by Jenn Stark
Stefan cut her off by squeezing her hands, then turning them around so that Cressida could see her own palms. While before her hands had been a mass of overlapping bites and scratches, now the skin was clear and blemish-free. She watched, spellbound, as he slid his hands up her arms, his touch as cool as water, leaving a trail of unbroken skin behind, everywhere he touched.
Then he reached for her face, murmuring something soft and archaic when she flinched away again, but following her motion with his hands. He drifted his fingers down her forehead, her eyelids, brushing away her tears with soft thumbs and trailing farther down her face and along her jaw and neckline. He spread his fingers wide against her collarbones, and she shuddered as the physical sensation of his healing caught up with his movements. Her skin felt electric where he passed over it, a shiver of life rolling along her nerve endings, rushing in her veins. He dropped to his knees in front of her, then his hands were on her thighs, her knees, her calves. He picked up each leg in turn, whispering something she couldn’t make out as he brushed every exposed inch of her, then setting down her feet as delicately as he’d picked them up.
Then he sat back on his heels, looking up at her. “There’s more damage,” he said simply. It was an observation, but also a question, and Cressida didn’t hesitate. She reached down for what remained of her tattered shift, then drew it over her head. With another hushed murmur, Stefan leaned forward, drawing his hands back up her thighs, around to her hips, and along her waist. He stood and stepped closer to her, pausing again until she nodded. She could no more keep this man from touching her than she could fly, and she found she didn’t want to. Every time he lifted his fingers from her skin, she missed his touch like a physical ache that had nothing to do with her few remaining injuries. When he returned his hands to her body, it was like he was coming home.
Until he stood in one quick, graceful motion and cupped her backside, his fingers splaying wide as he arched her back, angling her toward him.
“Oh,” Cressida murmured, a new sensation swirling in her belly. It made her feel dizzy and filled with expectation at the same time, and was vaguely familiar—which was impossible. She’d never been touched like this in her life.
“They were very thorough,” Stefan murmured. Cressida sucked in a sharp breath, but seemed incapable of exhaling when he slowly, deliberately moved his hands to the small of her back, then up farther, sliding them across the skin of her torso until they rested against her rib cage. He held her gaze steadily with dark eyes as his fingers crept higher, easing up the soft swell of her breasts.
He’d touched her breasts before, through her mesh shift, but this was different.
This was…better.
Stefan’s lips twitched in a manner she couldn’t read as his hands squeezed her breasts lightly, her nipples trapped between his long fingers. She sighed despite herself and arched against him, causing him to rumble deep in his throat. The sound was irresistibly sensual, and Cressida found herself quivering with anticipation.
“Cressida,” Stefan murmured and she blinked her eyes open to find him staring at her. This close, she realized that his eyes were not like the normal eyes of a human. They were a rich dark chocolate—she’d known that from the start, but deep within the irises, there was also a hint of fiery red. Had that glow always been there? Or was it only coming out because of the fight, or the healing he was doing…or because of her?
She realized he was waiting for an answer, and she belatedly attempted one. “What?”
“Your mouth—is injured,” Stefan said. “Inside and out.” He sounded like the admission cost him, and she frowned as he dropped his hands from her breasts to rest again on her waist. He was deliberately holding her away from him, and she didn’t know why.
She also couldn’t see her own lips. He’d cleared the other wounds with a brush of his thumbs but—maybe her mouth was different?
“You can’t heal it?” she hazarded. “Should I try a spell?”
His own lips tightened in response, along with his hands on her waist. She loved the feel of them there, steady and sure, but she didn’t like how he was planting her to the floor, keeping her from touching him. She felt that was important.
“I can heal you,” he said. “I’ll have to kiss you, though.”
Her eyes flared wide, and a new wave of heat suddenly blossomed inside her at the idea. She’d been wanting him to kiss her for the past five minutes—she’d arguably wanted him to kiss her since she’d first seen him on the floor of Storm Court, but now the moment was taking on a greater importance, one she couldn’t quite understand.
