by Julie Leto
He wanted her to try the door. Desperately. He was clever and commanding, this man, and he wasn’t as adept at hiding his emotions as she was at reading them. For all she knew, the wave of vertigo she’d just experienced was from him trying to exert his will on her with the same magic he’d used to disappear and to conjure the chaise lounge and the wine. But she’d fought him successfully. If she played her cards right, the game could be hers.
Bottom line, she wanted this man.
To be her personal phantom. This idea, so entrenched in her psyche for oh so long, blossomed into something tangible for the first time in her life. She’d turned quite a few of her more pragmatic fantasies into reality using her wealth and influence, but she’d never brought a fantasy to life with just her touch.
“What could possibly be more pressing than finding out if you are free of this curse or trapped by it?” he asked, incredulous.
“Finding out more about you.”
The atmosphere shifted. The power play ended and the blaze in his eyes kindled from a spark of frustration to a slow, steady sexual heat. He reseated himself on the chaise and held-out his hand to her.
“You say that with seduction in your voice, my lady.”
She accepted his hand. This time, when he drew her onto the chaise, he allowed no space between them. His thigh crushed against hers, igniting a wildfire of sensation through her.
She traced an invisible crazy eight on his knee. Crazy, as in completely insane, touching a man who, by all tenets of reason and logic, couldn’t possibly be real. “Wishful thinking, perhaps?”
He smiled with hooded eyes. “Simple observation. There’s no shame if you want me. In the most classical sense.”
She licked her lips, unwilling to deny his assertion. She did want him. She had wanted him—or, at least, a man like him—for all of her life. Gallant, powerful, intense. A master of magic.
And best of all, he wasn’t entirely real. By his description, he could not follow her out of this castle or disrupt the ordered life she’d built for herself on the mainland. He was a fantasy. A diversion. A sexy, sensual secret she’d discovered and, perhaps, only she could keep.
“I won’t deny that I find you incredibly attractive,” she responded.
“How can you? Even now, your body tightens for me.”
She swallowed a gasp. Even in her century, such talk pushed limits. And yet, as his gaze brushed over her breasts, her nipples responded instantly. Her thigh muscles clenched with anticipation.
Maybe he was simply like her. Honest. Insightful. Observant.
Hot for magical sex.
“Is this magic?”
He leaned closer so that his breath, wine scented just as she’d imagined, teased her cheek. “The most elemental magic of all.”
She tilted her chin to match his sensual stare. “You were a playboy in your former life, then?”
He ran his tongue over his lips, drawing her attention to the fullness of his mouth. “Circumstances of my youth dictated that my boyhood was rather brief and did not include much time for play,” he informed her, his words crisp and factual while his tone lazed with sensuality. “My pursuits of pleasure began when I was very much a man.”
“And you’ve been a man a very long time,” she said, her voice breathy with possibilities.
Their lips were mere centimeters apart.
“I’ve been a man trapped without a woman even longer,” he warned.
Their noses brushed. “Should I be afraid?”
“If you have to ask,” he said, sweeping the edge of his lips over hers, “the answer is decidedly no.”
Alexa couldn’t remember the last time she’d kissed a man, but the moment her mouth clashed with Damon’s, all thoughts of former lovers or the lack thereof flew out of her head. As she’d anticipated, he tasted of a fine claret—and so much more. Tobacco. Time. Experience. His tongue smoothed against hers with coaxing skill, but she didn’t need to be cajoled. She speared her hands into his hair, freeing the dark strands from the leather tie, and climbed onto her knees so she had to tilt his chin toward her to fully devour him.
He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her away. His eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“What manner of witch are you?”
She supposed she should be insulted, but instead she laughed. “Don’t try to convince me that all the women in your day were prim and proper maidens with no passion. I know things about history and I won’t believe you.”
He scowled slightly. “I would not attempt to perpetrate such a lie. Yet only moments ago, you doubted my good character.”
