by Berinn Rae
She saw Nila standing with Gradyn, their hands oh so casually brushing, his head bent close over hers. Nila’s face looked flushed with pleasure … and a few more complicated emotions. Then Lily found Daniel standing beside Megan in a crowd of four attractive women who were all talking vivaciously. He looked relaxed and interested in their conversation but his gaze wandered the room.
And suddenly she couldn’t breathe. In that moment there was no one else in the room but him, with dark curls falling over his forehead and his beautiful eyes casually vacant behind his glasses. She wanted him touching her, now. As if he heard her, Daniel lifted his head and met her gaze. A grin split his face. She felt his rush of love and pride in her and then he excused himself from the group. Lily was already halfway across the floor. When they met his fingers grasped hers, and locked tight around them. At his touch, she breathed again. A crackle of heat melded their palms together and he pulled her towards the door, snatching their coats from the rack on the way.
• • •
Once outside and free of the gallery, he paused long enough to help her into her coat, then hauled her across the street to his waiting truck. His fingers shook as he unlocked the door. Hands on her bottom, he heaved her into the seat and clambered up behind her. Ramming home the key and gunning the engine several times, he whipped the truck into a U-turn. Rodney and Look-Alike swayed like empty barrels in the back.
Daniel drove like a mad fiend through the near empty streets. The ancient engine, cold and sluggish, died twice. Muttering vague obscenities, Daniel restarted it but refused to let the truck sit and warm up properly. On the seat beside him, Lily laughed at his impatience while her hands tugged his shirt tails loose.
He hooked an arm around her neck to pull her into a hungry kiss, one eye on the road. The cab steamed with breathless laughter and frenzied excitement. In the street out front of the Lennox, Daniel spun wildly into a parking spot, two wheels on the curb. The clutch popped, the engine died with a jerk. Then he turned to take her mouth in a devouring kiss while she fumbled open his shirt. He grabbed her breasts, thumbs stroking hard over her nipples until, with a quivering cry, she hiked up her dress and straddled him, the steering wheel digging into her back.
• • •
“Christ, Lil, not here,” Daniel choked and wrenched open the door. They half fell out to run hand and hand across the lawn. Lily lost a shoe and with a growl, Daniel picked up the shoe and at the same time tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of grain. He took the stairs two at a time as if she weighed no more than a bag of feathers. When he lowered her to the floor in front of his door, she slammed him against the wall, pulling him into kisses that set his head spinning.
Fighting for breath against her mouth, he fumbled his key into the lock. Then they were staggering backwards into his apartment. He dragged off her coat while she tore away his jacket and then his shirt. Fierce, unrelenting, Lily forced him across the room until the couch hit him in the back of the knees and he sat. A delirious laugh bubbled in her throat as she leaped astride his lap, heard his strangled gasp, and felt him hard and ready between her legs. Her fingers fumbled open his belt, his hands slipped under her dress, gliding up her thighs to pull her deeper against him. At the same time he leaned forward to cover her breast with his hot mouth, clamping his teeth down on her erect nipple through the silky fabric.
“Gods!” Lily cried as her blood burst into flames. Time and space melted into roaring need. She lifted her arms, and Daniel dragged the dress over her head. His breath was ragged, his eyes burned black as he looked down at her while he skimmed trembling hands over her petite breasts and tiny waist. He paused when he saw the lacy, thigh-high stockings, shockingly erotic in contrast with her girlish cotton bra and panties. Embarrassed by his perusal, Lily pressed her face to his bare chest and felt his arms fold around her.
“I can’t seem to slow down,” Daniel panted into her hair, “and I want to.”
“No.” Lily sank her teeth into his throat and thrust deeper in his lap.
“Jesus … ” he groaned and took her mouth again in an open, driving kiss with teeth and tongue. He stripped away her bra in one quick move and flipped her under him, skimming his hands over her skin while his lips tasted her neck, her shoulders, her breasts. All Lily could do was hold on and try to breathe.
