Page 53 of All the Devils are Here

I would take this kind of suffocation every time.

Now that there was nothing between us, I understood the previous times we kissed he was holding everything back. The truth, his want for me, the incredible strength and dominance in the way he held me.

“I know you didn’t. But the thought of it makes meburnwith rage. So as much as I want to pin you to this bed and fuck you until we’re both exhausted, I am going to check you like the doctor I am first. Understand?”

Pressing my lips together, I nodded, unable to speak, and not sure I could describe how the way he just spoke and kissed me made me melt.

“Good.”

Ariel appeared and dropped some supplies and clothes on the bed and turned to leave. “You don’t have to go.”

He looked at me, eyes dragging over me. “You two need a moment.” Then he smiled. “I’ll be back.”

Laurent dug through the supplies and found a stethoscope. “You’re really going to use that?”

“We found you about to drown. Of course I’m going to use it.”

His hand slipped behind my neck again, holding me still while he placed the small circle where he needed it. I breathed in and out for him, over exaggerating the movement. A smile tugged at the corner of his lips. “You’re not making this easy.”

“You said I had to let you,” I whispered. “You didn’t say I had to make it easy.”

I’d been avoiding some of the questions I needed to ask him. But if I didn’t, they’d eat me up inside. “Laurent?”

He glanced up and met my eyes briefly while he wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm. “How many people died? On the boat?”

I watched his mouth firm into a line. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me. They died because I was there. I deserve to know.”

I was distracted by the feeling of his hands on my skin. He unwrapped the cuff and reached for the next thing on the bed. “When I left to come here, it was seventy from the boat. It could be more by now. But the storm also caused a lot of damage along the coasts.”

“Seventy.” I pressed a hand to my chest.

“Janelle is alive,” he said. “Along with Raoul Chagny. Without Janelle, I wouldn’t have known where you were immediately. I’m sure Prospero would have made sure, but she told me a man named Ariel told you not to get on the boat. And I knew.”

They were alive. Tension released between my shoulders. I’d feared the worst and hadn’t let it in, my mind compartmentalizing everything to try to make sense of everything happening the last few days.

“How long has it been?”

“Three days.”

I hadn’t lost much time while unconscious. Also relieving. “And Christine?”

Laurent did smile then. “Chomping at the bit. She wanted to come, but thankfully their majesties didn’t let her.”

The fact that my best friend was mated to the kings of the gargoyle world was still wild. But now I was there too. I hadmates.

The mate sitting beside me took my temperature. And now that I was warming up, I was becoming more aware of the fact that even though I was naked, he was almost naked too. When he’d shifted, he’d ruined most of his clothes—the barely there remains of his pants hanging on by a thread and hiding the sight I really wanted.

“Clean bill of health?”

He sighed with a smile. “I can’t run nearly the amount of tests I want to. But your lungs are clear, your heart is strong, blood pressure is normal, and your temperature is rising.”

“You can help it rise a little faster.”

“Don’t tempt me, mate.” His voice turned rough, and I recognized the beast within him speaking.

I reached out and pulled him closer, tossing the thermometer aside. “No. I will tempt you. I’ve been waiting three years to have you, Laurent.”

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