All Things Wicked (11 page)

Color swept up from her throat, over her cheeks. It flooded her fair skin, and her eyes opened. Glassy with need. With confusion.

Anguished.

She had to give him what he needed.

But as he watched her emotions clash inside her dazed eyes, it infuriated him to know he needed
her
. Visions be damned.

He trapped her jaw in his hand and crushed his mouth to hers. The instant their lips touched, the moment the contact sizzled across his body like a live wire, the needling whisper in his head simmered to a faint buzz. Pressure so mild that his own damned lust nearly drowned it out.

She gasped, and Caleb forcefully tilted her head to fit his lips more firmly against her own. He deepened the kiss without gentleness or permission, stabbing his tongue into the dark heat of her mouth to taste her. To devour her; damn him to hell, he wanted to crawl inside her head and possess everything she was.

She whimpered, and everything in his body thrilled to life. To sudden, electric attention. She raised her hands to twine them around his neck but he wrenched them away, captured her wrists in one hand and jerked them high above her head. He pinned her there, shackled to the cliff wall as she panted beneath him.

Her eyes were glazed, but snapping. Crackling with raw emotion. With lust?

With anger?

With magic.

The pressure in his head intensified as she sucked in a hard breath. “Don’t do this,” she said raggedly. “I can . . . I can just give you—”

Inside his own head, Caleb staggered under the crushing weight of guilt. Of condemnation. But her body strained against his grip, giving lie to her words. She wanted him.

She needed to hate him. It would be so much safer for her if she just hated him.

She doesn’t know how.

He found the hem of her skirt and hiked it up with one hand. Juliet pulled at the grip around her wrists. Gasped as his palms found the warm flesh of her upper thigh.

His fingers skimmed the soft curls between her legs. Her head fell back against the cliff wall, and something in him bent. Cracked.

She closed her eyes. “Caleb, please— Oh!”

And with her cry, shuddering and sweet, the presence—that sensation of
other
in his head—was gone.

And he was lost.

He stroked across the cleft of her warm, soft flesh. Traced the delicate folds of her body as she shuddered in his grip. Her legs opened and hunger swamped him. Filled him with a need so bright and sharp and ravenous that he groaned.

Without warning, he slid two fingers into her.

She cried out. Her hips jerked.

He cursed as he found her already wet, her warm channel so tight that her muscles clenched around his fingers. Her eyes slammed open, wicked bright and half gone already, and he struggled not to throw her skirt up and take her right here, right now. Hard and fast against this cliff wall.

He knew what it could be like.

He knew how badly he craved it. Wasn’t this what he’d wanted all along?

Caleb coaxed her legs wider, stroked her slowly. “Tell me you want me,” he whispered again, a refrain that hammered at his conscious mind.
Tell me what I need to hear.

She sucked in a breath, but it arced out on a sound that curled into his cock and pulsed. Sexy, so feminine. Wanton as hell, and oh, God, he was in trouble.

“Tell me you want me to do this.”

“Why?” she cried, even as her hips thrust against his fingers. Rode his hand, all but stroking herself against him. “Oh, please. Please.”

Keeping his other hand firmly around her wrists, he dropped his mouth to her breasts, breathing out against the thin yellow fabric. She arched into him, sobbing out a sound between a gasp and a laugh as he touched her clit with his thumb. Just a graze.

A tease.

“Say it, Juliet,” he said against her soft curve. She shook her head, writhing. He took her nipple into his mouth, laving it through the fabric of her shirt, sucking it deeply until she shuddered.

His thumb came down hard on the swollen bead of nerves, stroking it, over and over as he transferred his attention to her other nipple. She was sobbing, flushed and so ripe that his fingers slid in and out without any resistance.

With inhuman effort, Juliet wrenched at her arms. His grip broke, and she tunneled her fingers into his hair to yank his face up.

Her eyes were wild, mouth parted, breath heaving.

And she kissed him.

Against everything he expected, everything he’d craved and desperately hoped he never got, she fit her lips to his, voracious and wild and demanding, and kissed him.

Intentions snapped.

Control shattered.