Her tongue flicked over his skin, tasting the heady flare of his magic. His fingers burned fire down her spine and her power rose to wrap him in steamy swirls of green that lit the dusky room. She wanted penetration and their two magics locked together, wanted her senses swimming with him, wanted the silky glide of his skin damp and yielding under hers.
She needed them exploring each other with a kinetic intensity more arousing than just the ache for physical release. So she caressed, fingertips softly stirring, gently igniting. His magic poured like quicksilver through her nerves aquiver under this most intimate of touches.
For Lily only Daniel existed, the male scent of his skin, the aggressive press of his body wanting hers, his magic ardent in the blood racing under her skin. She drank him in and just when she felt too full to hold one more sensation, Daniel’s magic opened and drew her inside his consciousness. She tumbled into the sea of his emotions: excitement, love, exhilaration, and sexual hunger. There was no telling where she ended and he began. This time she reveled in the disorienting power of knowing him so thoroughly.
He kissed her thighs where lace stocking met tender skin, curving his hands up the backs of her legs to clasp her bottom. She couldn’t stop shaking, and tried to close her knees. But he moved between them to brush his lips over her belly.
He stopped, suddenly. “Fuck.” His whisper was harsh.
“Yes, please,” she sighed.
He lifted his head to look at her. “Tell me you have condoms, Lil.”
She blinked, tried to climb out of the sensual haze enough to focus. “I … I don’t.”
His breath gusting in a ragged sigh, he pressed a last kiss on her stomach and sat up to reach for his pants. Lily clasped her arms around his neck and rose with him.
“We can’t, Lily.”
“That is not the impression I’m getting.” Her tongue slicked over his bottom lip. “You know that I know you haven’t had sex since we both got tested last spring.”
“I know, but — ”
“And you know I’ve been celibate … ”
“Yes, but … ” He was laughing.
“What you don’t know is I got an IUD back when — ”
Daniel sprang to his feet, holding her slung about his hips. In half a dozen strides, he had her on his bed, fingers stripping away her panties. Off came the sexy stockings, off came his glasses and boxers, and at last they lay naked together, breathless at the sweet agony of skin against skin. Lily wanted his mouth on hers but Daniel had other plans, sweeping hands and lips over her shoulders, her belly, her ribs, his mouth suckling her breasts until she cried out.
Grabbing his hand, she thrust it between her legs and heard an exultant sound in his throat. He took her then, all wet and ready and so tight when he shoved into her, he felt the torturous tug of his orgasm coming too fast. He forced himself to stop, gasping against her neck for control. He felt like a teenager, it had been so damn long … for both of them. He plunged deeper in short, gentle thrusts that had her whimpering and curling her legs around his waist. Then he was driving harder. Her head fell back, and she came suddenly in a blaze of fire and violent magic.
The psychic backlash zapped his nerves, hot and dangerously exciting. He felt her go limp. Closing his hands around her wrists, he stretched her arms above her head. She squirmed under the vigorous plunge of his body. He kissed her face, tasted tears, and seeking her mouth, found it open and seeking his. She rocked her hips to meet his pounding rhythm, rejoicing at how perfectly he filled her.
Magic soared around them in crystalline harmonics that danced on their skin, rising and diving in arias of pleasure pulling him ever deeper into her and cle
nched her ever tighter around him. Locked together, they ascended breathless and fierce to climax together inside cascading light and throbbing, relentless magic.
Chapter Twenty-six
They lay unable to move for a long time, Daniel sprawled between her legs, Lily gasping into his damp curls, their hands locked together. As she slowly surfaced, she wondered if she’d ever be able to exist outside his bed again, even for a moment. Love had stitched her so tightly to him she knew she’d die if she couldn’t breathe the same air he breathed.
Daniel turned his face into her shoulder and opened his eyes. His lashes brushed her skin and, shivering at their silky touch, she swept her arms around his back.
“I never knew!” She drew him in for a long kiss. “I’ve ever only had sex. Never this. Never this all consuming taking and giving. In all my life I’ve never made love before, Daniel. Have you?”
“Not like this.” Chest heaving for air, he rolled onto his back. She rolled with him to splay loose-limbed on top, her face inches above his. She’d never been in his bedroom but could look no further than his contented smile and the warm dark of his half closed eyes brimming with emotions too heavy for words.
