by Rhys Ford
Trent Leonard needed honesty from me, and no matter what happened after tonight slipped away, we’d just have to deal with it because he was right. I was so damned hard it hurt.
“No, it was just the statue. Spell’s effects just wore off. Like five minutes ago. Don’t feel a damned thing.”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“Totally joking.” I ran my fingers over his mouth, catching the swirls of my prints on the chap of his lips. “But I’m not… I’m not going to be good for you, Trent. You’ve got to know that. If you know anything about me, you should know that.”
“I’ll take what I can get, Roku. For now.” He pushed up against me, angling his body into mine. I jerked my chin up, unsure of what he wanted at first, but the thick press of his cock through his jeans gave me a good idea. After taking the bottle from me, he took a quick sip, placed it on the counter, then trapped me against the cold quartz stone top. “God, you are so fucking damned beautiful. I—”
“So I guess we’re not going to talk about our feelings or—”
“Let me show you how it’s going to be so damned nice to shut you up for a few minutes.”
His eyes were nearly black, and despite the heat coming off his body, his fingers were gently cool. I tried to fight the lure he’d cast, but it was no use. The second he was on me, I was lost.
His hands were in my hair, a painful clench against my skull as he tugged my head back, exposing my throat. Trent’s mouth was on mine before the soft moan escaping me had a chance to linger on my tongue. He held me there, pinned to the cabinet, the stone digging into my hip as he pushed my lips open with his tongue, taking what he wanted—needed—from my mouth.
If my skin was on fire before, it was now molten from the heat he’d pulled up from my core.
I dug in, shoving my hands up his shirt and across his chest. Finding the hard points of his nipples, I pinched and twisted, matching him tug for tug as he yanked my hair, angling my head so he could bite my neck. His teeth sank in, and I gouged my nails into the tender buds I’d captured between my fingertips.
His eyes ran to storm when he lifted his face. The sun was long gone, and we stood in the faint light coming up from the mist-veiled city. Shadows filled every crevice of his strong face, casting his fine bones into a pale granite. I could see the Nordic in his blood, a wildness tempered by fire and cut sharp from ice. His massive thighs kept me prisoner, holding me in place as he tugged off the SFPD T-shirt I’d pulled on after my shower.
“Pele and Morrígan, look at you.” He skimmed my shoulders, his rough fingers tracking the markings he found there. “You’ve got wings. Under your skin. How far…? I need to see you. Have you. You have no idea how much I wanted to taste you last night, Roku. No fucking idea.”
Common sense wiggled its way into my brain. I didn’t want it there. No, what I really wanted was to have Trent Leonard spread me out on my bed and fuck me senseless with the iron-hard cock I could feel through his jeans.
“Hold up.” It felt futile pushing at Trent’s chest, but being part fae had some advantages, strength being a definite benefit as I shoved him back a step. “I don’t have anything here. I mean… fuck. I don’t even think I’ve got anything in the kitchen we can use.”
“Yeah, well, I do.” His grin was both boyish and sly.
“Thought I was a sure thing?” I tilted my head back to get a good look at him.
“No. Figured if you turned me down, I’d end up driving someplace to jack off my frustration.” He gave me a quick suckle on my lower lip. “Now, why don’t we go find that bed of yours.”
Seventeen
“GODS, YOU are… gorgeous,” Trent whispered, stroking at my hip where one of my smaller wing markings ran over the bone and down to the tight flesh along the back of my thigh. “They’re literally under your skin.”
“Or a part of it. I don’t know really. There aren’t a lot of people like me to ask,” I purred under his touch, loving the feel of his fingers along my ribs. “They’re deeper than a tattoo. My mom wasn’t going to let anyone poke at me to find out, and I don’t care why. It’s just something that happens. Like my hair growing longer.”
“They get brighter where I touch them.” To hear Trent’s awed whisper, it was as if he’d discovered Christmas, pizza, and crème brûlée all in one package. I would have teased him, but I liked what he was doing with his hands. “Roku, you are… you’re beyond any man’s wildest dreams.”
