Carowyn shook her head up at me. “No. Don’t go back there.”
Holding her fiery gaze for a moment longer, I shoved away the iron vise that had gripped my chest, wanting me to destroy and eviscerate…anything…everything. But my goddess begged me no. To stay with her. So I did. Whatever she asked, whatever she wanted, it was hers.
I slid my hand farther down over the slope of her stomach and cupped her sex, then kept still. Very still. She gasped, pressing her back to the cold ceramic wall, her palms flat down by her sides. I braced my free hand next to her head, my legs wide on either side of hers, I needed to have her completely within my keep, inside the protection of my body before I could finally speak a word. She looked up at me from under her long, wet lashes, her body so heartbreakingly perfect, the jagged and smooth and sharp and lovely images in ink whispering to me of all the beauty encased in this woman’s body and soul. As if I didn’t bloody well know. As if I didn’t want to possess and cherish and worship every fucking inch of her.
Three steady breaths in and out, then I finally—finally—spoke. She needed to know once and for all where we were.
“Going alone…that was reckless and stupid.”
“I know.” She struggled to speak, voice quivering. “But I didn’t want anyone else to be hurt.”
I lowered my head, my mouth hovering over hers. “It was also brave and beautiful.” Then I slid my middle finger along her sweet, slick cleft.
She sucked in a breathy gasp, lips apart, amber eyes flaring bright and completely focused on me.
“I didn’t want—”
“You are no longer alone,” I ground out in pain, pressing my forehead to hers and stroking her slowly, gently. “Do you bloody understand me?”
She nodded. “Yes.” Her hands came off the wall and cupped my jaw. “Yes, I understand.”
I watched her tough exterior that had been in play at the castle melt right before me, slide away into nothing as I slid my finger up and down her slit, dipping at her entrance just an inch before gliding away again. She’d gone there to that house of death, thinking there was no alternative. Still thinking she was Bone, back in her shop, hammering away endless hours in isolation.
I stopped stroking and cupped her again, firming my grip on her sex possessively. “I don’t think you do understand.”
My attempt at steady and calm vanished into the ether. I shoved off the wall and withdrew my hand from her body. After shutting off the water, I tugged her out of the shower, intending to dry her like a rational fucking human being before I buried my cock so deep inside her she’d understand well what I meant. But that plan all went to hell when I knelt before her on the plush bathroom rug and started to rub her dry.
Her tawny-brown nipples puckered in the cool air under my heavy gaze. She gripped my face again and pulled my head closer, guiding my mouth to her breast. I obliged with a throaty growl and licked and nipped, and then clamped my lips around her perfect nub till she whimpered. Then I did the same to the other. When her nails grazed my scalp, I lost my goddamn, bloody mind.
I flipped her beneath me on the rug, widened her thighs with my own, and pushed inside her body with a rumbling, quivering groan. She sucked in a sharp breath, gripping my shoulders.
“Hear me now, woman.”
I rolled my spine, pumping my cock out then in on a long glide, slamming hard at the end of each thrust.
“You…are not…alone.”
She nodded, “I know, I know, baby.” She lifted her head and flicked her tongue over my lips, then pushed past them to stroke me deep. I devoured her sweet, lush mouth and fucked her hard.
I tried not to be an animal, not to be this raging, hungry beast who needed to consume, to possess. Who would never be satisfied. But it was hopeless. She made me insane with need. There was nothing but our slick bodies, sliding over and inside each other, the pounding rhythm of our hearts and the beastly hunger driving me on. But my woman, she matched me thrust for thrust, rocking up and angling her sex so I could drive deep. So deep.
“God. Carowyn,” I groaned as I whispered against her lips and pounded hard inside her body. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
My confession became a promise, then a mantra, and then a pleading prayer. Pressing my chest to hers, my fist in her wild locks, my teeth grazing her sweat-slick neck, I pinned her in place with my torso and pumped inside her like a feral animal. She didn’t seem to mind, her moans growing louder and louder as we both raced toward that inevitable cliff where we’d finally fall over together.
As soon as the first few pulses of her orgasm rippled, her sex clamping around my cock, I was done, or undone, coming in a mind-hazing blur of glory and pleasure-soaked joy. Then she unhinged my heart and put it back together. Again.
“Cara,” she whispered, panting in my ear.