She balanced her hands on his shoulders, massaging the thick muscles with greedy hands, waylaying her need to rip the soft linen of his shirt away from his skin. “I still doubt your good character. All the better for what I want from you.”
He quirked a grin. “You’re sure you’re not royalty?”
She laughed. “Depends on who you ask.”
“I prefer to keep our interactions private.”
“Good,” she said, leaning forward and teasing his lips with hers once again. “I was thinking the very same thing.”
Six
Alexa hardly knew what had come over her.
Okay, that was a bald-faced lie. Lust had come over her. Years and years of fantasizing about a mysterious, ghostly stranger fading into her room late at night and introducing her to decadent pleasures of the flesh. Hot dreams. Wet dreams. Dreams that had haunted her with particular vigor since her month-long stay in the hospital, when she’d had little to do but sleep and surrender to the medications coursing through her body.
But now she was healthy. She could have exactly what she wanted with a lover who wasn’t completely real—if only she took the leap.
The room darkened around her. She leaned away from Damon and watched candles and torches in iron sconces and elaborate candelabras materialize all around them. Silk draperies and tapestries unfurled from the stones on the wall. In seconds, the landing was transformed into a sensual hideaway, with the cushioned chaise as the centerpiece.
“You’re getting the hang of using the magic,” she whispered, awed by the finery glowing around her.
“Wondrous what a man can do when properly motivated,” he replied.
Alexa sank to her knees, knowing she’d lost her mind in pursuing this mysterious phantom—and not really caring. “Maybe the magic is what is making me so hot for you.”
He quirked a half grin. “Do you truly believe that?”
Leaning back fully against the chaise, Damon locked his hands behind his head and stared at her with those stormy eyes that sucked her in like a watery vortex. She didn’t know what to think—until she realized that was her problem.
Alexa didn’t want to think anymore. Day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, Alexa Chandler was expected to use all of her brainpower to ensure that her father’s legacy didn’t falter. One hundred and thirty-five luxury hotel properties in eight countries fell under her responsibility, along with thousands of investors and employees. Not to mention hundreds of thousands of premium guests.
Even at home, someone always needed her. Jacob. The staff. Various and sundry members of her extended family who had no use for Alexa until they needed a suite for a good friend for their wedding, an advance on their dividends from the company or even her opinion on their latest vacation destination—which was only a roundabout way of bucking for a free room. Even the men she’d dated came up short in fulfilling her most basic desires. Or else she’d been too afraid to accept what they had to offer, so she’d found lame excuses to send them away.
The only peace she ever found had been alone in her bedroom, in the hour between when she slipped into bed and finally fell asleep, fantasizing like a schoolgirl about a mysterious man who would slip uninvited into her room and ask her for nothing while he gave her everything she ever wanted.
Girlish, yes.
But damn it, Alexa grasped escapism when it came,
which wasn’t often. How could she now deny what she so desperately wanted? Her entire body thrummed with the gravity of her need. In every other aspect of her life, she’d always taken what she wanted without looking back. Why not here? Why not now?
“Make love to me, Damon,” she said.
He sat bolt upright, touched his fingers to the straps of her blouse and, in a blink, the material disappeared, leaving only her bra to cover her breasts. And under his heated gaze, even that seemed too much.
“I will make love to you, Alexa, but not because you order me to. As a man, looking at you, feeling you against me…I have no other choice.”
The soulful longing in his voice sparked a flame inside her that raged the minute he grabbed her by the waist and pulled her down atop him. Whether their clothes disappeared completely via magic or through the insistent ripping away of fabric, Alexa wasn’t sure. In a haze of heat, she knew only that her skin had ignited where every nerve ending in her thighs, stomach, breasts and arms moved against his. Instantly, the fire melted her insides until liquid warmth seeped from between her pulsing labia. She stretched her body completely over his; his sex jutted against her, hard and ready.