I’d never found my markings all that fascinating. To me, they were pale echoes of my mother’s dragonfly green-and-gold wings, scattered hexagonal shapes loosely arranged into a spread of colors and darker spines as if they were folded down in rest. The colors ran over my lightly freckled shoulders, down my ribs, and to the back of my knees, vibrant and bright against the pale of my skin. I’d been torn between putting my mother’s star on my shoulder or where it should be on my mottled skin wings. I wore the murdered and forgotten dead along the larger of my right wing’s ribs, a scatter of black prickles swirling into an ever-expanding constellation. They were smaller than the ones I wore on my wrist for John and the girls, and I’d decided on my shoulder to honor my mother because I didn’t want to put her death marker on my ass.
Especially since my new partner intended on being there.
He kissed the stars trapped among the colors, then reached for my wrist, stroking his thumb over my dead’s remains. I shivered, ghosts walking over my grave and a chorus of mocking demons dancing down my spine, but Trent didn’t let go. He merely pressed into the spot where I’d left my goodbyes to the souls I’d failed to protect, his other hand stroking the colors up into my skin. My body grew warm where he lingered, and my cock responded in kind, liking the contact.
I couldn’t remember the last time someone touched me. Not like this. I refused to think about the kisses John gave me the morning I’d left to go to work and came back to a pyre, but the sense of longing lingered in me. I’d missed being touched. Missed coming home to someone who had a smile on their face solely because I’d come through the door. I wasn’t insane enough to think I’d have that with Trent, but lying next to him on a soft bed made me want more than a wet mouth and a hot, oiled slide of flesh inside of me.
“Hazard of being part fae.” I returned Trent’s touch, gliding my fingernails along the inside of his thigh. His cock was ready, stretching upward, its head slick with a bit of moisture beading at the slit. I ran my thumb through the damp, then brought it up to my mouth to discover he tasted like a brush of peppermint oil and salt. “You taste good. Like a shot of winter on my tongue. Wonder if it’s a faerie thing like my wings.”
“I don’t know much about the faerie.” He made a face, one tinted with regret and something sourer I couldn’t name. “It wasn’t something any of us talked about. Hell, I didn’t even know what I’d been spliced with until about a year ago. Up until then, it was just something that made cold.”
“Your parents didn’t talk to you about… I mean, they spliced you.” I rolled over, propping myself up onto my elbow. “Did they tell you why? Costs a lot of money to splice fae into a human embryo, and they didn’t tell you why?”
He stiffened, his body going taut, and his face grew hard, stony in the faint golden light. “Never met my parents. Someone dumped me in a baby drop-off box down in Los Angeles.” I heard him pull in a hiss of air. Then he rumbled, “I was raised in a crèche down in Santa Monica. Raised, educated, and sent out into the world. Joined the military and ended up on Special Forces with a bunch of other splices. There were about thirty of us when the program was closed down.”
“Who the Hell pays for a genetic splice, then abandons the kid?” The cost of a splice boggled my mind when I’d first learned most people who were like me happened on purpose rather than by chance.
Blending fae and human genetics was a difficult process, with magic and science needed to push the foreign strands together. Unless it involved a Scottish Odonata, a three-month-long affair with
a yakuza crime boss’s son, and a lot of whiskey-sake bombs, the fail rate was spectacularly high, with the spliced infant not manifesting any of its fae abilities. Going through all of that, then tossing the kid into a safe baby box at an ER was crazy.
“Don’t know. The unit became my family. We were… we were all kind of in the same boat. Spliced fae hybrids who didn’t fit in their parents’ human worlds. If anything, I had it better than a lot of the guys. At least I didn’t have anyone at home wishing I’d turned out different.” His fingers were moving again, coursing over my wings, up my spine, over my shoulder blade. “Lots of people think their kids are going to get wings or… Hell, I don’t know what they think, but most of us end up looking for a place to belong. And we found it in that unit.
