by May Dawson
I finally caught on. “Yes please.”
He grinned, one of those sudden, genuine Rafe smiles that was all the more endearing because he was so often grim and serious.
“You have become so polite over the past few months,” he congratulated me.
Well, he was probably congratulating himself, to be honest.
He took a step back, unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt, then quickly and neatly unbuttoning his shirt itself. He slipped it off, then pulled his white undershirt over his head; his defined abs and wide chest rippled with the motion.
“We should put a mirror over the bed,” he said. “When we go home. I want to watch you from every angle.”
“It’s nice to think of going home,” I said, although my mouth—and my brain—didn’t seem to be working quite properly, since he was tugging my sweater over my head. I raised my arms to let him undress me. “Of what comes…after this…”
I’d been so afraid that we would lose Rafe and Lex, and he stopped suddenly, staring at me, as if he saw that on my face.
“What’s bothering you, Maddie?” he asked. He stepped close to me, cupping the side of my face with his fingertips resting lightly on the nape of my neck.
I was about to say that there was nothing wrong, and he must have known that, because he ordered, “No nonsense. Tell me the truth about what’s going on in that wild brain of yours.”
My lips parted. Of course, Rafe wouldn’t let me lie to him any more than he would allow Silas, even if we just wanted to pretend that we were fine.
None of us in the team would be fine until we were all together, someday in the future.
Probably after a lot of therapy.
“What if I don’t?” I asked, raising my chin as I met his gaze. Just for fun…and to stall.
He shook his head, although his expression was amused. “I need to introduce you to the good girl spanking before you drive me nuts trying to earn the other kind.”
I had to smile. “I thought that my driving you nuts was foundational to our relationship.”
He smiled back at me, but he also took another step into my personal space, which brought his body against mine. I looked up at him, not sure what he was going to do next, right before he started to walk me back against the wall.
“Are you trying to trap me?” I teased him, my hands gliding up his chest.
“I already have,” he promised me, right before he spun me around. His cock teased along the curve of my ass as his hands slid up my sides until he reached my breasts; he cupped my breasts in his hands and began to tease my nipples. He began to kiss that same spot under my ear, the one that made me crazy, and I moaned softly into the night air.
He dropped one hand lower, toying with my clit with practiced skill. As he thrust two fingers inside me, his thumb still pressed against my clit, his fingers teasing my g-spot over and over again. I bit my lip to hold back an even louder moan; the thrust of his fingers made it feel as if warmth was spreading inside me, and my legs began to tremble.
He suddenly stilled, his fingers still buried deep inside me. I let out a ragged breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding.
“I asked you a question,” he murmured, his teeth capturing my earlobe, and I let out a groan, grinding down against his hand greedily…and ineffectively.
“I don’t remember anything ever bothering me, at the moment,” I managed.
He smiled and pressed a chaste kiss to my forehead. “I see. That’s too bad.”
His hand withdrew, leaving me suddenly cold.
“Rafael Hunt…”
“Mm?” He grabbed my hips and spun me around, and that was fine by me. It was all the better for me to glare at him.
He didn’t seem impressed; in fact, he didn’t even seem to notice my glower before he dropped his head, his mouth encircling my nipple. He flicked his tongue over it the way he always did, the way that made my eyes roll back in my head.
I’d have told him that I hated him, but I didn’t particularly want to prolong my punishment.
“No fair,” I told him.
He looked at me with a devilish glint in his eyes. “Never. And?”
“And I…” I ran my hands over his broad shoulders, my core throbbing for more of him. And of course, he knew it, the jerk. “I’ve just been afraid we won’t all end up together, Rafe. If we don’t do well enough and you and Lex leave us behind…”
“That’s not happening,” he told me firmly, straightening to look down at me, although his hands continued teasing my nipples. “If we can’t all be together as a team, we’ll still find a way. Maybe we won’t be together all the time, but that just means goodbye sex and reunion sex.”
I pursed my lips to one side, unconvinced.
He cupped my chin to tilt my gaze to his. “Maddie. Even if we aren’t a team…we are a family.”
He didn’t just mean the two of us. “Even when you and Silas are driving each other insane?”
“Or Jensen, or Penn, or Lex…” He studied me, his gaze affectionate, then said, “I’m not going anywhere, Maddie. You and I will always find a way. And we’ll drag the rest of these dickheads along with us.”
He looked so confident, it was easy to believe that a happy ending was in front of us, at least for the moment. I bobbed up onto my toes and twined my arms around his neck.
When I kissed him, his arm wrapped around my back and then he picked me up, carrying me easily across the small living room to set me on the edge of a wooden hutch. I rocked on the edge of the cabinet as his hands settled on my hips.
Then his lips were on mine, and I wrapped my thighs around his narrow waist, reaching for his cock.
He took himself in hand first, guiding his tip in circles through my folds. I leaned back, pressing my hips forward, as he teased his cock around my opening.
“Were you going to tell me if Silas lied to me?” he asked, our faces intimately close.
I looked up at him. “You are seriously in danger of not being my favorite right now. And given that you and I are naked, it really takes something to lose your current position as number one.”
