“The door was hidden somehow. Maybe the sinkhole was too.” She came up beside him, looking not at the sky but at the swirling water.
The Maya—and the Nightkeepers living among them—would have sacrificed their most prized possessions into the cenote, imbuing the water with a power all its own. She stared into the dark pool, trying to sense the magic, which Hannah had described as a humming red-gold haze. She didn’t hear any hum, didn’t see any red-gold, but there was definitely something in the air.
The equinox was in full effect, the fireworks were building to their finale, and she was standing beside a man who fascinated her, compelled her, made her want. And, as he took her hand and twined their fingers together, she knew he felt the same—knew it deep down inside, the same way she wanted to believe that the two of them being there at that moment, together, wasn’t a coincidence.
He looked down at her, his eyes shining with the thrill of adventure and the heat that built between them. “It’s beautiful,” he said, his voice rasping on the words. “And so are you.”
The simple statement curled warmth through her as she reached for him and he reached for her. They came together in unison for their first kiss, bodies flowing together naturally, aligning perfectly. When their lips touched, the fireworks reached their finale, lighting the sky red and yellow, and making the earth tremble.
Heat flared through Patience; her center turned to liquid warmth, her muscles to pulsing need. Oh, yeah, she thought. Or maybe she said it; she wasn’t sure of anything beyond the feel of his body against hers, all hard muscles and a vibrant energy that called to something within her.
She heard a humming noise, though she couldn’t have said which one of them made the sound; it seemed almost to come from the air around them as it gathered and grew, seeming to circle them, going faster and faster.
What the hell? She grabbed on to Brandt, digging into his solid strength when the spinning buzz gained traction, becoming a vortex that sought to pull her away from him. She screamed and clung, but he was already gone. Then she was rushing, spinning, moving at incalculable rates of speed while somehow staying still.
Gray-green whipped past her, scraping off the layers of innocence and enthusiasm, and aging her six years in the space of a few seconds.
Not yet! Patience cried in her soul. They needed to know what happened next, how the two of them had gotten their marks when the barrier was sealed, the magic disabled. They needed to know about Brandt’s debt, and why the Triad magic had stalled. What was more, she wanted to know what their first time had felt like, what they’d told each other in the aftermath. Maybe remembering the past would help her figure out what the hell had gone wrong in the present.
She didn’t return to the vision, though. Instead, her body took shape around her with the tingle of neurons reawakening to the real world. But as it did, she realized that she had brought a piece of the vision world out with her: desire.
Heat raced through her veins, lighting her up, making her feel things she hadn’t felt in what seemed like forever. Excitement thrummed through her as the memory of her and Brandt’s first kiss morphed to the sizzle of a new one in the present. Her lips were locked to his, their blood, power, and heat mingling. Exultation flared as a shudder ran through his body and he awoke, a testosterone-laden Sleeping Beauty coming to life beneath her kiss.
Oh, thank you, gods. The etznab spell had worked.
Relief hammered through her, but before she could say anything, he deepened the kiss, going from participant to leader between one breath and the next. Flames danced behind her closed lids as his free arm came up to wrap around her, catching her in a hard embrace that lit her senses with urgent desire.
His taste was fresh and new once again, his touch wildly exciting as he dragged his hand down her body to the place where the hem of her long-sleeve tee had ridden up to bare the skin above her jeans, which were soft with wear and rode low on her waist. His big hand closed on her hip, his fingers digging in with the inciting pressure of a rough caress that was echoed in his ragged groan.
Her excitement flared higher at the sound. It had been rare for him to ease up on his vicious self-control, rare for her to be able to push him past that point. If he was teetering now, it meant that she wasn’t alone in being caught partway between then and now, riding a wave of relief and sex magic.
She didn’t delude herself by pretending that the magic wasn’t part of what was happening between them. But at the same time, she couldn’t make herself care. She wanted sex. With him. Now.