“We were trained to be an investigative and tactical force. We went out, did the job, then came back to the base for some downtime. Gathered evidence before and after missions for federal prosecution teams, which is how I ended up leapfrogging through to inspector. I lived, ate, and shit with the same guys for years. There wasn’t any family or kids or anything. It was good until… well, things went to shit, and that’s how I ended up here.” His smile held a warmth that didn’t reach his eyes… it didn’t even reach the ends of his mouth, but it flirted with me, a wry twist of dark humor in the solidness that was Trent. “Now if only my partner would stop trying to get himself killed, I might be able to get on with my life.”
“That’s….” I didn’t have any words for the emotions rushing through me. “I’m sorry you lost that. I am.”
“Don’t look at me like that. I’m fine. Or I will be.” Trent frowned, but his hand moved up over onto my hip, his palm resting on the rise of my ass. “I like being a cop, and after years of having someone dictate where I was going to go next, it’s nice to go home. To have a home instead of sharing dorms with ten other guys. Chinatown’s an interesting district, and I lucked out getting into Arcane Crimes. Not to mention pairing up with you.”
“Yeah, that’s a bonus. Least the brass could have done was teach you the basics. Who the Hell shows up for work without tea leaves or salt?”
“I look forward to learning everything you can teach me.” He stretched over me, pushing me back onto the mattress. His cocky smile was back in place, his breath hot on my face. “Maybe I can teach you a few things too. Just lean back. I’ll show you.”
“I don’t know about teaching me anything. I know quite a lot.” Moving under him was like trying to slide out from under a ton of bricks, but he shifted his legs, giving me some space. “I could probably teach you a few things. I mean, I’m not Papilio, but I can do some amazing things with my tongue if—”
“Really, do you ever stop talking?” Trent muttered. “Let me give that busy brain something else to think about.”
Trent’s fingers were in me, deep and slick with oil. I panted, arching my back as he pushed in farther, spreading me apart. I could barely grasp the head of his dick with my hand, stroking at him in time with his curling movements, and I growled when he pulled himself free of my grip. I was going to need a lot of work to get him into me, but I was willing to give it a go. I rolled, pulled forward when he wrapped his arm around my side, and I gasped when his mouth found my ribs, peppering damp kisses down the length of my dominant wing. He found a sensitive spot, biting at it, and I squeezed down, stroking his length with a hard tug.
“Keep doing that and I’m going to come all over your bed,” he growled into my ribs. My skin there was wet, laved and bitten where he’d explored me. “Then I’ll have to kill you so no one knows I shot off too early.”
“Yeah, like you can kill me. I’m indestructible, remember?” I took my time with him, leaving nips of purpling skin where I’d tasted him. He’d moved too quickly away after one bite, and I drew blood, my sharp canines nicking his skin, and I laughed, lapping it up with my tongue.
There were reasons the fae were known to consume their lovers. The need to hunt ran deep in some bloodlines—my bloodline—but my hunger ran to sex more than death throes. Still, it was better to shove down the instincts calling me to take mouthfuls of Trent’s flesh down my throat and concentrate more on getting him inside of me.
Or I just really liked biting.
His fingers reached inside of me, into places I hadn’t been touched in too long. I loved the burn of his intrusion, feeling everything from the calluses on his knuckles to the rough whorls on his fingertips. He grimaced playfully when I tried to get my mouth near his cock, edging his hips away before I could get another taste of him, chuckling that he was afraid of my teeth. I cupped his balls, raking my fingers around their heft, and Trent gasped, then drove his fingers in deeper when I laughed.
Damn, he felt good. Too fricking good, and when he’d stretched me as far as he could, he eased back, stroking at my trembling thighs until the waves of edged pleasure rolling through my nerves finally let me go.
“Turn over. I want to see your eyes go green.” He eased me onto my back, guiding my hips with his strong hands. We were both sticky and wet, sloppy with spit and lube. The bedsheets were clinging to me, and he tugged away the linens wrapped around my calves. Trent waited until I settled, then bent over me, our mouths barely a whisper away. “Swear to any god you want, Roku. I want you. Since the first time I saw you. Even before I knew we were going to be partners, I wanted you, but if you can’t… I don’t want to hurt you. You’ve still got bruises in some spots.”