I lifted my head to gaze down into her otherworldly fire-gold eyes, tears pooling there. She licked her love-swollen lips.
“That’s the name my friends used to call me…before…when I was—”
“Cara,” I repeated, a smile finally breaking across my face, the first since the moment I’d read her note and thought she was snatched from my arms forever. I lowered my head again, sweeping my lips slowly across hers, saying her name with the reverence it deserved. “Cara.”
She did understand, after all. She might wear the battle-hard, I-stand-alone armor of Bone when she was in this shop forging blades and making arms. But she was no longer that lonely creature relegated to her world of one. No. Now she was mine, and I was hers. And she was—
“Cara,” I whispered again, coaxing her lips wider with my own.
“Yes, Xander.” She trailed her forefinger over my mouth, tracing as if to memorize it, or this moment. Or both. “When you say my name…” Her voice cracked with heartbreaking emotion, and she swallowed hard. “When you say my real name”—her gaze finally lifted from my mouth to my eyes—“I feel whole again.”
That was the moment I truly became her man, her protector, her partner, her eternal soulmate. For she’d verbalized how her presence had made me feel for quite some time. I just hadn’t realized it until there was the possibility that she would no longer be in my life that I was losing half of myself.
“I love you, my sweet, sexy, bewitching siren-warrior, angel-demoness.” I cupped her cheek, sliding my fingers into her thick hair. “My Cara.”
“I love you, too,” she said on a hearty laugh, then kissed me hard.
And my heart—the one she’d mended and made beat again for the first time the way it was supposed to—quickened at her words and her voiceless promise of forever.
In this godforsaken, bleak, gray world, we’d found each other. We loved each other. And that was enough.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Xander
I couldn’t rip my eyes from her up there on that stage. They’d been playing a mix of classic eighties, which was obviously Axel’s selection, and modern alternative that Carowyn often listened to while working in her shop. It made for an oddly balanced concert. But that was her stipulation to putting on this performance she owed to Axel. Her voice made the mixture of genres meld together like they weren’t composed decades apart.
Since the demise of Rook and Simian—whose death made me particularly proud of her when she retold that tale—we’d settled into a wonderfully strange domesticated life. Well, as domesticated as possible in the apocalypse. I’d compiled a playlist, which I’d realized were her favorites, and set it to play when I wrapped her up next to me on the sofa by the fire with our wine and whisky in the evenings.
She worked in her shop by day or sometimes with Maddie-bear, and I worked with Cooper and George, then we’d meet back up at night. Our nights. Fuck. Heaven had nothing on my bedroom at night. Paradise was having that unbelievably beautiful woman up there on that stage all to myself and in my arms. Tonight, she wore a sleeveless turquoise corset, leaving her arms bare. Her full-sleeved tattoos looked stark and lovely under th
e colored lights. Her black hair, braided in small plaits over her whole head, moved with every sway, gliding over bare shoulders and caressing her hips, making my fingers itch. She’d dyed that pink part of her hair blue. Her signature color now, she’d told me. Frayed and tattered jeans and her favorite knee-high black lace-up boots completed her Goth queen look. She’d told me she picked the corset to match my eyes. Then I’d made her late for their warm-up.
I glanced down at the hammered bronze cuff on my wrist. Perfectly encased in glass that had been melted and manipulated with the help of Maddie was a single white feather tipped in pale blue. It wrapped the length of the cuff, and my heart as well. The single feather Cara had left of her angel wings, and she’d gifted it to me. Words couldn’t describe what it meant. What she meant to me.
I glanced around at the crowd. Cargo was packed, so I kept to the very back wall, watching on my own until Dommiel sidled in and leaned beside me.
“Your woman sounds good. Looks good, too.”
His remarks usually rubbed me wrong and made me lash out at him. But now…
“Yes,” I agreed. “She bloody well does.”
He chuckled, mimicking my crossed-arm stance. “I never thought you had it in you, Goldilocks.”
“What’s that?”
“Monogamy.”
“Funny.” I glanced at him sideways, arching a brow. “I thought the same of you.”
I stared out the arched exit of the concert hall to the bar in the next room, where Anya stood next to Kat, both of them having a drink and talking to the demoness bartender. All three ignored the ogling men—demon and human—parked around them.
He grunted and lit one of his brimstone cigarettes, following my gaze and dragging deep before blowing it out. “Bachelorhood is overrated.”
