As if he was in my mind and not the other way around, the vampire prince brought his mouth to the angry, red scratches he’d carved into my skin. They were already healing. He brushed a kiss on the abrasions. By the time he lifted his lips, my skin was healed and porcelain perfect, just like before. “You’re focusing on the wrong thing, Ruby.”
“I am focusing. My magic—”
“Forget the magic. You’re shifted, so using it should be second nature to you. But only if you don’t overthink it. Focus on me.” He pressed his nose into the flesh of my thigh and breathed me in. At the sensation of my scent in his lungs, his pupils blew wide, his lips softened, and his Adam’s apple dipped with a swallow.
Seeing his reaction to me, thousands of goosebumps exploded over my legs. His free hand glided over me, feeling out the bumps like braille while he extracted his other hand from my sex and held up his fingers for me to see. They glistened and gleamed with the evidence of my hunger.
“Focus on how your body reacts to me. Lose yourself in me. Drown yourself so deep inside my being that your mind’s convinced there’s nothing else but you and me, here and now. Only then will the spell hold until you decide it’s over.”
I blinked, staring dumbfoundedly at the vampire as he dipped back to his place between my thighs. Now that my mind was barely on the spell, the magical energy surrounding me felt stronger.
Here in the sanctuary of my mate’s mind, I needed to focus to keep the spell going. But it wasn’t the magical energy itself that needed my attention. It was Sterling. After all, he was the whole point of the spell. If I lost concentration on him, how could I hope to stay rooted in his mind?
It made so much damn sense, I wasn’t sure why it hadn’t dawned on me sooner.
The key here was to throw myself into my mate—to surrender to him and bury myself in him until I felt nothing else. Because in his mind, he was the magic.
I could feel it dancing between us like electromagnetism across our skin, making all my little hairs stand up.
With my claws still twisted in his hair, I gently pushed his head back toward my pelvis, a silent ask for his mouth. His lips quirked with a grin. A heartbeat later, he obliged me. The muscles in his perfectly sculpted shoulders rippled as he ducked back to my apex.
This time, his tempo was slower. He brushed his lips over my aching bud and painted a kiss on it, grinning the entire time. Even as he licked and lavished and ravished me with that delectable curve of his mouth, his eyes never left mine.
Not even once.
“You’re so goddamn beautiful, Ruby Renada. You’re as potent and addicting as fine wine.” His tongue flicked out, tracing a circle around my entrance. “I could drink from you for an age and never have my fill. Like I’m drinking from the Holy Grail.”
I snickered, the sound off-kilter and fragmented by my breathy moans. “M–more like unholy.”
“Yes. Your cup runneth over with sin.” His upper lip peeled back to reveal his dagger-sharp fangs. Withdrawing his fingers from me, he drew an X with his pointer finger over my clit. “Shall I take a drink?”
“R–right there?”
His head canted, hair slipping sideways to frame one side of his face. “Right here.” He pinched my piercing, and I twitched. I tried to say “yes,” but all that came out was a sultry, slithering moan.
Brows hitching, his eyes stained redder as my arousal hung thick in the air. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
A drunken nod was all I could manage as I watched his fangs descend and puncture.
The pain was brief, the sharpness of it swallowed almost instantly by the raging inferno roiling inside me. As he fed on my blood, he still kept his gaze locked on mine.
With every drop he sucked down, he began to lose himself. His composure slipped, his bloodlust taking over. And here, that was all perfectly fine. Here, he didn’t need to keep up his mask, and he didn’t need to hold on so desperately to his control.
In his mind, right here and now, I didn’t have to worry about reality’s little annoyances like keeping my heart beating. With our minds linked, we could indulge in the darkest, most wild fantasies that could only be achieved in our dreams...together.
I flexed my fingers in his hair, claws scraping the back of his skull, which earned me a guttural growl that cleaved me in two. He was coming undone at his finely stitched seams, my priest leaning into his predatory nature that he’d probably been suppressing for millennia, only letting it loose in survival situations. But now, he was showing that side of himself to me, for pleasure’s sake, because here, it was safe. Here, there was no risk of him hurting me.
In this sanctuary of his mind, we could play and rut and tear into each other’s bodies without consequence. This was our playground, and we were only limited to the bounds of my magic.
His polished demeanor lost its clean-cut edges. The sight of him feasting on my body—his skin dripping with sweat, the damp tendrils of his hair hanging over his eyes, his chest heaving as he lost himself in me—reminded me of my birthday night.
When Vincent had left for Fairie, I’d shut down. Eros and Sterling had been there to pull me back, jamming as much sensation into my body as possible to wake me. The thought of Eros and his sinister tools had my skin prickling.
Eros had straddled my waist as he drew on my chest with the sharpie he’d used to mark the piercing sites on my nipples, threatening to pierce my chest over the words he’d written so his blind brother could read it like braille.
Then they’d pierced my clit. Sterling had made the hole with his own fangs. The thousand-year-old vampire had the most control in the entire coven, but even he had lost it for a few seconds. He’d drank the blood straight from my pussy, and I hadn’t been sure if he was going to be able to stop. I’d been so awe-struck by the sight of Sterling’s feral side, hunched between my legs, that I probably wouldn’t have stopped him.
At least, not until it was too late.