Page 129 of Sky Song
He took a step forward, crowding her. “It isn’t about me, and it’s all about me.”
“I don’t understand.” Her mouth went dry, and she couldn't decide if she was overreacting. She tried to calm herself down using the mind control she’d learned a long time ago, but it was difficult to concentrate with him looming, pushing against her, making her retreat.
“You’re so pretty.”
“Don’t try to distract me!”
“When I look at you, all I see is light. Serene, calming light, strength, and gentleness. You can have any man of your own race you want.” He backed her against a wall.
“I don’t want any man.”
It was like he hadn’t heard her. “Yet you want me. Why?”
“I don’t know!” She remembered not to shout, for they were in a full house.
“I don’t know, either. But I’ll damn myself to the darkest corner of the Universe - and believe me, there are parts so dead they echo with their own emptiness - before I let anything happen to you.”
“Nothing was happening to me until you arrived,” she said in a low voice.
“Are we so sure of that?” He made a dismissive motion. “Now, I’m all you have. I have to be able to think, to fight. I have to be able to fly. Simple as that, my hearts. Simple as that.”
Cricket was suffocating, her throat tight as if he was choking her, yet he hadn’t laid a finger on her body. “I don’t want you to kill anyone for me.”
“Too late - I already did. I wanted to.”
“No.”
He shook his head, and the energy emanating from him was almost savage. “You can’t will me into a different type ofa man.” He leaned over and captured her lips in a searing, passionate kiss.
Helpless, Cricket took in his sweet invasion, gasping at the taste of him that exploded on her tongue. Her head began to swim and she stood on tiptoes, desperate to mold her mouth tighter against his, to press her body closer. Belatedly, it came to her that he had lost some of his playfulness, that carefree ease that was distinctly Lyle. That, too, was a sign she’d missed.
He wrestled his mouth away and took a step back.
“I can’t play the touching game anymore. I…” For a moment he looked lost, but maybe she imagined it in the uneven darkness. “I can smell you,” he finished quietly.
It hit her. With the implant gone, he was no longer harmless - in more ways than one.
She pushed a lock of hair off her eyes. “You already reverted to your base uncouth state anyway. Might as well be a man now.”
“Still hanging the idea of a man on his body functions, I see.”
“You’re wrong…”
The room spun and she was on her back in the bed, the blankets on the floor, their mouths fused. He nicked her with his teeth, and she tasted blood. Those teeth - he wasn’t human, he wasn’t human…
The heavenly silk of his hair fell like a curtain on both sides of her face, and she grasped handfuls of it, sliding her fingers through, twisting. “Alien or not, you’re mine. Mine,” she chanted. He growled in response, low and erotic, and off the leash.
There was no teasing foreplay, or him exploring her body, watching for signs of pleasure. He gathered her up for a better fit and settled on top of her, pushing her legs open, bringing with it a rush of hot anticipation. His heavy bodyrubbed against hers in several places at once, delicious. His crotch touched hers in an insistent, universal rhythm - yet flat.
“Lyle, I can’t feel you. Oh, I can’t… feel you.” She was panicky and shivery, burning inside her cold skin. Could he or couldn't he - it wasn’t fair of her to wish. It had never mattered. But she wanted it. She wanted it…
He stopped moving for a second and gazed at her out of his bottomless eyes, darker than the night around them. And then he blinked, his trademark lazy wink-like flutter of eyelids, the third eye sliding out and back in. Just this.
Reaching between them, he roughly shoved her underwear aside, and his, and suddenly she could feel him, hard, hot and slick - and inside her as he pushed in without warning. “What about now?”
She sobbed once. More than better. Better than good. She let her legs fall wider apart as he rocked into her, and joined in the frenzy that engulfed them. She urged him to move, wanted him to take his pleasure with her, to hurry, afraid she was dreaming and the dream wouldn’t last. Yet it was Lyle, and despite the urgency, nothing he did allowed clumsiness or haste. He moved at precisely the right speed, hard but not rough, stretching her but slick and smooth with delicious little ripples.
Thoughts fragmented when her palms rested on the soft fuzz of his back, startlingly different yet perfectly right. It was suddenly so simple and elemental and divine. World shattered and she cried out into his mouth when she could hold out no more.