“Indeed.”
A brawny guy leaned on the bar next to Anya, smirking as he said something to her, in a way I was sure he thought was enticing. Then he petted her wing with a silky slide of his hand.
Dommiel took another drag on his cigarette, his red eye gleaming. “I’ll be right back.”
“Going so soon? You just got here.”
He gave me his best demon glare then sauntered off toward Anya and the guy who was about to get Dommiel’s fist in his face if he didn’t back off. And I thought I was possessive.
Carowyn finished her last song, the music trickling to nothing as she cleared her throat.
“So, I’m up here tonight because Axel and his boys twisted my arm.”
Wolfrick slid his finger down the D string of his electric guitar in response. A few hoots of laughter from the audience. Wolfrick grinned, flashing his sharp canines.
“Anyway,” she continued, rolling her eyes, then found me in the back. “This next one is for Alexander.”
Whistles and catcalls. I smiled. She had recently started teasing me about my full name, said I was still a stuffy aristocrat under my demon-hunter machismo, and the name suited. But then she’d started using it right before she was about to come. So I liked hearing my full name on her lips. More than liked it. I bloody loved it.
Wolfrick pushed back into the shadows. The lights dimmed except for a blue spotlight on her. Axel set his guitar aside and took a seat at the keyboard off to the side. As soon as he started playing the familiar piano keys, I knew what song this was. It was at the top of the playlist I’d made for her. She’d put it on one night shortly after she’d moved into my place, and she’d gotten the most peculiar look on her face as she sat curled in my leather wingback wrapped in a downy blanket. I was making us drinks when I looked up and caught her staring at me like that, like the world had disappeared and there was no one but us. Then I listened to the lyrics, and I understood. I agreed.
So Cara started to sing Svrcina’s “Astronomical” to a captivated crowd, her haunting voice elevating the music to a mystical level. She hadn’t used her seraph magic at all tonight. Until now. The electric hum rippled in the air with each word she sang as she stared at me over the crowd, serenading me with words about a cosmic pull being astronomical. Indeed. I knew exactly what she meant, felt it right down to the marrow of my bones. Gravity no longer pulled my body to the earth. It pulled me toward her. Always to her. And so it seemed the same for Cara.
She hypnotized her audience into a swaying stupor, finally bringing them down with her ethereal crooning toward the end. When she finished, and a roar vibrated up to the brick ceiling, I shoved off the wall and parted the crowd, heading straight for the stage. One dude started to shove me aside, but I gave him a look that made him think twice and shrink away.
Finally at the edge of the stage, I lifted up an arm to her, curled my fingers, and said, “They’ve had you long enough. My turn.”
She leaned down, braced her hands on my shoulders, then jumped into my arms, wrapping her legs around my waist—unashamed, bold, and soulfully beautiful. She planted a devouring kiss on me, showing me what she wanted with a deep stroke of her tongue. Delicious. I held her tight and started for the exit to the howl of cheers.
“I’m going to give you something to cheer about tonight,” I whispered against her lips.
“Really?” She bit my lower lip. “Well, I expect a superior performance.”
“Oh, you’re going to get a performance all right.” I smacked her perfect ass and lifted her higher, palming her tight. “Let’s go home.”
“Yes,” she agreed with the sweetest fucking smile. “Let’s go home.”
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Acknowledgments
Thank you again to my dear friend Angelique Hazen for her constant musical inspiration for Xander and Bone. And to Anne Zastrow who was my go-to girl for all things London and UK. Thank you, my sweet friend. A big shout-out to my amazing beta readers, Christina, Naima, and Angelique. Finally, just a big hug of appreciation to everyone who has embraced my broken but beautiful characters in this series. Seriously, you make me want to keep writing them.
About the Author
Juliette calls lush, moss-laden Louisiana home where the landscape curls into her imagination, creating mystical settings for her stories. She has a B.A. in creative writing from Louisiana State University, a M.Ed. in gifted education, and was privileged to study under the award-winning author Ernest J. Gaines in grad school. Her love of mythology, legends, and art serve as constant inspiration for her works. From the moment she read Jane Eyre as a teenager, she fell in love with the Gothic romance—brooding characters, mysterious settings, persevering heroines, and dark, sexy heroes. Even then, she not only longed to read more novels set in Gothic worlds, she wanted to create her own.
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