Page 60 of By the Fae

Panic shot through me. The words out before I could consider what Holly’s reaction might be. Which was . . . to grind herself onto my hand and the device. I had to turn my head, close my eyes, and bear down on my lower lip with my teeth for a few seconds.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said, when I forced my gaze back to her. Her sweet breath came in pants, mixing with mine, doing something weird to my insides. Stirring them all up like a witch attending to her cauldron. “It is love. Love is a human’s greatest strength. I’m sorry, you don’t want to hear that but . . . I have nothing else to tell you.”

“No,” I whispered, our noses touching, our lips barely a hairsbreadth apart.

“Just accept it, Goldie. Just make the game about love, and we can work on everything else that needs sorting for the expo.”

“Damn it, human!” I twisted my fingers in her hair, pulling her head to the side, and because I couldn’t kiss her lips, despite needing too, I sucked her earlobe into my mouth, and scraped my teeth down it. Her knees jerked forward, and she let out a whine like a drooling dog watching its master eat. I yanked the device away from her clit and scooped it into her palm, just as I switched it back on with the controller. She stared down at it, clearly debating running off to the bathroom or finishing there in front of me.

If she’d have chosen the latter, I would have let her finish. Silly girl.

I didn’t say anything to Holly as I left. Instead, I laid another kiss at the throbbing pulse in her neck, tilted her chin up with my finger, and walked out of the twelfth-floor break room. I didn’t go far. Didn’t need to. Two seconds later, she came striding out. A look of hazed determination on her face, and she slipped into the women’s bathroom. I hung around outside the door. Waiting. Listening. I knew her whimpers. I knew her body.

Not long now . . .

I shut the device off a second before Holly could come.

A desperate cry emitted from the bathroom. “Noooooooo!”

As I walked back to my office, I couldn’t decide which was bigger. My grin or my boner.

Chapter 20.

Holly

“What about finding long-lost treasure?” I said, artfully sidestepping Rusty. Saw him coming a mile away. “The graphics are already set up for it. It’d be perfect.”

Goldie gave me a passive, flattened look. I couldn’t tell if he was letting me know it was a stupid idea, or if he felt cheated I didn’t get mauled by the giant moose for a third time that day. Or both.

We were playing as each other again, me as him, him as me, sitting rather cosily on his big, squishy, maroon sofa. Our bodies nearly, but not quite, touching. The on-screen Goldie almost as distractingly handsome as the real one.

Only one of his flatmates was currently in and awake, Taurin. The minotaur occasionally crossed in front of us on his way to and from the kitchen, but he didn’t speak much. Which suited me fine. I guessed the vampire was also in, but since it was still light outside, he was probably in bed. Coffin? Whatever he slept in.

Goldie’s jersey clad chest rhythmically rose and fell, his breathing silent, but his gaze almost audible. Every time he looked down at me, it felt as though he was announcing it.“Hey human, I’m looking at you again. Why are your breaths so loud?”And it seemed to happen a lot, but only when I was staring ahead, at the screen, pointedly not looking at him.

“Okaaay,” I said, drawing out the word, and mentally tossing the treasure-hunt idea aside. Even though I really,reallyliked it. “What about some kind of city builder type game? You could have us, them, found some kind of harmonious utopia.”

Wrong choice of words, Holly. You’ve made it sound too much like love.

I was still mad at him for the whole clit-blocking episode at work on Thursday, two days ago. It’d held all the promise of being the best orgasm of my life, and he shut the thing off right before the crunch point. Twice! I had to finish manually. It annoyed me for three reasons. The first being it was a disappointing climax. Fine, it was okay, but compared with what I’d imagined was headed my way, it paled. Second, I’d never masturbated at work before and it felt so weird, so wrong, and so naughty. I loved it. It threw all my sensibilities out of whack. And the last reason, no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t stop picturing how smug his stupid face would’ve been as soon as he’d denied me those few glorious seconds of oblivion. Sat in his office, sipping his cavity-encouraging coffee, laughing at me.

And he was still mad at me for not relenting on the love thing. I wouldn’t relent. Ordinarily, I had no problem admitting I was wrong, even if, all along I knew I’d been right. Even if only to shut the other person up so they’d leave me alone. But this time, I wouldn’t cave. Couldn’t. Perhaps because his game would hugely benefit from the added emotion, or perhaps because I simply didn’t want him to shut up and leave me alone.

We were in a mutual stasis of irk.

I pressed on with my city builder idea. “Like, you know, Darren the Great and Todd the Enigmatic? The founders of Borderlands. One a fae, one a—”

“A human, yes, I know. You’re human-splaining my own history to me. You forget I was alive when Borderlands was formed.”

Of course he was. Him being nearly seven-hundred years old, and Borderlands coming up to its quincentennial anniversary. “Sure, sorry. Can I ask you a question?”

He said nothing, but his shoulders dropped in resignation.

“Which one was which? Was Darren the fae and Todd the human? Or was it the other way around?” I asked.

Goldie laughed and elbowed me in the ribs. It was a careful, gentle nudge, and it sent disproportionately numerous sparks skittering all over my body. “You know? I have no idea. So much for knowing Borderlands’ history.”

“How old are you, exactly?” I secretly congratulated myself for shoehorning that question in there.

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