Got something you want to say, Rainbow Girl?

I knew what he wanted. What he always wants from me: to know that I’m aware and I’m choosing and I’m one hundred percent committed, to him, to life, to myself, to the moment, which doesn’t sound like so much but it’s a damn tall order. And he wants his name in that sentence somewhere.

I tossed my head and shot him a savage look. Fuck me, Jericho Barrons. You’re my world, I didn’t add. At least I hope I didn’t. I let my lids flutter at the end, half closed, shielding my heart.

Then he was on me and I was crushed back against the wall, my bare feet dangling above the floor and he was sliding me up it, big hands splayed on my hips. His physical strength is surreal, an indisputable bonus when it comes to sex.

When he buried his face in my thighs, I wrapped my legs around his head, arched my back to push against his mouth, and fisted my hands in his thick, dark hair. When a fang grazed my clitoris, I pulled his hair—hard—and he laughed because, like me, when we’re having sex, drugged or not, there’s no such thing as pain. We did everything possible when I was Pri-ya. I became conditioned to him in that state. It’s all sensation. And it’s all good.

I let my head fall back against the wall, lost myself in the bliss of his hot mouth on me, his tongue moving inside me.

I arched my neck and roared when I came. Damn the man, he touches me and I explode and just keep moving in a red-hot haze of lust from one orgasm to the next until at last he stops touching me. He knows exactly how to work my body. It’s incredible. It’s frightening.

In desire, in lust, Barrons and I are perfect together. In everyday life, we’re porcupines who must navigate the circumference of each other’s existence carefully because one poke and either of us might bare our teeth and scuttle off. Not because the needles hurt but because we’re both…volatile. Temperamental. Proud. Obtuse as hell. It makes for difficult days and incredible nights. I can’t change. He won’t. It is what it is.

Here, now, in lust, we unite, bond in a way that makes the days work fine. I realize as I explode again and hear him make that low, raw sound in the back of his throat that makes me crazy, vibrates into my pelvic core, spreads in a rumbling purr through my body, enhancing my orgasm to exquisite proportions, that this is essential to us, to our ability to stay together.

I don’t dare not fuck this man frequently because this is the glue that holds us, the tie that binds, the only tether, collar, leash either of us can permit, the place where everything else falls away and we become something more than we are alone. I get now why he fucks with the single-minded devotion of a dying man hunting God. Sex with him is the closest thing to holy I’ve ever known. Barrons is my church. Every caress, each kiss, a hallelujah.

Burn me in Hell if you have a problem with that.

He’ll be there with me.

We won’t care.

As the orgasm ebbed, flashed red-hot then ebbed again, he leaned back and slid me down the front of his body, eyes glittering crimson, face half transformed into beast. He was two full feet taller than he had been before, shoulders massively wider, skin darkened to burnished mahogany. I could feel talons on my skin. Low humps of horns were sprouting on his skull.

I was shaking with aftershock, and still, fresh lust blazed through me, sanctifying my blood, opening a floodgate I’d not even realized I’d closed. I was breathless for a moment, stunned by the sudden unsought awareness that I’d once again been repressing all emotion for months. Every single bit of it. Just like I did after I believed I’d killed him on a cliff with Ryodan. Skimming the surface, a flat stone skipping across a bottomless loch, grateful to be a dispassionate observer, the invisible narrator of everyone else’s life. I’d hungered to be unseen. I’d wanted to disappear long before it happened. I have a critical fault line of a defect and it’s not the Book inside me. And it’s not something I can fix. At least not any way I’ve been able to figure out. The relentless, unsolvable clusterfuck in my own head made me choose to deaden myself rather than contend with the uncontendable.

Yet one carnal touch from Barrons and I was alive again. Awake and so very damned alive. And my problem that couldn’t be fixed would be as ever present and unmanageable as always when we were done. May as well savor the now.

He dropped his dark, misshapen head forward and long matted hair brushed my back. “I taste Unseelie in you,” he murmured thickly into the hollow of my neck around teeth much too large for a human mouth. I felt his tongue trace my jugular. Felt my heartbeat in my neck, pulsing against his fangs. His next words were guttural, violent, barely human, “Just how hard do you want to play?” He shook me a little then, like a dog with a rabbit in its teeth.

“How hard can you take it?” I purred into his chest.

He raised his head and looked down at me and laughed like I’ve never heard him laugh as a man. Oh, yes, Barrons prefers the beast. There’s something so sure and uncomplicated in that form. As if there, a prehensile creature, he’s free in a way I can’t begin to understand. I want to explore what he feels wearing that primal ebon skin, how life tastes to him on those killing fangs, cozy up to the basest he has to offer, meet it in kind.

I slammed my palms into his chest, knocking him backward. He crashed into the wall of the bathroom so hard his head went down, and when it whipped back, his smile was feral, exultant. “You want to fight or fuck, Mac?”

I bounced from foot to foot, wired with fury and sexual energy. I may never understand why I always feel them together around him but I sure as hell can enjoy it. “Both.”

“Think you can take me?”

“Going to damn well try.”

“Think you’ll survive it?”

I stabbed a finger in his chest and smiled up at him. “I think I’m gonna own it. Jericho.”

He growled low in his chest. “Bring it the fuck on, Mac.”

I brought it.

7

“I’m gonna walk before they make me run…”

I stretched, supremely satisfied, rolled over on my side, and looked at Barrons. He was in human form again, flat on his back, chest not moving, and I knew if I lay my ear against his skin, I’d hear no heartbeat thudding behind his breastbone.

Barrons doesn’t sleep. He drifts and was in what I’d learned to recognize as a deep meditative state. It wouldn’t be long before he disappeared into the night to do whatever he does that makes his body electric and his heart pound again.