Page 55 of Total Eclipse of the Moon
"What was that?" he asked.
"The healing light. That’s pure white magic. I’ve never achieved anything like that before. Takes an authentic connection to create it. I think it confirms this isn’t a spell."
He caught her lips, feeling happy. Happier than he’d felt in forever.
Until reality descended.
To say that had been unlike anything he’d ever experienced during sex in the past was an understatement. It’d been six times more intense. A zillion times more passionate. He wanted it again.
Fight an evil creature and have healing sex afterward to cleanse residual evil? On board with that. Oh, heck yes.
His brain tried to work through the angles to make the two of them work. How to make this happen again?
Her joy vanished. "I’m so sorry. Was I too much? I’ve been told… My husband used to tell me to tone it down. That I tend to get carried away. I’m sorry. You were in control but then I got lost in the feelings, kind of took over, and—"
"What? No." Had he been frowning or something? "You were perfect. I was wishing we had more time to enjoy this and do it again. Anyone who tells you to tone that down is an idiot. Don’t ever do that. That was… I don’t think there are words for it. I’ve never thought there could be actual magic involved with sex. I was just thinking about other things right now."
"Don’t," she whispered. "Whatever’s going on inside your head is what gets us into trouble."
He touched her chin. "We’re way beyond trouble right now, beautiful. And you know it."
"True. But you’re getting caught up in the worries and what ifs. It’ll make you feel regret. We needed this for many reasons. It was something for this moment, not the future. The two of us have been on a collision course with that release. This was only about right now. Not tomorrow or two months from now." She played with the two talismans around his neck. "When’s the last time you came that hard?"
Never.As in truly never ever.
When he didn’t answer she said, "That was a first for me. That was incredible."
"Me too." He couldn’t look at her as his mind churned in overtime.
She forced him to meet her gaze. "We stole nothing from each other. It healed me. It cleansed you of a lot of bad juju. Years of filth." She moved his hand to her stomach, now smooth with no evidence it’d ever been scratched.
Her eyelids closed as she drew in a shaky breath. "For both of us, this was once. Has to be only once. I might be a witch, which means I’m a victim of my passions and driven to express emotion through intense sensations like this, but this was different. This was a first. I haven’t been with anyone in forever. Until you. Something about you… I can’t get enough of it. It surprised me at the bar. Shocks me every moment I’m around you." She ran a hand from his face down his neck and along a shoulder. "I can’t stop touching and wanting you, only you, to have your hands on me. It’s crazy. I’ve never had this kind of attraction with anyone. The complication rests in who we are and what’s coming."
He blew out a long breath and tilted his head backward to rest on the end of the sofa. "I wish things were different."
"I wish there wasn’t an impenetrable roadblock the fates are forcing between us."
"Would you want this to be more?" he asked, desperation lacing his words.
"No good can come from answering that."
"You’re probably right." He let out a pent-up breath. "It’s once."Once in a lifetime.
Chapter Sixteen
The searchfor workable clothes at the borrowed house resulted in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt for Shane. She had spare underwear in her backpack but borrowed an oversized shirt. They left a nice note and money for the house owner, not that it’d help the guy’s sense of invasion or ease their mutual guilt over using his place. Yet they did save his world—not that he’d ever know.
Shane looked both rumpled and powerful. The borrowed clothes didn't change the last part. It was a bad look for her peace of mind on the long, mostly silent drive back to the airport and the private plane she'd learned was owned by the Alliance.
She didn’t have a handle on what just happened. Something beyond using sex as healing energy had blown her mind. It hadn’t simply been about getting the sexual crisis between them out of their systems either. This something, an emotion she needed to work to disregard, filled her with a sense of dread and a nervous energy she didn’t know what to do with.
He wasn’t helping the situation by the way he kept looking at her on the drive to the airport. The looks had her chest tightening and body screaming for a repeat that shouldn’t happen.
As if he sensed her mind was stuck on him, he paused his march to the airplane, shifting his vampire-in-a-blanket on his shoulder to glance down, eyebrows raised in question. Midday sun blazed down and the vampire remained locked in day sleep. They hadn’t tried to wake him. She wondered if he could be roused. Vampire biology remained a mystery to her.
She avoided the questions in his gaze by rushing up the stairs while holding down the bottom of the button-down shirt she’d found at the house to keep the wind from catching it. The shirt came to her mid-thigh, but she felt exposed without underwear. On the plane she announced, "We should strip Antonio and leave his clothes here. The necromancer mess might not affect him, but it could affect us."
"I’m changing first. Don’t like wearing another man’s clothes." Shane walked stiffly toward the restroom at the back of the plane. Minutes later he returned in a dark T-shirt and khaki cargo pants.
