Page 251 of Shadowblood Souls
“That is exactly how you should always look, Wildcat.”
I hesitate. “Do you want?—”
He shakes his head before I can finish. “I’m good. That was about you. And it’sreallygood to be able to give you something that lights you up for a change.”
A different sort of embarrassment heats my cheeks. “I feel like I used you.”
He fixes with me a look both heated and determined. “Riva, it’s a fucking privilege to be used by you. If that’s what you need, I will eat you out every day of the year and take the blue balls as a badge of honor.”
Okay, now my cheeks might scald right off. “Um…”
Before I can decide how to respond, reality crashes back into the room with a jaunty rapping on my door.
The heat of our interlude drains out of me. My body tenses, knowing it’s Rollick before the demon even speaks.
His voice calls through the door, as lively as his knock. “Rise and shine, little banshee. Breakfast is being served, and then I think it’s time we talked. The porcupine can come too.”
His summons wipes away the last wisps of the afterglow even as Jacob grunts in mild objection at the sardonic description of him. My heart sinks.
We’re on Rollick’s ship. We’re alive and well because of his mercy.
And after seeing his full demonic form, I’m really not inclined to test his patience or his generosity.
I caught up evenhim, with his millennia of built-up power, in my scream for at least the short while it lasted before I wrenched myself out. That fact is both incredible and unnerving.
I don’t think he’s going to forget any time soon that I can be a threat to him. One he might want to squash if I start looking like I’m more trouble than I’m worth.
“I’ll be there,” I reply, sucking in a breath, and gird myself to face the comeuppance I got to put off yesterday.
Thirty-Two
Riva
I’m not really in any state to immediately head to breakfast, regardless of the gurgle of my stomach reminding me that I barely ate anything all yesterday.
I dig through my backpack for a change of clothes and then look up at Jacob. “I’m going to take a quick shower. Er, alone.”
The corner of Jacob’s mouth ticks upward with a hint of amusement even as his eyes smolder.
“I think I’d better grab one of those myself, with the water set to ice-cold.”
He gets off the bed and then reaches to give my shoulder a quick squeeze before he leaves.
“You are all right, aren’t you?”
After everything that passed between us last night, that question could refer to a whole lot of things. Maybe all of them.
I pause in the stream of sunlight pouring through the window and really take stock of my internal state.
A whole lot of me still feels tender when prodded. The lump of guilt in my gut hasn’t completely dissolved, and I can’t say my emotions about the guy I just got awfully close with are free of snarls either.
But beneath the jumbled, painful bits, or maybe around them, my sense of myself holds steady. I was shaken yesterday, but I seem to have found my footing again.
“I will be,” I say, and Jacob nods as if that’s the best answer he could have expected.
“I’ll see you in the dining room, then.”
I can’t let him just leave like that. He reaches for the door, and his name tumbles from my lips.