Stefan clearly saw her confusion, and his eyes drifted shut, as if he was steeling himself against a terrible battle. “You’ll have to give me your permission,” he whispered. “The permission of a witch to allow a demon to kiss her is not one that should be—”
Cressida didn’t wait for him to complete whatever tortured sentence he was trying to construct. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.
Instantly, her body caught fire.
Literally.
A bright rush of purple-and-red flames burst around Stefan, leaping immediately to her skin and running down the length of her arms and legs, before circling back up again, surrounding her in a corona of blazing heat that somehow didn’t scorch her. She reached for Stefan with a strength well beyond what she knew she was capable of and yanked him to her, before he seemed to come back to himself and pushed her away once more.
The fire disappeared in a puff of smoke as she did, and Cressida dragged in a long, searching breath. Then she stared as Stefan balled his fists at his sides, looking like he was about to spontaneously explode.
“What…” she finally managed. “Was that?”
Chapter Twelve
Stefan was breathing hard, his heart rate completely out of control, every inch of his body clamoring for him to take Cressida and pound her into the ground. He deserved that. He deserved her. Every job for every human over the past six thousand years shouted defiantly in his mind, every demon he’d ever bounced to the other side of the veil, every indignity he’d willingly suffered—every single abuse he endured, he’d endured for this moment, this woman. He knew it in his body as surely as he’d been forged in the fire of God’s creation.
The need within him to take her, to fill her with his shaft, his seed, nearly overcame him with its primal force.
“What’s wrong?” Cressida spoke again. He’d heard her the first time, barely, over the roar of his own blood pounding in his head, and Stefan gasped at the sound of her voice, desperate to regain his hold on his own rampaging lust. He was a demon, not a human. He could control the way his glamour responded to the female touch—had controlled it, in fact, for millennia. He was no saint, like so many of the other members of the Syx. He didn’t deny himself the touch of a woman when it was offered. But he’d never so much as spoken to a witch before. No witch had ever had the strength to summon him to her pentagram, for any purpose, sexual or otherwise. He’d only got pulled into this one’s thrall because she’d been endangered—no. Because he’d thought she’d been endangered…
No.
Because the archangel had sent him here.
Stefan tried to focus on that very important point, but he couldn’t seem to get a fix on anything but the pheromones pouring off the witch like a lure to a wild animal. Cressida was everything to him: food, water, light, oxygen. He couldn’t not have her, and he’d never felt anything like this pull. She said something else, and he swung his face toward her, trying to refocus, trying to find some way to make her understand.
“You—there’s something about you,” he gritted out. “I can’t…trust myself. Can’t touch you. Will…hurt you.”
“You won’t hurt me,” Cressida countered. Then she took another step forward, the reduction of the space between them causing Stefan’s cock to twitch hard. A cock he should be in control of because, hello, he was a demon. There was not
hing about this situation that made any sense.
“I will,” he insisted. “There’s something different about you. Something I don’t—understand.”
“Touch me, Stefan,” the witch breathed, and Stefan lifted his hand almost without conscious will. He stared at it, then at Cressida, feeling a strange hysteria welling up inside him.
“No,” he murmured, though at the word a firestorm of fury erupted in his blood. His hand dropped.
“I’m not forcing you,” she murmured, her words awed. “Which means this attraction you have to me… It isn’t compelled. Which makes no sense. It’s not as if I’d ordinarily catch the attention of a demon. Unless he was trapped in my pentagram, that is.”
“You do have a very nice pentagram.” Stefan shuddered again as desire pounded through his veins, his knees nearly buckling under the strain. His hands itched to take her, his every muscle quivering with the restraint not to take her to the floor. She took another step forward, sidling toward him, and every one of his nerve endings twitched—particularly those in his cock. What was wrong with him? Cressida wasn’t compelling him—which meant he was reacting to her all on his own. But that didn’t make sense. Her body wasn’t lush the way he liked mortal women. Her breasts weren’t full enough, her curves not exaggerated. But when she lifted a small, smooth hand to his face, the skin of her palm maddeningly cool against his cheek, he nearly choked.
