Page 27 of Fool's Bargain

Heedless of the risk and the pain, I panted in her ear, “Praise fucking Dion, yes. Come for us, baby.”

And she did. Her body arched with a sudden tremor of pleasure and her teeth dug into my neck hard. Pain flashed through me but I was too wrapped up in drawing out her pleasure to pull away. I kept whispering rough encouragement into her ear, hissing when she clamped down harder and hoping that she managed to avoid breaking skin. Just as she reached the very pinnacle, her thighs clenching around my hand, we were caught in a drift so strong it felt like a punch to the gut.

Dion’s shiny balls, I hoped to fuck the Diviner hadn’t called us back to her already.

14

Theo

Iheld tight to Zarya through the drift, mind buzzing with near panic that I’d been so careless to let her taste my blood. The meld was nearly instantaneous, my secrets laid bare for her to see before I had a chance to erect any kind of barrier. But she’d wanted to get to know us. I hadn’t intended it to happen with any sort of permanence yet—I’d only wanted to show her that a taste of her essence was enough for us to know her, and that she could learn what she needed about us by doing the same.

Now she knew everything and I braced myself for any fallout. Would she be as repulsed by us as all the nymphs in the Haven were? The meld was only one-way so I didn’t have a similar link to her mind to discover what might be going through her head right now. Probably not a lot, considering her tight, hot channel kept spasming around my fingers all the way through the drift.

We came to a stop as I gave her another slow stroke before easing my hand out of her jeans. Ragged breathing surrounded me. Kyril and Dorian had been part of the drift too, but our surroundings were utterly foreign, so I doubted it had been either of them who had carried us away from the concert.

Which meant it had to have been Zarya, and the implications of that thrilled me. If she had drifted us by reflex with only a small taste of my blood, it meant she had to be filled with nymphaea power already. No wonder we’d been so drawn to her.

We were no longer upright, the music had disappeared, and the only sound besides our breathing was the unmistakable rhythm of waves crashing on some nearby shore. We were also prone on top of something soft, and I stared up at a ceiling with a dark brown, five-bladed fan in the center.

Zarya relaxed in my embrace and shook her head as if clearing her mind. “That fucking orgasm is making me hallucinate. What the hell did you guys do to me?”

“Where the fuck are we?” Dorian asked in a voice thick with his need for sex and his effort to keep his primal spirit subdued.

“Zarya, want to explain what you did?” I tilted my head enough to see the side of her face. She was staring intently at the chain that dangled down from the center of the fan. A teardrop-shaped piece of beach glass at the end glinted translucent in the cool lights that filtered through the window.

“I had one epic fucking orgasm. Beyond that your guess is as good as mine. Welcome to my bed, boys.”

Kyril sat up, looking bewildered. “This isn’t possible. Neither of us have ever been here before.” He shot a searching look at me and Dorian. “Have you?”

“Not I,” Dorian said.

I tightened my hold on Zarya with one arm and levered myself up with the other, twisting her around to sit crossways on my lap. My erection strained against my jeans, the ache bordering on painful, but we had bigger things to worry about. I touched her chin, wary of what I’d see when I looked into her eyes now that she’d seen some of the horrors I’d been through. A streak of red glistened on her lower lip, and I swept the pad of my thumb across it, gathering a remnant of the blood that remained. I wanted to kiss her, taste more of her essence, lick my fingers clean of her juices to know her even a little bit. But this was too grave an occurrence to just let it go.

“Someone likes to bite during sex,” I said, tilting my head to one side to display the half-healed bite on my neck.

She winced. “Sorry about that. You kind of do things to me. And I was trying not to make noise.”

“Are you also a screamer?” Dorian asked, one dark eyebrow lifted.

“You bit Theo, then drifted us to your home,” Kyril said, ignoring Dorian’s question. “Dion save us.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I don’t know how to...drift.”

“It’s instinctual for us, once we unlock the power. If either of us had visited your bedroom before, we could have drifted us all here easily. You must carry quite a bit of nymphaea power if you can do it with only a taste of satyr blood—and without even trying. It’s not a bad thing, just surprising. But the bite that triggered it... that’s a different issue.”

Kyril stood with a sigh and paced to the door to her balcony, staring out into the night.

“It’s just a sex bite. It’ll heal, right? If you’re anything like Deva, I wouldn’t think it would be an issue.”

“Did you swallow any?” Kyril asked, turning back to face her.

I still held her, and as she processed the question, I bent my head and nuzzled her neck. The primal satyr within me wanted a taste of her in the worst way. If I couldn’t have her blood to complete our bond, I wanted everything else she was willing to give. “You know she did. Somehow it was strong enough for her to drift.” And to get into my head.

“That would meansheis strong enough to drift,” Kyril said. “It takes more than just a taste of nymphaea blood to accomplish it. She’d need to be higher-races bred. But she’shuman.”

“Bloodline aren’t exactly human.” I brushed my lips over her cheek, inhaling her sweet scent. “And if she was strong enough for Deva’s hounds to call all three of us to her, strong enough for us to be drawn to her despite Deva being so close, that must signal a pretty potent amount of nymphaea blood running through her veins. Now that my blood is part of it, I can feel her inside my mind. You know me now, don’t you, Zarya?”

She shivered and tilted her head to give me more access and I relished her small surrender—even though the lack of a response to my question signaled her reluctance to accept this new information. But when she looked into my eyes, I knew she understood, and even better, sheacceptedwhat she’d seen.

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