He raised his brows. “Nice attempt to play on my ego and change the subject.”
“You’re the one changing the subject,” I chided, grabbing his cock, my fingers overlapping his. “Can we argue later?”
“Oh, there’s something we’re going to argue about?” He raised his brows, giving me that look. “I guess that’s as good as a confession anyway.”
“You are a maddening man.”
“Yeah, and you deserve me.”
I pulled his cock toward me, and he gave in and grinned. In one smooth motion, he thrust into me, and I gasped, running my hands up the chiseled planes of his chest to rest on his shoulders. He began to pump in and out of me, taking his time. I followed his gaze down to watch my thighs wrapped around his taut waist, and the dark happy trail that led to the long expanse of his cock, sliding slowly in and out.
“You are so beautiful,” he murmured.
He paused, buried deep inside me, and circled his thumb where his cock had teased earlier. The sense of his tip pressed against my g-spot deep within me as he teased against my clit soon had me breathing raggedly, and my back arched so suddenly that I slammed my head into the wooden cabinet behind me.
He hid his faint self-satisfied smile at the effect he had on me. His lips parted, probably to ask if I was okay, and I captured his mouth with mine. As we kissed, he kept teasing my clit until liquid heat seemed to flood my pussy, leaving me aching against his hand. He kissed me deeply, his tongue teasing against mine, the heat of his mouth echoing the heat of his fingers working my clit.
I broke away suddenly, and my voice came out breathless when I said, “More.”
Finally, he didn’t deny me. He grabbed my thighs and began to pump into me steadily. I threw my head back, my fingernails biting into his shoulders as I fought to keep from screaming. I didn’t want to wake the others. But he was slamming into me over and
over, and the hutch began to rock against the wall, thudding over and over into the stucco.
As feeling built between my thighs, I tried to push his shoulders away—although my legs were still wrapped around his waist—and he only pumped into me harder, adding a little thrust to the end of every stroke that had my eyeballs about to roll into the back of my head.
I dug my hands into his shoulders as the heat between my thighs exploded into pleasure and tingles ran through my body, through every muscle and bone.
I bit my lip, trying to hold back my scream, and Rafe murmured into my ear, “Who cares if we wake those fuckers up? They deserve it for fucking you in the train while I was by myself thinking about you.”
Imagining Rafe adjusting himself in that chair, his cock hard as he fantasized about me, was a powerful thing, and his harsh confession pushed me over the edge, my channel tightening around him, my muscles all tightening so that my back arched and my legs stiffened, before pleasure rippled through my body. He answered me with his own harsh breathing as he drove into me a few final times, then he exploded too.
“I thought you were thinking about the mission,” I managed, my body turning boneless after the power of that orgasm.
“I’m always thinking about you,” he admitted, nuzzling his lips against my ear.
The two of us stayed close together until I stopped twitching from that orgasm. Then he helped me down from my perch, only to warn me, “Don’t think that’s a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“Whatever do you mean?” I asked with the offended innocence I only managed when I knew exactly what he meant.
Despite the cum glistening on the tip of his cock, he was still hard. I could feel the combined evidence of our pleasure running sticky down my thighs.
But he was already turning me against the cupboard. Apparently, he had his own plans for us. His lips devoured my shoulders with kisses, his increasingly heavy hands gliding over the curves of my body.
“Let’s talk about that good girl spanking,” I said.
Chapter Nineteen
Silas
“Maddie and I will lead the recon into the museum and make sure the shield is where it’s supposed to be,” Rafe said, looking around at the three of us before he locked eyes on me. “Since apparently, you have a magic signature, we should keep you out of sight until we need you.”
I shrugged. “I would’ve mentioned it before we left, but there are only a handful of people who know me that well, and I thought they were all locked away in Elegiah.”
Or dead. I didn’t say that; I didn’t even want to think about it. But Isabelle must be alive, or no one would be able to control Frederick.
“Yeah, it seems like there are a lot of things you might’ve mentioned,” Rafe said. He looked at Jensen. “You two, keep each other out of trouble.”
“Always,” Jensen managed to say in a deadpan.
Rafe’s bossy nature had amused me back at the academy. There had been something so fun about playing Silas, courting Maddie, and pretending to be as carefree as a kid was supposed to be. But here, his dominant personality was beginning to be a real liability. And I knew I had to dance around it, because I didn’t have time to waste fighting Rafe.
“Maddie and I should go in now,” I said. “If the shield is there, Maddie and I combined have enough magic to steal it. We can all be home in time for lunch.”
Rafe shook his head. I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t share my optimism.
“You know, you’re going to have to trust us,” Maddie said gently.
“I do,” he said.
“Great,” I said. “Then let us go.”
He hesitated. “Silas, you and I can go. Maddie, you and Jensen stay here. See if you can figure out Maddie’s ability to shift.”
“And my inability?” Jensen asked.
“Yes,” Rafe said bluntly. “Maybe if you’re able to turn again, Maddie, you can figure out what’s going on.”
Her lips parted.
“Don’t we need them to watch our backs and stay close?” I said. “If we can get the shield and get out of here, we can figure that all out at home. Once I grab the shield, I can open a rip and we can move out.”
