. “Then why me?”

“Good question.”

I wasn’t sure I liked that response, but his fingers reached the collar of my top. My lips parted as the tips trailed down my neck and lower, between my breasts, and then even lower, down and over the slope of my stomach. His fingers glided back up and over my lower ribcage. That terrible, insidious voice slinked back into whatever hole it had climbed out of, thank God.

He flattened his hand, and his thumb tugged at my shirt as he followed the swell of my body until my back arched and a breathy moan left me. His soft hair grazed my chin as his lips followed the path his fingers had made.

“I hope this doesn’t count as kissing,” he whispered against the thin material of my shirt.

Did it? “I... I don’t think so.”

“Relieved to hear that.” He was on the move again, his mouth skating above my shirt to where his thumb was moving in slow, lazy circles.

My hand fisted the back of his shirt. I had no idea when I’d grabbed him again, but obviously I had. My legs moved restlessly, squeezing together as the thin material of my shirt became damp under his mouth.

Zayne’s hand moved to where the hem of my top had ridden halfway up my stomach, exposing a whole lot of skin to a Warden’s perfect night vision. The calluses on his palm created a unique friction as he inched my shirt up. “Yes? No?”

“Yes,” I breathed.

Cool air followed in the wake of my top, and I’m not quite sure what kind of magic got it over my head and off me, but with his breath against my skin, I didn’t care.

“What about this?” he asked. “Is this considered kissing? I feel like it might be.”

“No,” I said, feeling the lines blur, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

“Hmm.”

His lips pressed against my skin, and I thought surely this was the most exquisite torture in the whole world. I lost all sense of time, and his shirt might have begun to tear under my grip.

Slowly, I became aware of his hand opening and closing along my waist, my hip and then the bare skin of my thigh. One of his fingers slipped under the band of narrow cotton along my hip and his thumb moved along the elastic, dipping low enough to cause my head to kick back.

Zayne’s head lifted. “I want... I want to touch you. Do you want that?”

“Yes.” There wasn’t even a half second of hesitation.

And neither was there any on his end. I could make out just the outline of Zayne, but I knew he was watching himself. I could feel the intensity of his gaze as he slid his hand under undies that I now remembered had tiny sharks all over them. In the distant part of my still-functioning brain, I wondered if he could see them.

Then he obliterated that small working part of my brain with the first featherlight touch. My entire body reared as I gasped. We’d done a lot the night of the Imps. I’d been completely undressed, and we’d both found release, but we hadn’t done this. He hadn’t done this. No one but me had gone there, and that had felt nothing like it did now. Each pass became bolder and shorter until...

Every breath left me. Every thought scattered as Zayne made a sound that only added to the sensation of fullness. I’d been wrong earlier, because I lost all sense of everything. My hips moved with his hand, and a maddening, tightening rush swept through me. I was speaking. I thought I was saying his name as I drew one of my legs up.

“Zayne, I...” Tension curled impossibly tight as my eyes widened.

He made that sound again, a throaty groan. “I can see you. Each breath you take. The way your lips are parted. How wide your eyes are and how flushed your skin is. That light inside you. The spark. I can see it and it’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

Maybe it was his words or what he was doing, or maybe it was just because it was him and it was us, but whatever it was, I tipped over an edge and fell into pulsing waves that seemed to come from everywhere.

At some point I became aware of Zayne’s forehead resting against mine and that his hand was now at my hip, his grip tight but not painful in the least.

My eyes fluttered open, and again, I wished I could see him. I finally eased my grip off the poor shirt and touched his cheek. His head lifted the scantest of inches. Everything about him seemed incredibly rigid, and then his head tilted in a way that I knew what was coming next.

“No kissing,” I reminded him. “Kissing makes this mean more than it does.”

Zayne lifted his head, and I reached for him, my fingers brushing the band on his pants. He caught my wrist.

I stilled, lifting my gaze and wishing I could see his face. “I want to—”

“I know. I want you to do whatever you want to me, but no.”

“No?” I repeated dumbly. My senses were too all over the place to even begin to decipher what was coming or going through the bond.

“No,” he said. “Because that would make this mean more than it can to me.”