“Do you…do you want to make love to me, Stefan?” she barely whispered.
His gaze leapt to hers as fury erupted inside him. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“I don’t. I know I don’t.” She lifted another hand, her fingers trembling so hard, she clearly had to work to keep them steady on his face. “I want so badly to do this right, to—to make you want me. I don’t know if I can, though. I…I don’t know if I can make anyone do that.”
“Angels above, Cressida,” Stefan moaned, closing his eyes as fire leapt in his blood. This powerful witch before me, surrendering, begging, wanting. The very idea made his head spin, and he couldn’t focus on anything but the need pounding through his blood. Host on high, help him for what he was about to say, but he couldn’t keep himself from the truth a moment more. “I want it. I want you.”
“Yes—”
There were more words, but Stefan could no longer hear them. Need exploded within him, and he lunged for Cressida like a drowning man thrown a too-short rope. He lifted her bodily off the floor and carried her forward, out of the room with its stench of demons and death, and down the hallway. The first room he came to was a bedroom. Not her bedroom, he thought, but it hardly mattered. He’d have thrown her against a wall if there wasn’t another option.
As it was, he stretched her out on the bed, then pulled back, the haze in his mind lessening just enough for him to haul in an agonized breath. She was—so perfect, lying there. Fresh and brimming with life and energy, looking up at him with a need that seemed the perfect echo to his own. Need and curiosity and hope and fear and doubt and—
Once again, the truth assaulted his senses, nearly driving him to his knees.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
The demand clamored more loudly in his mind, but Stefan had to ask the question, had to know. “Um, Cressida—”
“Oh sweet Goddess,” Cressida groaned, covering her eyes with her hands as she spoke in a strangled, mortified voice. “Please tell me the Syx doesn’t have any rules about virgins. I swear, I will never, ever, ever get laid at this rate. Ever—”
Stefan pulled her hands away from her face, and, laughing, cut off her words with a kiss. It was as if he couldn’t restrain himself around this woman, couldn’t keep his hands, his mouth, his tongue to himself. Cressida’s confirmation of what his own senses were telling him didn’t change anything about his destination. It simply changed the route.
If she was going to let him be her first, he was going to make sure it was an experience she never forgot.
“We don’t have any rules about virgins, princess,” he murmured, brushing his lips over hers. “Especially not for virgin princesses.”
“Oh, thank the Goddess.” Cressida sank back, letting him come down with her. His kiss deepened to a soft, rhythmic pulse against her lips. She tasted like honey and cinnamon, a recipe no human had ever perfected before, but a combination that called to him like everything else about this woman, a bewitching concoction he couldn’t get enough of.
“A virgin,” he purred against her mouth, reveling as she shivered in his arms. He traced a line of kisses up her jaw to her ear, playing with the tender lobe as she arched beneath him, as if trying to get her body closer to his. He tugged on the lobe with his teeth but didn’t say anything else, instead rolling back slightly to take in the beauty of her body once again. She was strong, firm, and her psychic ability radiated around her like a rose-hued corona. He drew his hand down her breast, her waist, and she moaned in appreciation, arching herself against his palm as he traced the flare of her hips. “That opens up all sorts of possibilities.”
Her lids lifted again, the eyes beneath focusing on him suspiciously. “Don’t toy with me, demon.” Her words were part plea, part demand, and a new spike of need thrilled through Stefan.
“I wouldn’t think of it.” His hand kept moving, however, edging over the curve of her thigh until he reached the vee between her legs. Once again, he nudged her legs apart, and once again, they fell easily, setting fire to his blood. Heat and promise coiled around him, making his already stiff shaft twitch.