“You’re insane, Trent.” He felt good. Too good. The kind of good where I would never want to stop. I’d have to get up to feed the cat or she’d eat us alive, but the bed seemed like a good place to spend the rest of my life. “And don’t worry. I might look delicate, but I can take a beating.”
“Delicate is not a word I’d use to describe you, and trust me, Roku,” Trent whispered against my lips. “I pulled you up the side of a building, then kind of yanked a stone scorpion out of your throat. You are anything but delicate. I’m just worried if you’re up to this.”
“I’m fine,” I said, running the back of my hand over his stomach, liking how my touch made his dick jump. “My shoulder still hurts from the building, and let’s just say I’m not going to be giving you a blowjob any time soon.”
“Hurts too much to do this?” His cock was at my taint, nudging along the velvet of my balls. I spread my legs, arching my back until his head ghosted over my hole. “The shoulder, I mean. And yeah, those claws and your throat, I’m not going to—”
“Mrrrp.” A peach-and-white furry head popped up over the pillows, followed by a long, slightly chubby body. Rubbing her cheek against my forehead, Bob chirruped at me, kneading at the pillow as she marked me as hers.
“Bob, get off,” I grumbled, trying to twist around to get a better hold on her. “Seriously, dude, I haven’t gotten laid in forever. Now’s not the time for—”
“She just loves you,” Trent said, picking her up gently to put her down to the floor. “Can’t say I blame her. Maybe I should go put some food in—”
“First off, you leave this bed and I’m cutting your dick off so I can start without you.” I was serious. My cock throbbed with need, and my ass was mourning the loss of Trent’s fingers. My senses were on overload, and even on my back, the colors of my wings were startlingly bright. The sheets were bleeding flashes of light, and I was lying in the middle of a sea-foam green, gold, and teal aurora, aching for Trent to take me over the edge. “Secondly, if we ever do this again, she’s going to expect extra food every time one of our asses hits the bed. She’ll be the size of a cow before you know it.”
“That’s a when, babe.” Trent glowered down at me, shifting his hands until they were under my legs. “Not an if.”
He was in me before I could say anything else, filling me up until I couldn’t catch my breath. It’d been a long time since I’d been with someone other than my own hands, and that was few and far between. Hitching my legs up, Trent supported my thighs on his. He rocked, driving hims
elf in, and I rose to meet him, curling my spine and opening for his cock.
I felt a delicious burn when he pushed in. Despite the lube and the care he’d given with his fingers, I was too small for him. It would take time for me to adjust to his width. His cock pressed into me, straining my flesh, but it felt so damned good. The sting made my mouth water, and I swallowed as I arched my back to grind down onto Trent’s length. He responded with another thrust, seating himself into my body with a final long push.
“So fucking tight,” he ground out, balancing his weight on his knees. My legs pulled a bit. Spread apart and hooked over Trent’s powerful thighs was a bit of a stretch, but I limbered up quick enough. Another shove of his cock opened me up again, and I mewled, needing him to go back in.
Trent moved slightly, but it was enough. A simple twist of his hips and I was drenched in rainbows and stars. The world went hazy around me, my eyes refracting the light. The city turned to a churning sea of colors, blinding me until my brain could make sense of the changing hues. Trent moved again, and I was lost inside him, around him, as I was pierced through with his cock, my body enveloping him, then letting him glide away only long enough for my heart to drive another thundering beat into my chest.
I grabbed his arms, his biceps bunching and giving under my fingers. His powerful body rocked and quivered, strong enough to hold me steady, but I’d broken his control, turning him to liquid with every clench of my body around him. Trent retaliated, grabbing my hips to steady himself… or steady me, I wasn’t sure which. The bite of his fingers into my side was exhilarating, sending a hum along my nerves.
The bed gave, tilting to the right when he moved his knees, and the shift of his position changed the sound of our bodies coming together. His cock seemed to have grown another inch in girth, or I was too close to losing control and my body wasn’t willing to let him go. My hole was stretched nearly to the point of pain, and then everything ghosted over to pleasure. I held on tight, riding Trent’s thrusts into my core. We groaned and swore, panting to race to a finish neither of us wanted.
