Page 70 of Firedrake Betrayal
The towel thumps to the floor.
I’m rewarded with a cheeky grin and a darkening of his gaze. “Hmm.”
He has me pinned to the bathroom wall a split second later as he steps into my naked body, and I feel how hard he is.
I consider him for a beat, curious at the approval in his eyes. And the pleasure. “You like giving orders.”
“I didn’t know I did,” he mutters, “but fuck, yeah, I think I fucking do.”
Shep yells something about Patten not bothering me if I want to be alone.
“She doesn’t want to be alone,” Patten yells back, and looks at me. “Do you?”
I shake my head.
I’ve spent too much time alone that I think it’s in my nature now to want to run off and chew on my fears instead of talking them through with someone. It’s not a healthy habit to have, and one I need to break if I want to build a future with Shep, Patten, and Isaiah, and I want to.
Patten gives me a brief heated look and yanks his shirt off before he stuffs it over my head.
“What are you doing?” I ask when I can see again.
“I need to kiss you.” He snags my hand and pulls. “We can’t do this in here.”
“Why can’t we kiss in the bathroom?”
“You’re naked.” He swings open the door and peers over his shoulder at me.
“But why do?—?”
He pins me to the hallway wall, and his kiss, a hard, furious thing, silences me. I’m sliding my hands up his back, dragging him closer when he breaks the kiss. “That’s why. Understand?”
I understand.
Making it to the room he claimed as his takes a long time, even though it’s just down the hallway. Mainly because Patten keeps stopping to pin me to the wall and kissing me.
In his room, he stops and turns to face me, giving me a probing look.
“What?” I ask, trying to read his expression.
“It just hit me that I dragged you down here, and at no point between there and here did I ask you if this was even what you wanted.”
Dad thought all demons were dangerous and that I could never trust one.
Patten is so much more than just a demon to be hunted. There’s a kindness and a vulnerability in him that I think it would be very easy for someone to miss. But I see those things, only because I think he lets me.
Smiling, I step into Patten, winding my arms around his shoulders as I stand on my tiptoes and kiss him.
His hands flex on my hips before he kisses me back, holding me against him.
“That was a surprisingly sweet kiss for a guy who just dragged you down the hallway,” he breaks away to tell me. “I’m not sure I deserved it.”
“You did.”
His gaze dips and a half-smile tugs on the corner of his lips. “I like you in my shirt.”
“It’s soft,” I admit. “And you weren’t doing as much dragging as you thought you were. I’m a little curious about any other instructions you might have for me.”
He sweeps me into a lingering, lush kiss that kills any desire to go anywhere or be anywhere but in Patten’s arms.