• • •
There were parts of his body Daniel couldn’t feel, let alone move. Never had he been so ripped apart, his psyche stripped bare and scattered before being knitted back into one being again, whole and complete. It no longer frightened him, this absolute exposure, such naked vulnerability. Lily’s joy rushed him in tidal waves. She pressed her body tighter to his and he discovered something could move after all.
“Wait, Lil — ” he gasped when she reached to take him firmly in hand.
Grinning, her eyes never leaving his face, she sat up and drove herself down over him. He arched off the bed at the suddenness of it and she rocked forward to brush her hair, her breasts, her lips against the soft hair on his chest. His body shuddered, his hands curled around her. God, he wanted deeper inside her … but she held him pinned between her knees, her teeth biting his chin, her heated eyes warning of further exquisite tortures.
She lifted off him to roll his nipple between her teeth before plunging down on him again. And again. She took him with joyous command, with her dancing fingers, her driving hips and her pounding heart, transporting his body to places he never knew existed. His hands clung to her tiny waist and when her thumbs began a slow, circling massage on his belly, he bit his lip to keep from crying out.
A storm of color swirled up as she drew his magic out. It shot around them like streaks of blue lightning. He felt the pull of her where she clutched him deep and where his heart hammered and his bones melted into hers. Her magic breathed across his thighs, his ribs, and chest until he was gulping for air … and his sanity. Every nerve screamed for respite.
She splayed across his chest to sooth him with her tongue. It seemed physically impossible for him to orgasm so soon and yet he felt the sweet wrenching rise as Lily drove forcefully onto him. He heard her cry, watched her spine arc and her head fall back, felt her knees clamp tight around his ribs as together they exploded in release and fell clinging to each other like victims of a cataclysmic storm.
They slept then, at peace, their fierce magic satiated for the moment. Often during the night, one would half wake to reach for the other. They made sleepy, murmuring love in the early hours of dawn and Daniel slept again.
• • •
Not Lily. She lay in his arms and knew absolute happiness for the first time in her life. It felt like gravity, more solid than any force in the universe.
As daylight strengthened she saw Daniel’s bedroom grow in detail. The room was small, barely large enough to hold the double bed, a tall, antiquated dresser and a beat-up trunk from his childhood, probably still full of boyhood treasures. The walls showed a variety of framed artwork. One painting was a soft oil of a stream babbling its way between mossy rocks and ferns before bursting into an effervescent pool. She knew this painting well, though she hadn’t known Daniel when she painted it or when he bought it.
There were other works too, a lovely, airy watercolor of mountains, an etching of flying birds and a pen and ink line drawing of a gawky, teenage Nila. Lily rose on her elbows to see, in a row across one wall, a series of inked and colored graphic novel heroes and villains. Obviously originals, some had been rendered in an ornate, art nouveau style, while others were more typical of the modern genre, boldly dynamic with exaggerated musculature and distorted heroic proportions.
Lily slipped out of bed to check the signatures and was impressed to discover all had been drawn by Daniel. His pen technique was beautiful, fluid and natural. He could have been a very good artist, she realized and wondered why he’d settled for staying a simple colorist who filled in the work of others. She recognized the hero Hellketcher from the graphic novel series he’d helped write and illustrate a few years before. Something about the way he captured expression and character struck her as familiar but she couldn’t place where she’d seen it before.
Out of bed and away from Daniel’s arms, she found the room cold. Goosebumps rose on her skin. She snatched up the nearest piece of clothing, one of Daniel’s Tshirts and slipped it on, pressing it to her face to breathe in the scent of him. It hung loose to her knees as she moved along the wall, pulled by one drawing after another. Behind her, Daniel sighed and rolled onto his stomach.
