The Company of Fiends (Tempting Monsters 2)

My lips grazed his ear, heat bubbling through me as his calloused fingers stroked up my thighs. "What do you want?"

Jude leaned in. Sitting up on my knees, his face was close to my breasts. His breath ghosted over my skin, bristled cheek turning to graze against me. He tilted his head back, soft strands of hair landing in my reaching fingers.

"To know what it feels like to be all of myself at once," he whispered back.

The words gripped me, a concept I'd banished from my own heart years ago. To be human and monster. He was fae, and he hardly knew that part of himself, even less than I knew my own nymph blood.

"And you," he added, the words pressed to my pounding pulse through full lips.

I didn't even have to pull. It was as if that stare that had hooked me minutes ago had locked us together. I slid off his lap and he rose with me. The incubi tucked their legs to the side, making room for me to lead Jude out of the audience, into the aisle. On stage, Hugh was already being gently feasted on by his adoring troll, her huge hands petting playfully as she lapped at his cock with enormous lips, his face dizzy and blissful. Isabel looked significantly less blissful as she ordered an elegant vampire into the stockade at center stage, but the vampire didn't seem bothered and the troll only had eyes for Hugh, so I assumed Isabel could be left to her own devices. Jealousy wouldn't serve her long in this theater.

I caught Jude's hand in mine, considered my former plan for Hunter, and then blushed and discarded the idea. I knew Jude almost as well as myself and yet hardly at all. Especially not when it came to sex. And as much as the theme meant I ought to make him submit, I looked at the stage and all our toys—chains and paddles and phalluses and clamps—and knew there wasn't one I wanted to introduce to Jude. Well, not tonight at least.

I drew him into the shadows of the small staircase to the right of the stage, and Jude crowded close.

"I'm nervous, suddenly," he whispered. "Do you get nervous?"

Not anymore, I thought. But I didn't answer.

I reached for his face in the dark and pulled it to mine, as I'd been craving to do for what felt like ages. His arms snapped around me as our mouths fit neatly together, and there was no evidence of nerves or hesitance as his tongue met mine, stroking and twining and chasing for more. This man knows me in ways no one else does, I thought, twining my own arms around his neck, pressing my hammering heart to his through our chests.

He tasted a bit like pipe smoke and bitters, earthy too, and he felt familiar in my arms even though we'd never kissed—a destination I understood intimately even if it was my first visit. I sucked at his lips, rocked my hips into his, and pulled away with a few quick kisses.

"I'm less nervous now," Jude said, voice lowered, honeyed and warm, nuzzling his cheek to mine. His hands cupped my ass, rubbed me against his hip, the ridge of his cock growing stiff in his pants.

Strange, because I was more nervous now.

"Jude…do you have any fae features?" I asked, inching us slowly toward the door that led to the stage.

"Wings," he whispered. "I keep them hidden."

Wings. That was right, he'd said so before. Webbed like Ronan's, or feathered like an incubi? The last Unseelie I'd met didn't have any wings.

"Tonight you'll show them," I said.

I didn't give him a chance to argue. That would be my dominance, I decided, because everything else I wanted to do to Jude probably wouldn't match. Reddy and the others would forgive me. I pulled Jude out onto the lights of the stage, past Evie, who was undressing a pretty demon woman with chains jangling over her arms, and into the center of the floorboards.

His eyes were wide and shockingly pale, pupils shrinking at the glare of the spotlight, and his steps stumbled into place. I circled to his back, leaving him to the stare of the audience, and brushed the nape of his neck with my fingers.

"Just look confident," I whispered in his ear, tugging at his collar to warn him.

He straightened, shoulders broadening, and he didn't flinch as I pulled his jacket down his arms. The back of his white shirt was cast in shadow, and I blinked and puzzled over it for a moment, tossing his coat to the floor. The shadow shifted, trailed down to his thighs, tickled against mine, and it struck me suddenly. Not waxy membrane or feathers. I reached up and stroked the shadow, felt the whisper of Jude's wings rustling and flexing against my touch. Jude groaned and shuddered. Had these wings ever been touched? Not likely, given I was the only person aside from his mother who'd known what he was.

Which presented an intriguing possibility about Jude's experience with touch in general.

"They're not strong," Jude gasped.

Because they'd been trapped under coats his entire life, prevented from stretching and beating freely. But in spite of his claim, the shadows began to spread out, shrouding Jude's head through a dark film, tickling and teasing me as they started to stretch. I rounded them carefully, the spotlight making their outline clearer on stage than they would be in the dark. I stroked my fingers over them, the sensation cool and pleasant, just shy of tangible but not entirely.

Jude's head was dropped, his chest heaving, his wings flirting eagerly with my hands.

"Look up," I said, not performing for the audience anymore, not even aware of what the others were doing.

Jude's eyes were hooded as he lifted his chin, lips wet and parted on a pant. I stroked his wing closest to me again, and those eyes shut as he released a moan. Softness nuzzled into my palm, his wing still stretching. I guided it out, my own lips parting on a gasp. They were huge, perhaps even growing to spread into the light, to swallow it up in that gauzy, glittering shadow. I stepped in front of Jude, and he blinked dazedly at me.

"I want everyone to see you," I said.

He blinked again, eyes flicking over my shoulder and then to me. "I want you to see me."

So I unbuttoned his shirt, watching and studying the way his wings only really had to flutter to shed the fabric. Pure shadow. I'd never seen anything like them, and from the murmurs of wonder behind me, I had a feeling neither had some of the audience.