Page 96 of Guarded By the Nightmare

I just couldn’t tell normal people what he was doing. I pretended he was in some kind of tech and he’d signed a really stringent NDA. He left when they called him, when he was done he came home, and our lives went on. I didn’t need to do Bluebeard’s wife shit—I knew what he was capable of.

The same way I knew he always loved me, and Wisp—which was what we’d started calling the baby in my belly.

Sylas thought the nickname was because they would be a little Wisp of Shadow, or a Will-o-the-Wisp...and I didn’t feel the need to tell him that I’d had a Breyer horse I’d loved that I’d named Wisp in third grade.

We each had our secrets.

“This just seems like a lot,” he said, continuing to look around. He lost some coherency now that there weren’t other people watching, and opened up a few extra eyes.

“Totally,” I said, putting a hand on my stomach.

“Do babies come out with opposable thumbs?” he asked, sounding sincere.

I gawked at him. “Yes, of course!” I sputtered—and then I realized he was grinning. “You’re just fucking with me!”

“Not yet,” he said, floating toward me through a field of ribbons and bows that we’d been told we were keeping for some inexplicable reason. Some of them had been affixed to a hat, which I’d been wearing for the event, but it didn’t match my maximally comfortable, and somewhat glamorous, in an “I’m really committing to this housewife bit” way, silk teal muumuu, so I’d taken it off.

“And Ella is gone now, and usually she gives us at least three hours alone...” he went on.

“Yeah?” I asked, settling my arms around his shoulders. The benefit of him being somewhat incorporeal was that I could hug him without my belly getting in the way.

“I do worry that we’re traumatizing him some,” he said, pretending to sound grave.

“First off, it’s a girl, secondly, he knows his mother needs to get some.”

One of his eyebrows arched up. “You changed genders there.”

“I’m waiting for it to pick, Sylas, but in the meantime, you’ve got about thirty-seconds to fuck me.”

He gave an evil chuckle. “On the couch?”

“Absolutely—don’t hit that playset though. It looks super expensive.”

He traced a line of himself beneath my voluminous dress, but instead of coming for me with it, he raised a portion of the fabric itself, making it hover between us like a ghost while he made ridiculouswoooooonoises, and I began laughing helplessly.

“If you tell me that’s your dick, we’re done here, Mister.”

“You like my dicks. All of them,” he said, laughing too, moving to catch me from the back and shift me to the couch, in one smooth motion. I squealed with delight, and he flung up the bottom of my dress, diving beneath, and with him hidden from me and the rest of his shadows trailing around the living room, it was like my vagina was about to get haunted, and I was one hundred percent okay with that.

I felt the pinpricks of his claws above the wide, high waistband of my completely unsexy underwear—at the same time as pieces of him began to press against the cotton between my legs, rolling up and down, while hands I couldn’t see rode up my dress to cup my breasts beneath my bra. We were approximately three seconds away from mouth-town, and Sylas had trained my body like Pavlov’s dog. “May I, my queen?” he asked politely, but I could hear the hunger in his voice.

“Yes—please—I’ve got more,” I promised, and he shredded them off at once. I gasped, as his shoulders became more solid beneath my knees, and pieces of him started kissing me all over, at the same time a forked tongue started teasing at my clit. I groaned and threw a helpless hand up over my head to push off of the couch’s arm, as I arched my hips up into him.

“Greedy, greedy,” he teased, while feathering a different, thicker tongue against my slit.

“Only for you.”

He made a pleased sound, then paused. “What if I hit him on the head?”

I reached down and yanked the voluminous extra fabric up around my chest, so that I could see him, past the half-moon of my belly. “What if I die of the horny? I don’t think you’re thinking through all of the possible ramifications of leaving me hanging here, my king.”

“I was teasing,” he said with a laugh.

“I wasn’t,” I said, arching my hips up and giving him a wicked grin.

He rose up at that and flared his shadows out all around me, blocking all the other light in the room. “And do you think I would ever let anything happen to you or Wisp?” he doubled down.

And in that moment...I had precisely too damn long to think. I shook my head and answered honestly. “No...”

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