Shards of Hope (Psy-Changeling 14)

Aden lifted his head, palms braced on either side of her shoulders. “Sexual penetration is the final step. Many more precede it.”

“How do you know?”

“There are manuals.”

“Manuals?” She gripped fistfuls of his hair. “I want to read them.”

“If you get in bed,” he said, his lips against hers, “I’ll download them to your organizer.”

“Blackmail?”

“Negotiation.”

The rage in her wanted to curl around him. “These better be worth it,” she said, sliding into bed as he found the slim-line device on a small shelf by the door and came to join her, his body sleek and strong and healthy, his olive-toned skin warm.

Tapping the screen, he brought up files from his own account, then lay down on his back beside her, holding up the organizer so they could both see the screen. “This bed needs to be bigger,” he said, and lifted one arm so she could use it as a pillow.

She turned into his body so that she was on her side and he wrapped his arm around her. It made her feel precious again. Worth protecting. “As long as you don’t go far, we can get a bigger bed.”

That look again, the one that said an inferno blazed below the calm waters of him. “Vasic passed on this package of data,” he said, his voice rough. “It apparently originated with Judd, but Vasic’s added to it, as did Stefan.”

•   •   •

I’M happy you need it had been Vasic’s only comment when Aden raised the subject of physical bonding.

“That’s ridiculous,” Zaira said suddenly, her eyes on the screen. “The pulse point of the wrist cannot be an erogenous zone. It’s just like any other part of the arm.”

Aden’s body grew taut. Placing the organizer beside him, he picked up her hand and bent it slightly back to expose the delicate skin above her pulse. He didn’t touch it with his mouth as the literature had suggested. Instead, he used a fingertip to map the tracery of fine veins beneath the skin. “Your skin is softer than mine,” he said. “Did you know that?”

“Yes.” Warm breath against him, her eyes trained on what he was doing to her wrist. “I like the way you feel against me.”

His body grew impossibly harder at her confession, but he continued to trace her veins with a fingertip. It was difficult to hold his concentration, especially with Zaira’s unfettered breasts pressed against his side, the thin barrier of her black tee no impediment to feeling the lushness of her. The fact that her nipples were hard ratcheted up his primal response.

Long conditioned to suppress all sexual desire, his penis was now very definitely receiving signals from the rest of him and it liked those signals despite the almost painful intensity of the sensation.

Bringing Zaira’s wrist closer as his erection throbbed, he licked out very gently over the pulse point, then blew on it.

Her pulse skipped, fingers curling into her palm. “Perhaps the manual writers do know something,” she admitted.

Instead of releasing her, he put his lips to her skin, licked out again. She tasted of Zaira, of power contained in a small form, of ice and of steel. Blowing on her skin once more, he released her. She didn’t pull away, allowing her hand to fall on his chest, over the racing beat of his heart.

Her fingers curved, her nails grazing his skin.

It was too much provocation.

He had her under him before he consciously processed what he was about to do. Halting with his weight braced above her, he looked at her face, into her eyes. “If you ever want me to stop, just say.”

“Why would I do that when I can just break one of your ribs instead?”

And Aden found he knew how to smile after all, his lips tugging up at the corners. “That’ll work, too.”

A small fist mock-punched him in the abdomen. “I wouldn’t hurt you.” Thunder in her gaze.

“You are so beautiful.” The words came out raw.

Freezing, she looked up at him for a long, long time. “You mean it,” she whispered. “You really do.”

He didn’t understand why she’d even question that, but he didn’t have time for a discussion. Not today. Bending his head, he kissed her. She opened for him immediately, one of her legs curling over his hip in a distinctively possessive act. Reaching down, he pulled up her other leg until she was locked around him, her arms wrapped around his neck as she held him to her.

“Mine,” she said on a kiss.

The single word branded him to the soul. “Yes.”

When he allowed her to feel the weight of his lower body, she slid one of her hands through his hair to grip at it. He groaned at the tug of sensation, at the sign that his wild, dangerous lover was with him every step of the way. Pushing up her tee, he drank in the silken feel of her skin, shaped her rib cage. How can you be so small and so strong?

Her answer was to bite down on his lip. Not hard enough to hurt or to draw blood. Just enough to send an electrical current directly to his erection. Shuddering, he shifted his hand to close it over the warm globe of her breast.

She jerked, nails digging into his nape. “Don’t stop.”

The husky order sliced like a scalpel through any control he might’ve retained. Raising his head to look at her face as he touched her, Aden saw her eyes flutter shut and his entire body turned into one big pulse. Giving Zaira pleasure was an intoxication, her trust in him a drug. With no one else would she allow herself to be this vulnerable—that knowledge alone was enough to drive him to the edge.

When the scrape of his thumb over her nipple elicited a throaty moan, he knew he should file the response away for later retrieval and future use, but his brain wasn’t functioning too well. All he wanted to do was taste her, touch her, devour her.