She gave every indication she was wet and ready for him, but a demon couldn’t be too sure.
Stefan drew his fingers up the delicate folds that hid her channel, and Cressida dropped her head back on the bed, her lips parting on a groan. Her reaction told him without him having to ask that she’d not only never had sex before—she’d never been touched. If her only experience with men had been Marcus, he could understand why there was no urgency, but still, it seemed a crime.
One he was happy to rectify.
He drifted his fingers along her quivering skin, up, then back again, up then back, always circling but never quite touching the tight nub of nerves that swelled eagerly every time he ventured close. Cressida might not know exactly what she was missing out on, but she did know she was missing out on something, and her hands fisted into the sheets, her body writhing in anticipation.
“Stefan,” she whimpered, the word an entreaty he had no intention of denying.
“I’ve got you,” he murmured, then slipped his finger into her entrance, causing her to seize up, her ass clenching as she lifted off the bed.
“Shhh,” he said, pulsing gently as she collapsed back to the bed, barely inside her channel and already surrounded with her wet heat. He set his jaw, wanting to move slowly—until Cressida gasped with incoherent need. Without fully meaning to, he inserted a second finger alongside the first, gently stretching her wider. She groaned, her breathing going decidedly shallow, and he risked a glance at her face.
Her eyes were closed, her brows drawn together as if she was focused on a problem of vexing proportions, her expression so intent that Stefan’s heart gave an ungainly lurch. And, because he was a depraved son of a bitch, he withdrew his slickened fingers and returned his soft touch to her body, only this time he didn’t merely circle her clit, he centered on it, swirling his fingers with practiced experience as she gasped.
“Oh!” Cressida’s eyes flew open, and her gaze pinned on Stefan’s as he grinned—grinned! As if she wasn’t completely ready to explode. “What are you doing? And where are your clothes?”
“You close your eyes, you miss a lot.” He shifted on the bed, his body gloriously naked. Sleek muscles moved easily under his fair, perfect skin, interrupted only by the soft brush of hair over his chest and extending down his belly and—
“Oh,” Cressida murmured again.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Stefan bent one of her legs until he
positioned himself between them, then leaned down to place a kiss on the inside of her knee. Cressida couldn’t keep herself from jumping again. Then she froze for a long moment, transfixed as he kissed a slow trail up her thigh.
“Stefan,” she whispered as he moved still higher, drifting his lips over her hip bone.
“Do you trust me?” he whispered, the vibration of his voice over the sensitive point nearly making her eyes cross.
“Not at all,” she moaned. She didn’t trust any of this. She didn’t know what she was feeling, or why, or how it had become such a burning fire within her to have Stefan do—whatever he wanted to her. To her and with her and through her, over and over again.
He grinned and moved back over the slight swell of her belly, his breath cool and intimate on her overheated skin. He didn’t make her wait anymore. He leaned down and followed the trail his fingers had mapped out, but now with his lips, his tongue. At the first touch of his tongue, her entire body convulsed, and a sudden fire erupted to life around them, translucent bursts of purple-and-red flame dancing in unrestrained delight.
But Stefan didn’t stop there. He continued to tease her with his tongue, his fingers, his lips, until Cressida gripped the sides of his head, her fingers tangling in his hair, wanting him to stop, to let her breathe, let her process—yet she could no sooner speak than she could fly in that moment, her body and mind completely consumed with the intensity of the way he was making her feel. And just when she thought she was getting used to the rhythm, he shifted again, this time sliding up to the point where it seemed like every one of her nerve endings was clustered in a tight ball of—
“Stefan!” Cressida gasped, and she suddenly exploded into a starburst of sensations that felt like her entire body was coming apart. She jerked in Stefan’s arms, her back arching, the purple and red fire lighting his skin leapt and roared with energy.
“I’ve got you, I’ve got you, princess.”
Cressida blinked hard, willing herself to focus again as Stefan leaned away, not even trying to wipe the self-satisfied grin from his face.
