A Darker Past (The Darker Agency #2)(69)

And he was staring at me with his mouth wide open.

I looked down at myself and gasped. “What the hell?” My favorite Mashing jeans were gone, replaced by a little black dress. I raced to the full-length mirror by the bed and stared. Little black dress my ass. This thing was like a silky second skin, painted on and hugging every single contour of my body with perfection. I would have died rather than willingly put something like this on.

And yet…

I turned around and glanced back over my shoulder. My hair tumbled wildly down my back, falling just below my waist. My makeup, artfully applied and darkly mysterious, gave me an ethereal look. On my feet were a pair of strappy black heels.

“Wow,” I muttered, impressed by my reflection. Part of me was horrified by my reaction, while the other part stretched and twisted, ogling the mirror and playing it up, knowing Lukas was still watching.

I turned back to face the mirror, and he came up behind me, throwing his arms around my waist. “This is the cave’s plan? To lock me in a room with the most beautiful woman on earth? However will I overcome?” He laughed. A deep, throaty sound that made my stomach quiver.

“It must be total agony,” I said with a laugh. My voice was low. Raspy. Unlike me. Sexy.

I liked it. A lot.

Lukas gave a chuckle of his own and let his hands slip, palms flat against my stomach. My heart thumped a little harder. “It is agony. To be this close to the sun and know that to touch it would be to burn.”

His hands slipped a little lower.

“This is Lust, after all,” he whispered in my ear, the warmth from his breath igniting a fire in every nerve ending. “We shouldn’t give in.”

I wanted to speak. Words formed in my head and rose in my throat, but the actual act of forming a sentence was too complicated. Too time consuming. He was right. This was the thing we were here to fight. But how? Why? Resisting something so powerful, so magnetic that you felt it everywhere, in every pore, with each breath, couldn’t be right.

“What do you want, Jessie?” he asked, lips skimming the top edge of my ear. I nearly screamed. “Tell me what you need…”

“I need—” I gasped as he moved his hands to my hips, gripped tight and turned me to face him. He was breathing hard. Eyes ravenous with desire and hands itching to explore. He let the fingers of his right hand slide down my hip, then slipped them underneath the edge of my short skirt. Playing with the hem for a moment, he tugged the material up an inch, giving me a wicked grin.

“I’ll tell you what I need.” The material rose another inch. “I was trapped for over a hundred years. In darkness and despair. A neighbor to pain and misery. I was dead, Jessie. Dead, yet still present. I need to scrub that away. Erase all that pain of being nowhere, of being no one. I need to feel alive.”

Alive.

The word rang like a thousand church bells echoing inside my skull. It was perfect. The perfect word. The essence of how I felt when I was with him. There was no more time to waste. I kissed him.

Hands, limbs, lips. We were a jumble of moving parts and insatiable need as we tumbled back to my bed. The mattress had never felt so soft. The air had never smelled so sweet. Lukas’s hands, venturing beyond the boundaries, had never felt so right.

Right.

More. I needed more. I pulled at his shirt. When I couldn’t wrestle it over his head, I gripped the middle and tore. The ripping fabric was like a timer going off inside my head. Suddenly, I’d never needed anything more than him. I’d never wanted anything more than this.

He ran with my enthusiasm, pulling at the straps of my dress. I wriggled my arms, trying to make it easier. It wasn’t fast enough. He growled, a dark, delicious sound, and the straps popped free. In seconds, the smooth material was around my waist.

The cave was wrong. This wasn’t sin. It was sustenance. It was life. Being here with Lukas, like this, was fire and fuel and…

Love…

“I want this,” he said between kisses. “You. I want you. So badly. It’s been so hard to hold back. I don’t know why I—”

My head began to swim. I was drowning between the miraculous sensations, looming on the edge of a life-altering moment, but something chewed at my subconscious. A single, terrifying word.

Love…

We’d come here to… To what? There was something we should have been doing. Someone we should be looking for. I chased the thought, but it was too fast and skittered well out of reach. With his lips, borderline magical, Lukas traced a molten trail across my shoulder and up my neck. It felt like heaven. This couldn’t be considered wrong. This wasn’t lust. It was—

“Why did we wait?” he pleaded, and slid the material up a few inches. I’d never been more exposed with another human being in my life—and it didn’t bother me. All my insecurities, all my fears, all vanished.

It wasn’t right.

I brought my hands to his chest and pushed, the truth of it slamming into me like a million pounds. Why we’d waited. It wasn’t about a quick fix or an itch that needed to be satisfied. It wasn’t about lust.

“I love you,” I said.

He froze. “What did you say?”

I hadn’t realized it’d been there, but the invisible hand pushing down on my chest lifted, and I could breathe. Hell, not only could I breathe, but I could sing. I could fly. I could do anything. The one thing that held me back, three simple, stupid little words, were no longer my prison. They were my freedom.