When oxygen ran low, they ended the kiss and drew apart, both breathing hard and fast. She opened her eyes to find him staring at her with a hint of the wonder that was rocketing through her, along with the sense of “there you are.” It felt like they had been looking for each other for months now, years.
She knew the intensity was an illusion of the sex magic, making the joining seem like so much more than it would otherwise, but she didn’t care. She wanted to lose herself in the moment and forget about all the rest. Most of all, she wanted to hold on to the warm glow of love and desire that lit his expression right now.
But even as she watched, the glow dimmed. “The Triad spell didn’t work,” he said in a low rasp.
“We know. The nahwal warned us.” She braced for his withdrawal, the return to business-first Brandt.
Instead, he reached up and brushed his knuckles across her cheek as he had done that night. Until she saw the wetness, she hadn’t realized there were tears.
“The vision . . . ,” he began, then trailed off. Something shifted in his eyes; they heated with molten gold, turning to those of his younger self. “I saw you in town that day. You were coming out of some bar with your friends, but I didn’t see them. I only saw you. I froze for a second, and it was too long—you were gone. I spent the rest of the day searching—hotels, bars, whatever. By the time it got dark, I was pr—hoping to hell you’d be on the beach for the fireworks . . . and that you would feel what I was feeling.”
Oh, Brandt. New tears stung the corners of her eyes, but she willed them back. “I felt it too. It felt like this.” Knowing she was probably making a mistake, that this was going to hurt when things went wrong again, she leaned in and locked her lips to his.
She didn’t care. She wanted this, wanted him.
He kissed her back, openmouthed, in a blatantly carnal demand that she met and matched, her body vibrating with need and arousal. Heat slapped through her alongside wonder when she found that although it was morning and they were in their bedroom, the moment she closed her eyes, she was right back in the night-dark cave, being held in the arms of a stranger while fireworks lit the sky.
She kissed the stranger who was her husband, not letting herself think of yesterday or tomorrow, of marriage or magic. The only thing that mattered was that moment and the things they were making each other feel. She didn’t care that the feelings were coming from the mirror spell or a backlash of the magic she’d poured into their mated bond to bring him back. She cared only that he was alive, that they had recovered a piece of their shared past . . . and that it was a memory worth holding on to.
Although she didn’t know how their first kiss had ended, she imagined how it had gone from there, putting herself into the fantasy.
When Brandt reversed them in a smooth, powerful move, so he was above her, pressing into her, the yielding mattress at her back became the soft limestone sand at the edge of the subterranean pool. When she dragged his T-shirt up and off, so she could stroke the hard-edged leanness of his chest and abs, following the feathery line of coarse, wiry hair from the wings of his collarbones to the yielding elastic of his bike shorts, the long, masculine groan she elicited from him echoed off water and stone. And when they wrestled the remainder of their clothes off and shoved aside the bedding, leaving them twined together, fully naked and exposed, the excitement of skin on skin came with a hint of the forbidden when she imagined what it might have been like to be with him in
that cave.
But although the fantasy came quickly, vividly, the man who slid his legs alongside hers was very real. Almost too real. So she held on to the fantasy, using it as a buffer when emotion threatened to break through the heat and make her think when all she wanted to do was feel.
Chasing sensation, she trailed her mouth down the strong column of his neck, pressing lightly with her teeth as she worked inward, headed for the spot just above where his collarbones joined, where a kiss could make him shudder. Before her lips reached that destination, though, he tunneled his fingers through her hair and gripped, anchoring her as he brought their mouths together for a hard kiss that was more heat than finesse, more demand than request.
The move put her off balance, with a sense of “Wait. That’s not what comes next!” But that realization warned her she was falling into a pattern she hadn’t been entirely aware of, one that had grown up in their years together, as she had figured out what he liked and how to give it to him.
