Page 35 of Defended By Love

Just as the building convulses with its last protest before it quiets, my orgasm explodes against the tip of his cock. I scream out a moan into his mouth when I come. My legs tighten around his hips as I grind against him, riding him, bucking wildly with an insatiable lust as my orgasm pulses to the very ends of my toes in increasingly potent after-shocks.

Finally, when my body shudders with the final vestiges of pleasure, I pull away from his kiss. Our foreheads rest against one another as we catch our breath with the same air.

For a moment everything’s perfect. Here, intertwined and together, it’s impossible to ignore the undeniable feeling of rightness. Fate, for all her folly, has decided that we’re meant to be. He’s my other half, my lover, my person, my destiny.

“Hailey,” he breathes, my name a promise on his lips. “We need to go. Let me take you home.”

I pause and pull away from him, looking into his beautiful brown eyes that shine with their devotion to me.

“I know that’s not your home, Zagreus Hart.”

Sure, he might be my true love, but fate can suck my dick. I fucking died today and came back even stronger.

Nothing is going to tell me what to do. Nothing is going to stop me.

Least of all a liar in a cheap spandex suit.

Chapter 19

The silence extends, permeating the office, despite the ragged sounds of our panting breath and the creaks of the walls as they begin to crack. The silence is a living thing that rears its head and threatens to suffocate us.

To suffocate me, along with my withheld tears.

“You’ve got it wrong,” says my handsome, spandexed liar. “Let me get you out of here and I’ll explain.”

He goes to grab me, but I slap his hand away, pushing myself away from him as best as I can. Beside us, there’s a snap and a whole chunk of the wall just falls off, an empty husk of the support it once was.

“If you can explain, you can explain now. So what if we die? We’ll just reset a second later?”

I’m propelled against him and into his arms with breath-stealing force. Clamped in his arms, he takes off flying through the flotsam that fall off the wall and float around us in terrifying, gravity-defying swirls.

“As someone who dug out your dead body yesterday and had to live with you being dead all day,” he snarls. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let that happen any time soon.”

Out into the foyer and wrapped together, we fly faster than he’s ever flown with me. The air whistles its wail in my ear—a sound so shrill and lurching it could almost be a real scream. Grant—or whatever his name is—makes a beeline for the broken window. Objects sail out of our way, tossed aside like dust on a shoulder, as we go.

My heart races. Despite the fact that I know I’ll just come back, the very core of me distinctly does not want to die. I close my eyes and trust that Grant will get us out of here. I just breathe in his scent and feel his warmth against my cheek until it’s over.

We’re barely out into the pouring rain when the building sighs its death rattle and collapses into rubble. It’s a sight that never ceases to stun me into breathless awe, even after experiencing it from the inside.

Grant, or maybe Zagreus, whatever his name is, isn’t looking at the building. His furious eyes are trained intensely on me. In a way I haven’t felt since high school when I skipped prom to secretly study, I know I’m in trouble.

Whatever. He’s in trouble too. He lied. I died. We both have hell to pay.

“Let me go,” I say through clenched teeth.

“No.”

My nostrils flare. No one tells me ‘no’.

“I’ll scream.”

He huffs a humourless laugh. “Good! That’d at least show a modicum of common sense. I mean, what were you thinking yesterday? Trying to get out through the stairs? Did you not think that I’d come for you?”

“You? You’re who I was trying to get away from!”

Grant recoils. There’s a raw confusion and hurt in his eyes that tugs at my heart. Damn those beautiful eyes.

“Why would you want to get away from me?” he asks in a voice too small for the man I see in front of me.

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