Page 75 of Creatures that Breathe

A command.

I do as he asks, fire eating at my veins.

“If you remember nothing of me,” he says, voice like silk, peppering my inner thighs with languorous kisses, easing his shoulders between my knees, spreading me farther. “Then remember this.”

And then he’s tasting me, licking and sucking on the most intimate part of me, rolling his tongue across me.

It’s too much.

The embers fizzing in my blood spark to flame under his ministrations. I forget how to breathe, how to stay still, struggling, twisting my hips, gasping out half thoughts like “we should just,” and “you don’t have to,” and “Sweet Gods of Olympus.”

“I changed my mind,” he says, pulling apart from me, gaze scoring up my heaving body, cheeks flushed red. He pushes a single finger inside me, another, and I gasp, back arching up off the bed, hands clawing at the sheets. “Forget everything,” he orders darkly, happily, “Allow me to remind you of this, over and over.”

The pleasure goes white hot, pierces to catastrophic, and sparks fracture across me, blistering and beautiful. I moan, slam my legs together, arch taut and say the only name I know. “Cross.”

He guides me through the peak, kissing paths up my legs, keeping his finger deep inside me, pressure on exactly the right spot.

Gradually, the sparks fade to oblivion, and I slink into the bed. Smile at the ceiling.

I’m still breathing hard when I push to my elbows. Cross is staring, rolled back to sit on his heels as he white knuckles the edge of the mattress. The clench in his jaw would shear mortal teeth.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

Some strange emotions show on his face. “Ask me to stop,” he rasps. “Please.”

Please.

“I can’t.” I don’t want to.

We’re here, rocketing toward the game winning move I’ve been grappling for since we met, toward my freedom, and I’m wishing I was stronger, brave enough to tell him to stop.

I’m not.

I bend to fold my hands over the bulk of his shoulders, draw him into me, and he’s drawn as easily as teeth of a zipper, pulling us tighter, cinching us to a lock, his length hot and hard on my thigh.

Shivers and heat.

Noise blasts through our embrace. A shout. “Hey! He’s not finished! Wait!”

The door flies open, Cross’s shadows ripple, rush to cover me and the bed. The bulb in the lamp next to us explodes from a thrum of his power and he covers himself over me to protect me from the spray of glass.

And then the worst thing possible happens.

A low, monotone voice commands, “Hands off the princess.”

17

Cross

HQ Mike-India-Alpha Vester—Fuck it

Every fiber of my being rejects the truth, but it’s too easy to accept Atlas’s accusation. Of course, Leni’s a princess.

Look at her.

The elegant rise of her chin when challenged. Her aversion to harm. Those pretty manners.

Even when she was injured, a couple of bruised fingers, her reaction was that of a sheltered royal, not a street-smart creature.

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