Fatal Strike (McClouds & Friends #10)(71)

He clenched his jaw, and broke eye contact. Three hard, athletic bouts of sex were way more than enough for the girl who just got rescued from the pits of hell.

The abandoned plate of food on the bedstand caught his eye, and he lunged for it. “It’s been a couple hours,” he said. “How about you ingest your next shot of calories?”

She looked at the plate, doubtfully. “I’ll try the rice and veggies,” she conceded. “The meat’s too rich for me right now.”

“Whatever. As long as it’s something.”

He watched every bite go down, and felt himself fed. When that was all gone, he let himself be persuaded to polish off the steak, which she insisted she could not eat. He tried to be non-cholant about the erection as he peeled off his clothes and slid in next to her, tucking the comforter up to her chin.

He switched the light off, and pitch darkness thudded down onto them, pressing in on all sides, charged with menace. All at once, he remembered that she’d been confined in the dark. Thoughtless *.

“Oh, shit, Lara, I’m sorry,” he said, groping for the lamp. “We can leave the light on, if you—”

“It’s fine,” she whispered, pulling him back down. “With you, it’s fine. You’re all the light I need.”

His heart thumped, and his eyes fogged. He wrapped her in his arms, amazed. She was so sweet, so soft. And paradoxically strong.

He wound around her, settling her cheek against his chest, wrapping her leg around his.

She slid her hand timidly down over his belly until she encountered his stiff cock, in its perennial slick of precome jutting toward his navel, ferociously unappeased. She petted it, with appreciative fingers. “You can rest like that?”

“Better learn how,” he said, ruefully. “Or I’m not going to get much sleep for, oh, say, the rest of time?”

“Wow.” Her fingers curled around, squeezing.

He pried her hand away. “Don’t. I’m making this huge effort not to be a pig, and you are not helping.”

“You are the farthest thing in the world from a pig.”

“Hah,” he muttered. “How innocent you are.” He dragged her hand away from the danger zone, and flattened it against his chest, pinned beneath his own. “Sleep.”

“I’m afraid to,” she admitted, after a pause. “I’ll get sucked into the vortex again. I’ll start tripping, and he’ll find me out there.”

He mulled over the implications of that for a while, and remembered Davy’s suggestion. An elegant and eminently desirable solution. “Get inside,” he told her. “Sleep inside.”

She propped herself up onto her elbow. “You think?”

“Why not? Is that any weirder than all the rest of it?”

“But what about you?”

He thought about it. “I’ll stay awake.”

“No!” she protested. “You have to rest, too. And it should still work, even in your sleep. You kept me safe for weeks when I hid in the Citadel, and you were asleep then, right?”

“Yeah, but I don’t like letting go of conscious control,” he said. “That feels wrong to me, with that guy out there gunning for you.”

“You have to let go sometime,” she said. “You’ll crash if you don’t. You kept Anabel out of your wall when you were fast asleep. Every time. Your shield never goes down.”

“Okay,” he said, dubiously. “We can give it a go. If you want.”

She petted his chest hair, a slow, seductive caress. “The only question is, can I sleep if I’m inside the Citadel?”

“Why couldn’t you?” he demanded.

She paused delicately. “Well. My associations with the Citadel are extremely, shall we say, erotically charged. Every time I went there, the Lord of the Citadel appeared, swept me off my feet—”

“And right onto your back. Yup. I know. I was there.”

“It was amazing,” she assured him. “I hated when the drug wore off and I got dragged back. The dance, to get through the wall, it felt like foreplay. The whole thing just shone with sex. It was the one good thing I had to cling to. It’s what kept me alive.”

“Oh, come on,” he mumbled, abashed.

“Seriously. I’m not exaggerating,” she said. “That’s how it was for me. I never thought I had such a creative sexual imagination. Now I know that, in fact, I don’t. At all. That was your imagination, not mine.”

“Um . . .” His face was hot, in the darkness. “Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing. What I’m saying is, if I go inside the Citadel, I can’t answer for the consequences.”

He stared up into the darkness, a big, stupid grin tugging at his cheeks. “Are you threatening me?” he asked, wondering.

She draped herself across his chest. Even in the pitch dark, he could swear he saw that subtle Mona Lisa smile on her face.

“Are you scared?” she asked.

“Shitless,” he said bluntly.

She cupped his cheek. Kissed him.

It was like his heart burst in his chest, and the light of the flash-pop startled them both, but only for a moment. Then the kiss yanked them deep into itself, wild and sweet and tempest-tossed, each launching a tender, frantic assault upon the other to taste more, feel more, know more. He wanted to crawl inside her soul, drink light, heat, life from her soft mouth, and oh God. He had . . . to . . . stop.