Page 492 of Shadowblood Souls
Ineedit, right down to the center of my being, with a wrenching longing I can’t explain.
But when I lower one hand and hook my fingers around the waist of his boxers, Griffin tenses. It’s a tiny shift, only noticeable because I’m pressed so tight against his body, but it echoes through his muscles into mine.
I can’t hide my flicker of surprise and disappointment, not from him. Griffin goes still. “I’m sorry. I?—”
“It’s okay,” I say, even though accepting his rejection sets my eyes burning. I close them, willing my emotions to settle so I won’t make him feel guilty. “If you’re not ready?—”
He shakes his head before I can finish that sentence. “I’m ready. I think I’ve been ready for you my whole life, Moonbeam. I just don’t know if I can be whatyouneed now.”
I frown and cup his cheek, startled enough that I can meet his gaze again. “What are you talking about? I love you—you know that. I trust you. I don’t hold anything that happened before against you. None of that matters.”
“It matters to me,” Griffin says softly. “I’m still not back to normal—I still have the nightmares. Almost everything I feel comes with a jab of pain, and I don’t know if that’s ever going to completely fade. I love you so much, but I can’t love you the same way the other guys can, with nothing else getting in the way.”
“Griffin…” The ache expands up to my heart, with a bittersweet poignancy that has nothing to do with lust.
This man just reminded me in the most vivid possible way of who I am. Rebuilt my foundations of confidence from the ground up like no one else could have.
How can he think he isn’t worthy of me?
The greatest truth he reminded me of had nothing to do with my emotions from the past several weeks and everything to do with our deeper history.
I tamp down on my impatient desires and hold his sky-blue gaze. “You could never not be enough for me. We’re blood. No matter what happens, no matter how buried we get in the shit that’s thrown at us, we’ll find each other. I wouldn’t even know how to ask for more love than that.”
There was one massive truth I’d almost forgotten in the wake of Balthazar’s horrible revelation: I already have a family. The five guys I grew up with are closer to me than genetics, more a part of me than any shared DNA.
We share something Balthazar could never understand, both in the training we endured and the supernatural essence flowing through our veins. Nothing could bind me tighter to anyone.
Not only do I have a family, I have a huge one. These five guys I grew up with, who own my heart, but all the younger shadowbloods too. There’s no impact Balthazar could have on me, aware or unconscious, that could come close to my kinship with them.
The very fact that he doesn’t recognize those ties only proves how little he knows me.
I’m not sure how much of my thoughts Griffin can discern from my emotions. Enough that between whatever he senses and my words, a bright smile crosses his face.
“You should always ask for more,” he says. “And we’ll all give you everything we possibly can.”
I smile back, a strange shyness gripping me. “You could show meyou. All that love you have in you already. Then you’ll know for sure that I’m more than satisfied with what you can offer.”
Griffin stares at me for a moment. Has he ever projected his true feelings to someone else, shown them what it’s like inside him the way he can absorb everyone else’s emotions?
Then the sensations reach me. A potent, joyful warmth rises up through my chest, tentative at first but unfurling until it’s flooded every cell.
A few sharp pricks of resistance that I know aren’t really him, only his lingering conditioning, tarnish the happiness. But there’s so much more as well—hope and gratitude and determination, and twined through it all a longing so heady my heart starts thumping faster.
I tug him toward me, and he comes, his mouth crashing into mine. We kiss roughly, like we’re running out of time.
Which maybe we are.
As my body strains toward his, Griffin keeps casting wave after wave of emotion into me. The tang of our matching desire twines together like our tongues.
His love fills me with so much light I can’t separate his devotion from my own. It’s all merged together into a blissful tsunami.
The clamoring of my shadows peals through everything else. The same urgency quivers through the feelings I’m absorbing from Griffin.
This time when I yank at his boxers, he helps me shove them down his hips. Beneath the water, he peels off my soaked panties in turn.
I curl my fingers around his hardened cock, and his groan reverberates through me with an internal keening of need. An answering whimper spills from my lips.
The first time I’ve slept with each of my guys, there’s been a magnetic power to it, a point when it’s hard to imagine we could possibly resist the compulsion driving our bodies toward each other.
