Born, Darkly (Darkly, Madly 1)

She turns in my arms, her eyes seeking the truth. “How?”

I push a loose wisp of hair behind her ear. “Trust, London. It’s what comes next. You have to trust me. Do you think I’d want you to suffer an innocent child’s death?”

She blinks up at me. “He was safe the whole time.”

I press my lips to her forehead, unable to deny myself the taste of her. “We’re not those monsters,” I say, my hands mapping a path across her back and waist, gripping the satin dress. “But we aren’t mundane, either. We’re ravenous, and we have to feed.”

She’s touching me, too—her hands tracing the ink and scars on my forearms, palms seeking friction along my chest, fingers entwining my hair and stroking the back of my neck. Every intimate quest to get closer sends an arousing shock to my flesh.

We’re uninhibited. Unleashed.

“It would’ve changed nothing,” she admits. “And now, I’ll never be sated. How will we ever stop? Filling the void is an endless cycle. We’ll always need more and more until it consumes us.”

I palm her face and stare into those dark eyes. The gold flecks sheen with the reflective sparkle of keys. “We never have to stop. Never. I no longer have my penance to bear, just as you no longer have to live a lie. Shame doesn’t exist between us. As for the maddening need…” I drag the dress down her body, letting it fall to the ground. “We’ll find a way to satisfy ourselves.”

Bathed in starlight, her body is achingly beautiful. A tantalizing tease finally within reach. I’m drunk on the sight of her. I lower my mouth to her shoulder, tasting the hint of lilac on her skin—my aphrodisiac, my drug. She’s my addiction.

Her breath hitches as I grasp her tiny waist in my hands. Then as she tilts her head back, surrendering to the spell, I drop kisses to her flesh. Greedily taking every bare inch of her for myself.

Her gaze slips to the trap, where our victim erodes into nothing. “It’s too much—keep touching me, Grayson. I’m burning up. I need more.”

“God, I love it when you talk dirty. Tell me all the bad things we’re going to do.” My knees hit the ground. I suck a trail over the soft skin of her pelvis, loving the way she grips my shoulders, her legs trembling from need.

“We can do anything,” she says, the throaty rasp of her voice tearing at my control.

I graze my fingers down her thighs, then bring one of her legs over my shoulder and bury my mouth against the tender flesh of her inner thigh. She jolts at the feel of my teeth, and I groan when her heat touches my face. Her hands sink into my hair as I kiss and bite my way up her thigh, her breathy, broken cries making my cock so hard it aches against my jeans.

I taste her then. I grasp her ass and force her sweet center to my mouth, my tongue slipping between her silky lips. She’s wet and hot and I can feel every constriction of her muscles as she grinds against my face.

“Grayson…” My name is a prayer on her lips. It makes me crazy. The need for her unbearable. My desire roams wild, tasting her until she’s throbbing against my tongue.

I pull away and push off the ground. I lift her into my arms, seating her right up against the achingly hard member of my body that yearns only for her.

“Take me,” she breathes over my mouth before she nips my bottom lip. I groan, thrusting a hand into her hair and pulling her down against me. “Fuck me until I’m begging you to stop…until we’re on the brink of death.”

“Shite.” I tremble as I lower her to the earth, every muscle and sinew strung tight in anticipation. “Christ, you’re so fucking perfect. I won’t ever hold back with you. That would be a sin.”

Her hands fight to remove my shirt, her nails digging into my skin. It’s agonizing and pleasurable and unadulterated. I hiss out a tense breath as her fingers hit the fresh wound on my stomach.

“Do it again,” I say.

She strokes the injury she inflicted with a sure hand, owning me. “Is this what love feels like?”

I crave her pain like my lungs crave oxygen. “This is what our love feels like.”

“Then make me a sinner, Grayson. I don’t want redemption. I want us.”

I kiss the cuts on her wrists. The marks I put there. It heightens the urge to mark her body even more, to make her mine in a way that she’s belonged to no one else. I rake my teeth over her shoulder, then sink into her neck, eliciting a soft, breathless cry.

We work my clothes off in a frenzy of stolen touches and heated avowals, impatient. Ravenous. The pain building to a staccato beat between us that pulses with insatiable need. To be closer. To be skin to skin. The hard slab of earth beneath us amplifies my awareness, the night clear and flawless. Nothing impure to hold us back.

I roll her on top of me, gazing up at her naked body, breasts bared to me with no trace of shame in her bottomless eyes. I flatten my hand along her stomach as she arches her back, working a string of expletives from me as she grinds her slick lips against the shaft of my cock.

“Fuck. You’re killing me.” I lift up to meet each of the sexy rolls of her hips.

She falls over me, her hair cascading down her shoulder and creating a curtain to shield us from the world. I let her cage me in, the undeniable power flowing from her limbs jacking my heart rate. She wears her sin beautifully.

“What if I could?” she whispers into the shell of my ear. Her teeth nick my flesh as she finds purchase on the ground to push back hard, decimating my restraint.