He forgot the need to
see.
Forgot the coven, the conflict. Her mouth opened under his and something wild in him flared. Away from anger and violence. Away from fear.

So much trouble.

Groaning, Caleb withdrew his fingers from her warm body and fumbled at the snap of the borrowed, too-large jeans sitting low on his waist. Wrenched at the button fly as she whimpered against his mouth and tried to help. Somehow, God, somehow, he got them pushed past his hips. Somehow, he pulled her skirt out of the way.

When the very tip of his erection nudged her swollen flesh, he thought he’d go up in an inferno that would claim his soul.

She braced her hands against the cliff wall behind her, eyes closed. Cheeks flushed. Sweat gleamed on her skin, and she breathed in spiky knots that whimpered and begged.

Caleb framed her face in his hands. “Tell me,” he demanded.

She shook her head.

“Tell me you want this.” God, was that his voice? So angry and harsh. So . . . needy.

She caught her upper lip between her teeth and said nothing.

His hips jerked as she tilted hers, forcing her sex to rub against his flesh. Slick. So hot he could feel it saturating the head of his cock. His gut clenched. Muscles locked.

He growled, seized her hips in his hands. “Juliet, God damn it!”

Her eyes flew open, met his. Linked. He could drown in spring green. Drown in her tremors as she held her breath. Drown in her.

He could be the bastard she needed him to be.

“Lie to me,” he rasped, and plunged deep.

The ragged sound she made echoed in his wild groan. The slick folds of her sex parted for him, too fast to be painless, but oh, God, so wet that he threw his head back, clenching his teeth.

She hooked a leg over his hip; he held it in one splayed hand, her skin warm, her body hot and tight as he withdrew, braced himself against the cliff, and thrust again. Balls deep, coated in her, surrounded by her as she wrapped her arms around his neck and held on.

Her breath spiked with every thrust, shook as he gritted out a curse. Heat gathered at the base of his cock, slid into his body like liquid flame. Harder, faster, angrier, more and more desperate, she rose to meet him, matched him thrust for thrust, until she was gasping for breath and crying out his name.

Her muscles clenched around him, tighter than anything he’d ever known before her. There was no before. There was only Juliet, riding him, milking him, shuddering in his arms and draining his strength with every sobbing cry.

His orgasm detonated without warning or care, uncoiling like a spring wound too tight and leaving him gasping for breath as he shuddered, his hips pinned to hers and her body wrapped like silk around him.

As his vision slowly cleared, as the fragments of his mind and body pulled together, Caleb found himself cradling her, his arms curved around her back, her legs around his hips. Found his nose buried in her hair as he panted, sucking in oxygen as pinpricks of light detonated around him.

She smelled like warm wind and rain; like raw woman, like—
fuck
, what he’d always thought flowers should smell like. The T-shirt she still wore bunched in his fingers.

Gradually, her shudders eased.

Bit by bit, his heartbeat mellowed. The buzzing pressure in his head hadn’t gone away, and with it came the memory.

The anger.

She uncurled her leg from his hips, pulled away so fast that he staggered, sucking in a breath as his flesh slid out of her warm body at last.

Juliet sidled away, shaking out her skirt, and Caleb quickly pulled his pants back up. “I can’t—” Her voice cracked.

The ache between his temples intensified.

Do it.
He closed his eyes, fingers halting over the buttons of his jeans.

He couldn’t be gentle. He needed to
see
. No matter what the cost.

Quietly, he said, “You can’t be surprised.”

Her gasp forced him to look at her. Her back was to him, now, her shoulders rigid. “You
really
don’t think about this stuff before it comes out of your mouth, do you?” she demanded.

Of course he did.

His smile humorless, Caleb leaned back against the cliff wall, arms folded over his chest. “What did you expect? We’d done this once, it was only a matter of time before we needed it again.”

She was so still, he wasn’t sure that she’d even heard him.

But the pressure in his skull told him she had.

Good girl.

“
Needed it
is a poor choice in words,” he went on conversationally. “You can’t say no to me. I think I made that clear.”

Now she turned, spots of color high on her cheeks as her eyes flashed echoes of the fury peeling her lips back from her teeth. “You conceited son of a bitch.”