This was different, though—he was different. His hands were fast and borderline rough as he cupped her breasts, kneading them and dragging his thumbs across her nipples, making her arch against him, her fingers fluttering against his shoulders as she lost herself momentarily in the pleasure. His mouth shaped hers and she came alive to the scrape of teeth and the slide of tongue when he mimicked the act of love, in and out, until her body throbbed in time with his thrusts.
Her breath went thin; her head spun with knife-edge arousal and she had the feeling of being at the lip of a precipice, balanced between safety and free fall. She didn’t know this lover. Or rather, she suspected she had known him at one time, but they had lost each other along the way. She didn’t know what came next, didn’t quite know where to put her hands or how to move her body as old patterns gave way to nerves and the thrill of experimentation.
Refusing to let herself be taken without leaving her mark on him first, she twined herself around him, seeking the upper hand. He yielded, lying back with a growl that turned to a harsh, rattling groan when she dragged her teeth lightly across his ribs and down, trailing kisses and nips along his torso. The salt on his skin made her think of the ocean-fed lagoon; the hammer of his pulse reminded her of the heavy thud of fireworks.
He lay still, his muscles locking as she tasted the points of his hip bones and the taut skin between, but when she shifted to move lower, he uncoiled lightning fast; in a blink, she was beneath him once again, trapped under his superior strength and bulk as he looked down at her, his chest heaving, his eyes wild.
She expected him to slow things down. Instead, he grated, “More.” Then he proceeded to give her more, taking it for himself in the process. He kissed her long and deep as he ran one hand down to hook her knee up alongside his hip, so his body settled tighter against hers while his hips moved in a slow, tantalizing rhythm.
Whimper-moaning with mingled need and satisfaction, she dug her fingers into the strong muscles of his back, and lower down, where the long muscles of his quads blended into the hard handfuls of his ass. There, she felt the same near gauntness she’d noticed earlier in his face. He’d lost weight—his muscle mass was the same, but what little fat he’d carried had burned away, distilling his body to its essence. And although he’d been far from soft before, she thrilled to his new hardness, and the fact that he was using his bulk to pin her in place and make her writhe with pleasure.
He rubbed his hard cock against her, bringing her to another precipice, not one of free fall this time, but of an orgasm that sparkled behind her eyelids, equal parts magic and sensation. The skin of her inner wrist warmed and pulsed as their jun tan connection cracked open and let a trickle of arousal flow from her to him and back again.
“Yes,” she said with her heart, mind, and voice. “Yes, now.” Her mouth found his and she poured herself into a kiss.
He went utterly still against her, save for the throb of his hard shaft against her center. Then he exhaled a pent-up breath on a whisper that she thought was her name. Shifting, he nudged the wide head of his cock against the initial resistance at the entrance to her body. She was wet and wanting, but tight because of how long it had been since they had given up the pretense of sleeping in the same bed. The pressure wrung a growl from deep within his chest as he thrust home on a strong surge.
He invaded her, stretched her, filled her. And when he was seated to the hilt, pressing up against the end of her channel and making her breath go thin with the intensity of it all, he went still once more. For a long moment, they lay joined and motionless as the counterpoint beat of their hearts echoed in the throb of his hard flesh, the pulse of her inner muscles. Unable to stay safe in the darkness behind her eyelids, she opened her eyes and looked up at him.
His gold-flecked brown eyes were entirely focused on her, on the moment. He wasn’t the twentysomething grad student who had glimpsed her across a crowded playa and chased her down, but in that moment he wasn’t the hard, remote Nightkeeper mage she’d been coexisting with for more than a year either. In his eyes she glimpsed the man who’d carried her over the threshold of their starter house and made love to her in every single room, including the laundry nook during the spin-dry cycle.
Her eyes prickled at the memory, warning that she’d fallen out of the safe refuge of fantasy and magic. The heat and need, though, hadn’t dissipated. The jun tan sent incandescent energy through them both; he hardened further within her, stretching her and setting off chain reactions of inner fireworks. She focused on those bursts and slid back into the fantasy, remembering how her younger self had felt when she turned and found him watching her, how it had felt to lead him into the cave, to kiss him.
