Page 48 of Hopelessly Teavoted
Thank goddess for mesh and lace.
He stroked, with gentle, snapping magic, everywhere he had felt her gasp softly against him. The hand in her pants pressed against her in that panoply of pleasure points he had taken care to memorize in all the times he’d ever touched her. All the moments six years ago, all the breathless stolen glances as teenagers, every word that had ever made her bite her lip in anticipation. The way her hand had paused just below her navel above her hip the time they went skinny-dipping. The way she arched for him now. The soft exhales the times he’d run his fingers over those dimples on her back.
He knew them all. Which was good, because he needed her to finish before he was inside her, and his blood thundered in his head and lower, begging him to let go. His left hand throbbed, but he told himself it was nothing.
She was everything that burned brightly and beautifully in his universe.
Brighter than can be sustained, a small, broken part of him whispered.
He needed to be closer to her. He had to be touching all of her.
Slipping his left hand under her shirt, he let the warmth of her skin seep into it, easing the stabbing pain for a moment. Then, before Azrael knew what was happening, his hand was so hot that it almost burned the metal of his mother’s ring as he caught his breath and kissed Victoria. Magic he didn’t recognize wreathed them, shifting and snapping into place.
Vickie gasped at the heat of it and pulled back to look him in the eyes. Emotion flickered across her face; the pain in his hand was excruciating now.
Azrael looked down. Flames licked for a moment around his mother’s ring as he stared in horror.
“Az,” she whispered, voice shaky. “Don’t touch me again.” She was scrambling away from him, and for a heartbreaking moment, Az wondered what he had done wrong.
He let her go in an instant, but it was an instant too late.
Holding the hand that felt like it was engulfed in flame in front of him, his ring was too hot to bear, and he pulled it off, putting it on the console between them.
The agony in his hand vanished.
“No,” whispered Vickie, reaching for him and then stopping herself, suddenly, holding her hands up away from him, and scrambling farther away until she was pressed against the passenger-side door, zipping her pants, pulling back on her coat, and wrapping it around her. “No, no, no. That can’t happen. It shouldn’t happen if I let go. It can’t be happening.”
His lust-addled brain tried to process the words and the sensation of them. His hand was still throbbing, and he realized that the back of his neck, where she had been gripping, was raw and scraped. Burned.
Vickie spoke now, but not to him. She was looking at the back seat, and suddenly he knew his parents were there. Azrael’s stomach dropped and then heaved, and for a moment, he was afraid he might vomit. It shouldn’t be possible. She wasn’t touching the ring anymore. How was it possible that the ring was burning between them on the seat of the car, small flames licking up the side of it without so much as a second brush of her skin?
This was the worst thing he could think of—almost having the woman he had loved forever, finally telling her how he felt, and then having the ghosts of his parents immediately appear to her.
Vickie was listening, her face crumbling, and tears gathering at the corners of those beautiful green eyes.
It occurred to him that there might actually be worse things.
“They said I burned you, where I was touching you. That if I touch you again, you’ll summon them back. That you’re like a departed’s precious object now. Like the ring was. If we touch again, you’ll die.”
The pain of the realization prickled at him gently for a moment. Az breathed through it as the feeling deepened, spiraling out of control, and slicked like oil on top of water, not yet plumbing the depths of despair it would cause when it sank in.
Lex’s words echoed in his mind.
You’ll rue the moment you chose to do that, witch.
A curse trapped in a ring, and now, in him.
Azrael was a precious object now. Another soul to be collected.
And if she touched him again, he would die.
He buried his face in his hands, barely hearing the sound of Vickie’s voice as she spoke in hushed tones with ghosts he could not see.
CHAPTER 14Victoria
Benedict Hart’s gaze felt painful as he focused his golden eyes on her. Victoria resisted the urge to duck and hide as her pulse slowed. Nothing killed a mood like almost immolating the object of her affection in front of his dead parents. Vickie breathed in and out slowly, trying to focus. And to stop the awful, damning blush running up her throat and her cheeks.
“You will kill him if you are not careful,” Benedict’s ghost was saying, voice sharper than she had ever heard in life.