He shrugged, forcing himself to respond like the asshole he needed her to understand he was. “You didn’t say no.”

“I didn’t say yes!” she shouted, fists clenched by her sides.

“You think that matters?” he told her, inwardly flinching at how much of a dick that made him.

She stepped back as if he’d slapped her. Guilt twisted, sharp as a knife.

Pain lanced through his head.

She took a step forward. Then another. Her fists unclenched. Curled up again. Caleb watched her.

I’m so sorry.

“I hate you,” she bit out.

“No, you don’t,” he replied. “You just want to fuck me. There’s a diff—”

Her fist was a hell of a lot bonier than her openhanded slap had been. Caleb’s head snapped around with the impact, collided with the cliff wall behind him and he saw stars.

The angry buzz of her magic slammed into his skull, and he dropped like a stone. He didn’t even feel the rocks jab into his flesh as the universe stretched, humming, and turned white.

I
t tore free of its moorings and howled from her skin, as physical as a hurricane. Painful as a scream.

She felt the magic explode from her, spread out like a wild net and slam into Caleb. She experienced it as the power filled his skin the way it filled hers; as it tunneled and burrowed and overflowed from nerve to throbbing nerve.

Something more than sexual.

Worse than torture.

Draining.

Juliet sank to the sand in boneless exhaustion, her own consciousness flickering. He’d wanted this.

She didn’t know how she suddenly knew, but she did.

He’d wanted this, right here, and that’s why he’d done all those things. Why he’d goaded her, and then pushed her against a wall—the bastard, what
was
it about walls?—and said what he’d said. Done what he’d done.

Now she could only stare, hands over her mouth, as he fell still.

Deathly still.

“Caleb?”

His eyes flickered, hands twitching as they scrabbled at the rock and sand. Blood trickled from his temple.

She reached out.

Caleb’s hand lashed, fingers snapping viselike around her wrist. “I see a mountain of flesh,” he said hoarsely.

Juliet stared at his hand. Slowly, her gaze traced the trembling line of his arm. Slid across his chest, panting with effort.

Ice filled her spine.

Caleb’s eyes had opened, fixed on her, but it wasn’t her they saw. They blazed a shade of blue she’d never seen, something made of the bluest sky and the deepest ocean and every shade in between. Lightning crackled deep inside that unseeing stare, wicked and wild and unrestrained.

Primordial fear.

This is why they hunt witches.

The thought made her shiver.

His grip tightened, bruising. “They’re nothing but tangled limbs and putrid flesh and dead, staring eyes, but I see the tattoos. Branded like ownership, marked into the skin of each carcass like a name, but they don’t have names. They’re lines and numbers; no faces. There aren’t any faces.”

She sank back to the sand, silent with fear.

“She sits at the top like a queen, rotting bones and tattooed flesh her throne.”

Juliet gasped as he let her go. Fingers digging into the sand, she swallowed back a surge of nausea.

These? These were the visions of the future? Vivid scenes of symbolism and carnage? Oh, God. No wonder he was so cold.

These weren’t things for people to see. To
handle
.

“She is marked, too, and her face is empty, but she
has
a face. She’s the only one, so they gather. Movement in the shadows. I see silhouettes of humans, but they aren’t,” he continued quietly. “One holds the leash. The leash that fastens to the queen’s own flesh. It sags between her legs, dripping already, filled by them. Filled by all of them, one after another. There is no rest for the wicked. She is the key.”

Juliet held her breath as a sudden, vicious tremor rippled through Caleb’s body. Black sand clung to his shirt, his hands as they fisted.

“Mine,” he growled. “You can’t have her. She’s mine to protect, damn you all.” A ragged sound forced free from behind his bared teeth, Caleb surged to his feet, every muscle locked and ready, eyes wild.

Juliet flung herself against his chest, unthinking and desperate. She wrapped her arms around his waist, pressed her head to his heart and held on for dear life as he strained against enemies she couldn’t see. “Caleb, wake up!”

“I swore I would protect her,” he whispered hoarsely, and his arms banded around her. Tighter than steel, unyielding. “Mine.”