She couldn’t wait. What if she awoke before she’d had her fill? What if someone roused her prior to the fantasy playing out? She’d been there before. The frustration had been maddening. No, she wouldn’t wait. Not a minute. Not a second. Instead, she pulled her knees beneath her, took his cock boldly in her hands and guided him inside her.
An explosion of sensation rocked her. She cried out from the blast of ecstasy, burying her fingers in his chest hair, holding on for dear life as her body rode the wave until it crested, then fell. She was nearly unaware of his presence until he spoke.
“Why the rush, my lady?”
He curled his hands over hers and softly loosened her grip. Panting, she opened her eyes and saw a smile twinkling in his eyes. She’d used him for instant gratification.
Embarrassingly instant gratification.
Wonderful instant gratification.
“I didn’t want you to disappear,” she admitted, breathless.
He shifted so that the thickness between her legs jolted her with another wave of pleasure. “I’m certain I have no better place to be than here.”
He felt so real. So solid. Unlike the lovers from her dreams, whose very insubstantiality had haunted her. Climaxes while in the throes of sleep left her wanting more. Like just now. Her body, so starved for satisfaction, had taken the least he had to offer.
And from the look in his eye, he clearly wanted to give her so much more.
She smiled shyly, keenly aware of how their bodies were still merged and how she’d reacted like she’d never had sex before in her entire life. “I suppose I jumped the gun.”
He clucked his tongue. “Clearly, you jumped something.”
Surprisingly, his chuckle didn’t send her running. “Someone, you mean.”
He arched a brow. “Not that I mind, but such haste defies logic. Had you waited, I could have done this.”
Lifting her hands to his lips, he kissed her fingers one by one, then lolled his tongue along the inside of her palm, flicking down her wrist to stir her pulse points. He then guided her hands to her breasts and smeared the moisture over her nipples until the tight pucker of arousal no longer ached, but instead pearled with needy vibrations she knew only he could alleviate.
“Your breasts are perfectly lovely. So sensitive. May I?”
His polite request left her stunned, but she dropped her hands to her sides and managed a nod, her eyelids drifting closed as he applied his singular touch. He smoothed his roughened fingertips over her, weighing the fullness of her flesh in his palms, using his thumbs to draw tiny circles around her areolae, then flicking the tips of her nipples with his thumbnails until she cooed from the sensations.
She found herself running her hands over his stomach, reveling in the resistance of his abs and in the soft pelt of hair arrowing down his chest. In a dizzy swirl of sensation, he pressed his hands against her shoulders, pulled her close, then flipped her beneath him.
“Ah,” he said, his grin wide, “that’s more like it.”
She blinked rapidly. “Women on top threaten you?”
His chuckle spawned another wave of sensations within her, each more delicious than the one before. “Threaten? You have an odd view of men, my lady.”
“You haven’t lived my life.”
“No, but I have lived mine. Trust me when I tell you that nothing you do, nothing you say, will threaten me in any way.”
She grinned and laced her hands behind his neck. “You said yourself that I’m a powerful woman.”
“Yes, and this intrigues me. Challenges me. If the men in your life have run from you because of your strength, you are simply pursuing the wrong men.”
She cradled her cheek against the pillow as she laughed. “You’ve said a mouthful,” she agreed.
He eyed her breasts hungrily. “Ah, but a proper mouthful has nothing to do with words.”
Damon proved his point by scooping his arm beneath her back, arching her body so he could wrap his lips around her erect nipples. Instantly she reacted, boldly scrambling her fingers into his hair and tugging him closer. Had he not been certain of her station in life, he might have thought her a courtesan, at the very least—or more likely a queen. From the moment she captured his cock, shoved it within her moist folds and milked instant pleasure from him, she’d snared him. Now it was his turn to enslave her. Only through their mutual delight would he find his way to freedom.
He flicked his tongue across the tight tip of her breast. She writhed beneath him, impatient. Needful. His tentative control slipped from his grasp. He needed to orchestrate this seduction to his advantage, but more than that, he needed to feel her, taste her, lose himself inside her until the wasted years refilled with new, glorious memories.
