Page 22 of Walking in Darkness
A hot palm slid all the way down my side. Chills lifted in its wake. “Turns out, you are irresistible, Aria Rialta. God knows I tried.”
“I guess I’m going to count it a positive that you were a total failure.”
Mischief danced on my tongue. The joy we’d found together bubbling through my being as that energy rolled through the room.
Pax let go of a warm, rumbling laugh, and he edged close, his nose brushing mine as he murmured, “Total, complete failure.”
I trailed the tip of my finger down his cheek. “You can take heart that at least you excel in one thing.”
In a flash, he rolled me onto my back and hovered over me.
He was so viciously beautiful that my heart clutched, and my stomach twisted into a thousand needy knots.
He angled down and wisped his lips across mine. “Oh yeah? And what would that be?”
My teeth raked my bottom lip, and the teasing evaporated. “Loving me.”
“That’s right. Because loving you was what I was created to do.”
He suddenly pushed back to kneeling, and the covers dropped from around his waist.
He rose high between my trembling legs, a fortress that towered over me.
A stream of light that cut through the slit in the drapes lit him in a dazzling blaze.
Every inch of him bristled with strength.
Skin scarred with our fate, covered with the violent designs he’d imprinted on his flesh.
Our truth.
But it was the first time I noticed what was hidden deep within the horrors inked on his abdomen. The first time I was this close to him in the light.
Veiled within a darkened expanse of red vingas.
The faint vestige of a face.
Gray eyes wide and long black hair whipping around the face.
With a trembling hand, I reached out and brushed my fingertips over the image he’d tattooed of me.
“Pax,” I whispered.
His body quivered beneath my touch. “You see it now, Aria? I was always yours. I just hadn’t quite gotten what that meant.”
The air changed. A charge of static electricity.
All the lightness vanished, and those fathomless gray eyes somehow darkened as he stared down at me.
“Need to feel you, Aria. Whole and safe and real.”
“I’m right here.”
He hooked his fingers in the edges of my underwear, and I lifted my hips so he could peel them down. Then he wound himself out of his, and he came to me.
Pressed himself inside me.
Took me.
