Page 95 of The Seven Rings
Down her body, using lips, teeth, tongue to destroy her, giving her no choice but to surrender. To find a wild thrill in surrender.
Her moans turned to gasps, then her gasps to a cry of release. Breathless and blind, she shuddered.
And still he took more, gave more.
He’d wanted her like this. He hadn’t realized how much he’d wanted her like this tonight, every night. Pleasured beyond reason. How he’d wanted her writhing under him as he built that pleasure again, built it higher.
The light gleamed low, but they were in the dark. He was with her in that dark that saturated mind and body until there was nothing but pounding, pulsing needs.
And she with him.
When his name, just his name, came through her lips like a sob, he rose over her, looked down at her. Her lips swollen from his, her face flushed with heat, her eyes deep and dark.
And he drove into her, into the hot, wet wonder of her, with an urgency he couldn’t control or deny.
“Stay with me.”
In the dark, a little longer in the dark.
She clung to him, her nails digging in, but he didn’t feel the bite. Only the wild whip of need as he plunged deeper, darker.
When she cried out again, the sound took him to the edge of the dark, and over.
Though deeply asleep, Trey’s instinct woke him as Sonya slipped quietly out of bed. When he started to get up, reach for pants, she shook her head.
“I’m sorry. It’s not the mirror or anything. It’s not a pull. I don’t know why I woke up. It’s not even three. Not quite three.”
She looked toward the open doors. “I want to watch her,” she realized. “I woke up wanting to watch her jump. I don’t know why there either, but I do.”
“Okay.” He pulled on pants.
Always wary of night walking, Sonya wore nightclothes. With him, she stepped out on the balcony in sleep shorts and tank.
“She’s already there. It’s not quite three, but she’s already there. Looking at the manor. At us?”
A different moon. A different night, he thought. A night that came and went more than two hundred years ago.
“I don’t think at us. I think she’s looking at what she sees as hers, what she’s about to make sure stays hers.”
The wind whipped the dark hair, the long black dress as Hester Dobbs turned to the sea.
Did she see her death? Sonya wondered. Did she look down at the rocks and see her body shattered, her blood splattered?
The death, the blood she used to seal the curse.
The clock struck three. She watched Dobbs climb onto the seawall, raise her arms.
Piano music drifted up the stairs. In the nursery a mother wept. In the servants’ quarters, a girl from Ireland writhed in pain.
And Dobbs jumped.
“Every night. If I stop it, cut this loop, will Astrid stop playing her sad music, Carlotta stop weeping for her dead baby, Molly stop dying in pain, night after night?”
“I don’t know.” Leaning down, Trey kissed the top of Sonya’s head. “But if you use manor logic, it seems like yes.”
“I wish there was a way to make her just die there.”
Trey started to draw her back in, stopped.
