Page 25 of Reflections of Silence

Swallowing hard, I twisted to look over my shoulder, clutching the sheet at my waist, hair tumbling haphazardly around my bare shoulders.

Heat burned within Sebastian’s gaze. His eyes never left my face, though I had the impression he took in all of me where I sat. He crooked a finger—the small movement sending a thrill through me as he drew me up his chest.

“Uh-uh,” I wriggled. “You promised to talk.”

Sebastian’s features smoothed. “Always with the talking.”

Two days of sex, of learning about the monster in my bed, let alone under it, swirled around me in a maelstrom of emotion. I couldn’t pick one down to focus on, and suddenly, everything was too much.

“Answer me,” I whispered.

Tears stung my eyes when he stared at me, stone faced.Don’t do this to me.I pleaded inside my head, hoping our silent conversation hadn’t been a figment of my imagination. The dual ache at my throat and breast certainly wasn’t.

I slapped his chest, but he didn’t move. No mark rose beneath his skin, though my hand stung.

“So you are—” I faltered, still staring.

“I am.”

I slapped him again, though it appeared to make no difference to him. “Don’t you do that.”

“Do what?” His face was smooth as alabaster, though I sensed a large degree of humor boiling beneath the surface.

“That,” I snapped, though the single word came out waspish. I swallowed and tried again. “Don’t you go all god-like on me.”

His hands clamped around my hips, and he rolled me beneath him with ease.

Maybe chastising a minor god wasn’t the best idea of the morning. Or night. My mind flitted back to the first day here— yesterday, today...my thoughts remained too muddled, my sense of time lost.

I’d thought my husband was a lay-about who chose to rise in the evenings on my first day. Not that those hours were thatdifferent from the rest of European nobility, but the truth had been far more haunting.

Sebastian snarled above me, his weight bearing down on the body he had spent so many hours teasing and using for his own pleasure while giving me mine

Definitely god-like.

“Do I look god-like to you?” he growled, the sound reverberating through his broad chest.

Without much thought in the action and lost in the feel of him, I nodded. His snarl grew as he pushed my thighs apart, sinking his hard length inside me in a single stroke.

I tossed my head back, my mouth dry on the scream that tore from my throat.

Then his lips were there, sucking as he worked his hips into me over and over, his hands gripping my rear for purchase. I swallowed the wave of pleasure threatened to black out the twin pain and pleasure as he rose to kiss me. Ruby lips glinted in the darkness, my body responding to his every wish.

Then he kissed me, demanding more, and then the night swallowed us both.

His fingers trailed the length of my spine as I rested on his chest, my body covered with a fine sheen of sweat. Sebastian’s, of course, held nothing. I sighed, tracing a hand over the ridges of muscle on his chest, down to his stomach.

“You’re too perfect.” I propped my elbows on his chest, remembering the last time I'd done this, and hoped we wouldn't be interrupted.

“You think I’m perfect?” His mouth twisted in a sardonic smile. “You don’t know anything about me, Gella.” His voice was as dark as his eyes, like velvet that wrapped around me.

An edge of danger tugged at me, heightening all my senses.

I thought about what I did know—which wasn’t that much—of his resilience to the bias against his kind, and there was plenty I needed to discuss with him. There was the way the servants were around him—had he terrified them for years? And the Gallery. That strong familial resemblance I suspected was the singular lifetime of one man.

Yet another conversation I needed to have. But he hadn’t killed me, hadn’t maimed me, though he contained the strength and ability to do so.

A wife would be easy to replace in such a remote home.

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