He’d been alone too long. Longer than his entrapment. Longer still than his married life, mistress or no. He dropped lower and bathed Alexa’s naked belly in hot kisses. She spread her legs so that her feet dropped over the sides of the chaise. Her need crystal clear, he thought he’d lose his mind.
And he did. In the taste of her. In the feel of her. The heat of her desire and the fire of his own tossed all thoughts of freedom and captivity, magic and evil, from his brain. He wanted nothing more than to learn her, brand her, make her his in ways neither of them would ever forget.
She was panting hard when he finally looked up from between her thighs. She grabbed him by the cheeks and pulled him close.
“I can’t wait anymore. You’re driving me mad.”
He kissed her hard, loving how her flavors mixed and mingled with his. The tightness of wanting her made his whole groin ache, particularly when she clasped his buttocks with both her hands and drove her fingernails into his flesh, urging him inside her once again. He saw no reason to prolong the agony and immediately complied, though he did not impale her swiftly as she expected. Instead, he pressed the head of his sex into her just an inch, waited for her to gasp in pleasure, then withdrew.
“What?”
He drove into her a little deeper, relishing the sensation of her hot, moist skin against his hardened flesh and the way her breath caught in her throat when he teased.
“You are too hot,” he chastised.
Her eyes widened. “I’m too—?”
He eased back, leaving the top of his penis nestled in her tight opening, but denying her—and him—the full sensation they both so desperately sought. “Slow and steady wins the race,” he claimed.
She grabbed his buttocks and pulled him hard inside her.
“Not in my century,” she claimed.
His laugh soon turned to unbidden groans as need overtook him and he could think of nothing else but pumping them both to climax. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and the tilt of her womb nearly drove both of them mad. In a haze of pleasure, Damon felt centuries of contr
ol slip out of his grasp. Around him, candles blinked in and out of existence. The tapestries and silk sheaths rustled from an unseen wind and the music of her gratified bliss rang in his ears.
The moment of climax came hard, and Damon’s entire body tensed, then released. He crumbled atop her, sated and stretched to his limit. The gentle way she curled her fingers in the long strands of his hair nearly lulled him to sleep.
“I can’t believe this is real,” she said on a stilted breath.
He pulled up onto his elbow and watched how the reflection of the flames from the sconces flickered in her emerald eyes. Her beauty truly was unsurpassed. Her intense passion enhanced her attractiveness to the point where it almost pained him to look at her. Against the pillow, her burnished hair taunted him, reminded him of the Gypsy’s promise. He could only wonder how deep Alexa Chandler’s influence would remain over his destiny. She’d already released him, albeit partially, from Rogan’s cursed painting. Now she’d brought him intense pleasure in an act so simple and basic, with any other woman, the physical actions might as well have been by rote. Yet with Alexa, Damon felt renewed. Invigorated.
Alive.
Completely. Not a shadow of a man, but solid to the core.
“This is amazingly real. A few hours ago, I was trapped in a single room, staring out at nothingness for centuries on end, too exhausted by monotony and emptiness to dream about either my future or my past.”
She released the lock of her legs around his waist, but he remained inside her. Now lax, a single movement enough to separate them, he remained perfectly still.
“And now?”
He brushed a lock of her hair from her dark eyelashes. “The present has grasped my attention in a most amazing way.”
As their bodies readjusted to normalcy, Damon shifted beside Alexa, and after untangling legs and arms and slick skin, they spooned. He placed his hand protectively on her belly, splaying his fingers to possess the maximum amount of skin. He concentrated, and seconds later, a silk coverlet draped over them, chasing away the chill. Surprisingly, he felt the muscles in his shoulders and arms go completely lax. His legs barely seemed to exist. The only part of his anatomy having trouble embracing this laziness was his cock, and with her buttocks snuggled so tightly against him, he could hardly blame his intimate anatomy for attempting to regain its strength.