Rafe gave me a long, warning look. Right; I wasn’t playing along well enough with my old role.
“If Maddie can shift and if we can figure out how the rest of us can shift, we don’t even need the shield,” Rafe said. “There’s no need to continue an operation that could end up with all of us in prison in another world.”
“Maybe Maddie is just special,” I said, although I had been troubled by how much power she seemed to have now too.
I was happy she had the power to do magic so easily, and I was happy she had her wolf back. I just didn’t like it when I didn’t understand things. It wasn’t something I felt often, and it left me unsettled.
“Let’s just do this,” Jensen said abruptly. He clapped my shoulder, as if he were sympathetic to my arguments but thought I should just let Rafe take the lead.
I smiled back at him easily, the way I was supposed to. “Let’s.”
Not long after, Rafe and I headed into the city. We went on foot, because it was probably for the best I stayed off public transit where we might run into monitoring for magical disguises.
“Have you ever been here in Quorum before?” Rafe asked as we walked.
“A few times, yeah,” I said. “Briefly.”
“What were you doing here?”
“Stealing weapons, mostly,” I said. “An assassination, once.”
I might as well be honest.
Rafe’s gaze flickered toward me, but his voice was causal when he said, “Were you alone?”
I was pretty sure he was asking if I was the assassin. “Yeah.”
“How’d it go?”
“Clean,” I said. At first, I was going to leave it there, let Rafe know I had zero interest in further discussion of my past. But then some stupid part of me hated to disappoint him, and I reluctantly went on, “He was an Establishment magician who had hunted down dozens of Rebels. Made a habit of torturing them. The world didn’t lose much that day.”
Rafe nodded, sticking his hands in his pockets. “Is there anything you want to tell me about what happened in the woods today? Or...long before?”
“Not a thing, Rafael Hunt. But I appreciate the attempt.”
The two of us exchanged a look, then turned the corner. There was the faintest ripple of tension across my skin, as if I were breaking through water, and then suddenly, the temperature was about fifty degrees warmer. I was already pulling off my coat and scarf to sling it over my arm while Rafe stared around us, his lips parting in surprise.
Prospect Square spread out around us. The museum was an immense white building with tall columns on the other side of the square; other regal buildings ringed the square, but brightly-colored flowering trees and fountains filled the square. A dozen kids in swimsuits or hiked-up pants were wading in the fountain. Parents sat on the marble rim of the fountain or stood nearby, occasionally ducking out of the way of a particularly animated splash. It felt like spring here, even though we’d just been through winter; there was a warm bubble of magic suspended over Prospect Square, creating an eternal summer.
Sometimes I forgot there was a world here besides a fight for freedom and magic. There were families living their lives and hoping the war would pass them by.
Rafe was still looking around curiously as I headed across the square. A few pigeons hopped in front of me then spied an abandoned heel of bread on the ground; they dove at each other, fighting for it, gray wings flapping furiously.
Rafe caught up to me in a few quick strides. “Pigeons. I guess some things are the same everywhere.”
“Everywhere you go, there’s vermin and villains,” I promised him.
The two of us jogged up the slick marble steps of the museum. Then we paused by the side of the doors until a big crowd went in; in case there were magical scanners here, I wanted to make
sure we were lost in a crowd. It would take them time to track down who was using the magic and anyway, the odds were good that someone else in a crowd was using magic to cover their zits or wrinkles. It might be illegal, but vanity is a powerful thing.
We didn’t find the shield. We found an empty wooden stand, a brass plate, and a little sign that said, exhibit on loan.
Rafe glanced at the sign and then kept moving. The two of us wandered out of the hall and into another hall that showcased the caverns of ice before he said, “Any ideas where it might be on loan to? Or how we find out?”
“I think our tail might have some ideas,” I told him quietly, and to his credit, Rafe’s expression didn’t even change.
“What do you need from me?” Rafe asked.
Relief swelled in my chest. He was going to let me do what I did best; I was sure he’d have questions later, but for now, I needed space.
I knew he’d be unwilling to split up, as much as I wished I could be alone.
“It’s Frederick,” I said, and even though I was embarrassed to admit the truth, I managed, “I don’t want to kill him.”
Had Frederick somehow guessed why I was back in our world, to find me here? Or had we blown our mission so badly that we were being followed? In that case, Maddie and Jensen were in immediate danger too.
“Maybe he’s trying to talk to you,” Rafe said.
“I’m not talking to traitors. But I’ll interrogate him.” I needed to get him out of here quietly and then I could find out what exactly he knew.
“Don’t be an asshole,” Rafe said, and the blunt words were like ice water. “You know your friend’s in trouble. Give him a chance to explain before you tear his head off.”
“I only do that to robots.”
“I can’t believe you can literally rip heads off at all,” Rafe said, sticking his hands in his pockets. He had a smile fixed on his face as we spoke quietly, even though it was a very fake smile. I matched his energy for the sake of whoever might watch besides Frederick. “You’re more dangerous than I realized back at the academy, and I admire that. But you’re also the kind of friend anyone would be lucky to have—and that’s admirable too.”
