Page 17 of My Brutal Beast

The look on his face is a mixture of excitement and trepidation, and it makes me love him even more.

“I trust you,” I say. We rest our foreheads against one another’s, share the air we breathe, and then I take a single step backward, then another, and another.

He looks tormented, and I say it again, trying to convince him: “I trust you. I love you.”

His eyes widen at the confession, and it only makes my smile grow.

“Now count to ten and come find me, if you can.” I smirk.

His nostrils flare and his pupils dilate at the challenge. And before he says the number “one,” I’m off.

“Two,” he says out loud.

I dash into the forest.

“Three,” his voice booms.

I keep running.

“Four.”

My heart is pounding in my chest from a mixture of fear and excitement, and the thought of what he’ll do when he catches me makes me more wet than I’ve ever been.

“Five.”

I kick off my shoes, throw them in different directions to try and trick him. I keep running, step on the sharp end of a rock, and the sudden pain makes me tumble onto the forest floor.

“Six.”

I don’t have time to lie there. I get back up, using all of my adrenaline to run farther away from his voice.

“Seven.”

Panic rushes through me at how soon he’ll set out to find me, and he will find me. I run farther through the densest part of the forest, thinking that will keep him from searching for me from above. There’s a small river that runs through here, and if I can just cross it—

“Eight.” His voice is right in my ear, and I scream.

It turns into a shriek as he turns me around and propels us into the air, above the canopy, making my eardrums pop. My fight-or-flight response kicks in, and I try to pull away from him.

Raven doesn’t budge. If anything, his arms grip me tighter, and before I can even process that we’re floating in the sky, his lips slam against mine. I push on his chest, and he pulls me closer. I bite his lip, and he growls and slaps my ass hard. The sharp sting shocks me for just a moment, and it’s all he needs before his mouth is on me again.

He kisses me like he needs to devour me, to brand me as his. It’s a mixture of lips, tongues, and teeth, and I love it. I love how enlarged his fangs are, how they scrape against my lips when he bites me. He steals my every breath, and he can have them all. He can take whatever he wants. Every part of me.

I raise my hands to grab onto him, but he uses his tail to tie them behind my back. I wiggle and writhe against him, but he still won’t let me go. I’m exhilarated by the danger of him, and I want him so badly it hurts. I need him, right now.

“Raven,” I whimper in between his harsh kisses.

He pulls back just enough for me to finally look at him.

I gasp.

His white skin is now dark gray. It looks thicker around his bulging muscles, like armor, yet smooth like stone. His face is all sharp, hard angles. And his eyes—the deepest darkest black, with luminescent white irises. He’s a perfect contradiction, like a beast stuck in mid-transformation: not quite human and not quite animal, but a mixture of the strongest parts of both.

He’s breathtakingly beautiful, and perhaps the most incredible part of this is the knowledge that he is completely and entirely mine.

Raven must see something in me because he suddenly releases my wrists and loops his tail around my waist and hips. I wrap my arms around him, pushing my body against his. I let out a frustrated groan at the clothes separating us. Raven understands immediately and shreds the material until it flutters around us in tiny pieces.

The air is cold, but the feeling of Raven’s hot skin against mine only stokes the fire in me higher. I wrap my legs around his hips, and for a moment we stare into each other’s eyes, panting. I don’t need to clarify what I want. He knows.

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