She looked back at him, her eyes softening as they traced the naked curve of his shoulder blade folding into his long spine sliding down to narrow hips. So filled with love was she, she almost turned away from the hallway where more of his work beckoned. But curiosity killed the cat …
Daniel’s office was private, she understood that. She’d only been invited in half a dozen times and only when it was neatly organized. Lily leaned in through the doorway to see it messily disorganized this morning. He’d obviously been at work on a project. Loose sketches lay in untidy stacks on his work table and crammed in beside his computer on the desk. Lily reached to turn on his work lamp. Some of the papers were covered in random concept doodles. Others showed full workups, detailed portrait studies.
A large corkboard held rough renderings pinned in overlapping chaos. Lily found herself wondering when he found time to draw so much. Between building maintenance on the Lennox, seeing to tenant needs, and his freelance jobs as a colorist, when did he manage to sketch the Formans’ golden retriever lying asleep or leaping in play with the twins? Lily was amazed and plucked up a study of a man and woman walking together, eating in a booth at the local diner, talking on a street corner. In another sketch she recognized the McCready sisters and gasped at how he’d managed to capture their primary characteristics — the erect, protective Eleanor and stodgy, rumpled Ruth — in just a few simple strokes.
Scanning the board, she saw the corner of a sheet of paper with a doodle of her fishbowl and, plucking out the pin, took it in her hand. The page was filled with small flash illustrations of herself, glancing over her shoulder at the top of the stairs, digging for her keys with a hang-dog expression, laughing, scowling, concentrating. He’d captured her easily, her quicksilver energy seemed alive in every pencil stroke. Flipping through other drawings stuck to the board, she found all of them, Lonnie Ranchero, the Forman twins, the newlyweds Ruby and Brian, Mr. Newman across the hall, even Gradyn Spencer.
Her eyes moved back to the drawing on his work table and looking closer, she caught her breath. It was a girl wearing a baggy shirt similar to her paint smock. The girl even had her long, large eyes and pointed chin. Breadsticks, celery stalks, and a candy cane stuck up from a knot of curls at the back of her head. Almost against her will Lily leaned closer and saw the drawing was not of her at all, but the leggy, neurotic girl in the comic strip Lost and Found. The one Ellen called “Lesser-Lil.”
She stumbled back, confused. How could a character from a comic strip be here, in Daniel’s office? On his drawing table? Unless … oh, Gods and Saints! He couldn’t be …
&nbs
p; Lily glanced wild eyed at the mass of drawings again, saw sketches of the Lost and Found computer nerd with his crooked glasses. In a blinding revelation, she recognized Daniel. And there were drawings of the on-again, off-again couple, slightly resembling Brian and Ruby from downstairs. And the loner techno geek looking too much like Gradyn Spencer for comfort. Still clutching the sketch of Lesser-Lil in fingers gone numb, Lily felt her legs go weak and she crumpled to the floor.
Daniel was G.I.L.? No! Impossible! Lily’s vision blurred into surreal, disorienting snippets of memories, past conversations, subjects nimbly avoided. She threw the sketch away from her. Closing her eyes against the damning proof, curled against the wall, she began to cry. Daniel, her beloved Daniel, had spied on her. Had spied on them all! Studied them like specimens, dissecting and analyzing … and then turned them into public caricatures. What kind of man did this, used his friends in so callous and mercenary a fashion? And how could she have loved him so unreservedly without seeing this side of his character?
“Lily … ”
Her paralyzed mind didn’t register him crouched beside her wearing only jeans. Not until he touched her. She jerked then, flinging her arms out in an instinctive defense as she scrambled to her feet.
Daniel’s face was bleak. “Jesus … Lily, I’m sorry you found out this way. I’ve tried to tell you a dozen times — ”
“I don’t want to hear!” She covered her ears and shrank away, sobbing brokenly.
“Let me explain.”
He grabbed her as she tried to dart past him. At the feel of his hands on her she fought him, kicking and clawing until he let her go. Lily ran then, pausing only long enough to snatch her spare key from the hook beside his door before racing out of his apartment. Terrified he was seconds behind her. She fumbled the key into her lock, fell through the open door, and kicked it violently shut behind her. A hysterical scream filled her throat. She choked it down. His scent still filled her senses and she furiously tore his shirt from her body. Diving into her bed, she pulled the blankets over her head and cried until exhausted sleep finally claimed her.