For a second, she could’ve sworn that the cool blue bedroom walls around them darkened and aged, turning to stone. Wishful thinking or not, it was enough to push away the tears and put her back in the moment, in the fantasy. Locking her inner muscles around him in a liquid squeeze, she said, as he had done earlier, “More.”
His expression turned inward, went glazed, and his teeth flashed on a purely masculine grin that held an edge of violence. “Hell, yeah, there’s more.” His voice dropped to a husky rasp that sent frissons of anticipation coursing through her body. “Hang on to me and I’ll show you just how much.”
He pressed her flat with his body, stilling her small, inciting movements. Then, although she would’ve sworn he was seated as deeply as he could be, he rolled his hips and went farther, startling a low moan out of her as he hit her sweet spots inside and out. When he withdrew fractionally, she moaned again, this time in protest at the loss of that delicious pressure.
“Hang on,” he repeated. “Let me take us there.” He pushed forward again, then eased back. Forward. Back. And as pleasure vised her, locking her muscles around him, beneath him, she did as he’d demanded, clutching his wide shoulders, which became her anchor.
He was pulsing more than thrusting, his movements on the scope of fractions of an inch, but her body lit as hard and hot as if he’d been pistoning into her, driving them both beyond reason. What was more, the deep, subtle thrusts left them almost entirely joined throughout. He was inside her, almost becoming part of her. His pleasure echoed through the jun tan connection; she felt the satisfaction of each thrust from his perspective, then felt it from hers and sent the sensation echoing back to him. The feedback loop joined them even more deeply than his flesh within her, uniting them.
Nerves quivered, but she focused on the moment, on the man, turning her face into his neck and pressing her lips to the hollow dip at his collarbone. He shuddered against her but didn’t change his stroke or tempo, flexing his hips and withdrawing, flexing and withdrawing, bringing her pleasure inside and out, until the sum total threatened to overwhelm her.
Tears stung again, but she was beyond processing where they came from, or why. She could only feel what she hadn’t felt in so long, if ever. Her orgasm hovered close at hand, as if waiting for some signal from him, under his spell just as sur
ely as she was. But although he was in charge of their lovemaking, she held power of her own. She exerted it now, contracting her inner muscles to counterpoint his pulsing thrusts, beginning to work him as he was working her.
His breath hissed out and his fingers flexed on her hips, where he held her against his relentless thrusts. That might have been his only outward response, but she felt a surge in the jun tan connection. Pressure and aching, impossible arousal echoed along the bond, sparking red-gold behind her eyelids as orgasm drew near. His. Hers. Theirs.
She tightened around him, her body taking over the volition. It seemed that each muscle fiber sent a starburst of warm anticipation when it contracted, building a new layer of heat atop the desperate pleasure within her. She dug her fingers into his shoulders, finding purchase at the base of his neck and hanging on for dear life.
“Yes,” someone said. “Yes, there!” She wasn’t sure if the words had come from him or her, or if they were entirely internal, a cry of pleasure shared along the jun tan bond. She buried her face against his throat, reveling in the slick skin, the heat, the feeling of being there, with him. Not alone.
He must have quickened his pace and lengthened his strokes an iota at a time, because they weren’t locked together anymore, weren’t pulsing together, touching along every possible inch of skin. Instead, he was fully moving within her, thrusting an inch at first, then more, both speed and swing increasing faster and faster, as though he’d fallen off the edge of self-control.
Her blood burned in her veins and her body undulated in opposition to his building thrusts, creating crazy-hot pressure with the liquid slide of skin and sex. The cave fantasy disappeared and the room around them ceased to exist as her entire universe contracted to the sum of her body and his, and the energy they created together. He groaned her name and wrapped his arms around her, enfolding her in an embrace that made her feel simultaneously protected and vulnerable.
Blood Spells Page 7
