Page 43 of Cursed Shadows 2

He clenches his jaw, tight.

I feel the tension of it against me. And I plant the first true kiss on his smooth, caramel skin—right at the corner of his full mouth.

Still, he is as rigid as a statue.

I lift the kiss to his soft lips.

His lashes flutter.

I savour it. I delay it. Sweet breaths I let escape me, soft lips brushing his, and he feels every bit of it.

Daxeel tilts his chin down. That slight tilt of the head aligns us completely. And I kiss him.

I kiss him softly, I kiss him lovingly—just as the whore does.

Daxeel is that desperate for me to need him. He needs me to beg for him, his touch, his love after the slight.

If he hadn’t been so desperate for this to go to the whore and get some cheap imitation, then I wouldn’t know how to seduce him back into me—how to win him over again.

I know now I make him feral with need. And that is power. But I don’t mistake it for less than absolute danger.

So I finish with a chaste kiss to his lips before I draw back to the mattress and—with our gazes locked—I fall on my back. Loose chestnut waves fan up around my face before my head lands on the feathery pillow, and it settles into something of a halo.

I don’t fix it.

I just spread my legs for him. It has the hem of my dress falling over my knees and bunching at my naked core.

But Daxeel makes no move for me.

Looking down my body at him, I see he hasn’t budged from the bedpost. His hand is gripped tight around the wood, so tight that it will erupt in an explosion of splinters any second now. But tighter is the clench of his jaw as he keeps his smouldering blue eyes on me.

He fights.

Hard, he wages a battle within himself—and I fear he means to turn and leave.

I can’t let that happen.

So I slide my hand down my middle, all the way to the bunched dress around my hips. His gaze follows.

I delve my fingers into the warmth he craves.

He watches.

It doesn’t go unnoticed that he’s positioned me to the bed, not on my knees, not on the floor—because the last time he did that, I brought him to his knees.

It haunts him, I have no doubt about it. Mocks him, like my words mocked him that night.

‘I wonder which other dark males I can bring to their knees—and will they whisper my name, too?’

Daxeel needs this, to own and claim me, shame me. Heneeds to balance the scales, not for his ego—it has never been about that. It’s his nature, the beast, the animalism within him. Even a litalf male would have cut me down for a slight like that.

But he’s trying. I see that. I’m not broken, I’m not dead, I’m not alone in my bedchamber this Quiet.

He is trying, and so I will too.

And for him, I bring myself to orgasm—and he watches.

I finish with a whisper of his name.

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