Page 134 of Visions of Darkness

My voice was gravel when I spoke, grinding through the tension that strained between us. “I’m sorry we didn’t find it last night. But we will. I promise you, we will.”

“There is nothing for you to apologize for, Pax.” She hesitated like she was going to say more.

“What is it?”

Her head barely shook. “Nothing. I’m just thankful to be right here. Right now.”

My hand went to her head, fingers weaving in the locks of her long, black hair, caressing down until I was holding her by the back of the neck. “I just want to take care of you. Protect you.”

“You are. You are right here. Exactly where I need you.” The words were wisps, and the fingers she had on my face traipsed lower until she had them curled in my shirt. She drew me closer as she pressed her chest against mine. Desperate to erase the space. To fill the void that ached between us.

“I need you.” She whispered it like a prayer.

A plea that I felt like a punch to the gut.

“Aria.” It was restraint. A promise. A warning.

I knew I needed to unravel myself from where we were tied. Push her away and stop this recklessness before it spiraled out of control.

Before I did something I knew we would both regret.

But in that second, I could barely breathe. Could barely think. Everything was skewed by the greed that ran rampant.

It howled in my ears. Clouded my mind. Laid siege to my senses.

I was consumed with what it would be like to peel her from her clothes. Touch her. Sink into her.

Like she’d witnessed every salacious thought blaze through my mind, Aria whimpered a tiny needy sound, and her plump, swollen lips parted.

She arched. The peaks of her small tits were hard and pressing at my chest.

Electricity crackled and snapped, a bolt of lightning that shocked through the room.

Thunder came from a place that shouldn’t exist, and I swore I felt the ground tremble.

My palm spread wide as I let it rove down her shoulder and skim her side, and my fingers dug into her hip, somehow both pushing her away and drawing her closer. “You’re everything, Aria. I don’t thinkyou know the way you changed everything the first time I saw you. Standing there in the doorway of your room in the facility ... when I looked at you?”

My fingers burrowed deeper as the words scraped like shards from my mouth. “It wasn’t like being reborn. It was realizing why I was born in the first place.”

“You were the truth inside me when I never knew what was real. My hope. The hollow place inside that only you could fill,” she whispered.

Shifting, she dragged her leg over the top of mine, and those eyes flared as she purposefully rubbed herself over my cock, which had hardened to stone.

She gasped at the contact.

A thousand flames leaped.

Fuck me.

She’d barely brushed against me, but I thought I might pass out from the feel of her.

Sparks of pleasure shot up my spine, and lust rolled through my insides like liquid steel.

“And kissing you last night?” I said. “It’ll probably go down as the single most perfect moment of my life.”

Her teeth raked over her bottom lip like she could taste it. Like it was going to be the most perfect moment in her life, too.

Still, I was forcing out, “But we can’t do this, Aria.” The words were coarse. Gravel that scattered between us. “I crossed a line last night I never should have crossed.”

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