Stone Cold Lover (20 page)

He reduced her to a keening whine when he dragged his mouth across her throat, the flat of his tongue tasting her like melting ice cream. A tender nuzzle against her breast made her shake; the feel of his hot lips closing around her nipple made her sob. He drew on the peak with strong, rhythmic pulls, then teased with clever little flicks before resuming the suction. Fil tugged desperately at his shoulders, trying to bring him over her, but he resisted with casual strength. He kept them both on their sides, facing each other, while he fed on her flesh and left indelible marks on her soul.

“Spar. Please.”

She tried to curl her arms around his head, to cradle him against her breasts, to do something to alleviate the ache that threatened to drive her mad. Chuckling, he slipped easily from her grasp and continued his ruthless assault.

A rough palm stroked up the side of her knee, along the quivering line of her thigh, before drifting inward. Gentle fingertips brushed like feathers through the soft, pale curls concealing her sex before delving deeper. She arched helplessly against him, urging him to soothe the pain of relentless need.

When his fingers slid away, she almost broke, almost begged him not to leave her, but he hushed her with butterfly kisses and lifted her upper leg to drape her knees across his hip. The position left her open, exposed, and his fingers quickly returned to fill the space he had created. He slipped through her damp folds, parting her tender flesh to uncover the tense little bundle of nerves at the top of her slit.

He slid a finger across the nub, and that single touch was enough to have Fil tensing and arching as if a bolt of lightning had coursed through her. She cried out, but he swallowed the sound, his mouth returning to hers with renewed passion.

This time, he didn’t just taste her, he devoured her. She felt consumed, overwhelmed, feasted upon. His tongue tangled with hers while his fingers rubbed hard, tight circles around her clit. In seconds he brought her to the edge of release, but before she could fling herself into the void, he abruptly stopped. She tried to pull her mouth from his, to berate him for toying with her, but he fisted his free hand in the hair at the back of her head and simultaneously plunged two fingers deep into her swollen passage.

She screamed into his mouth, her hips snapping forward as pleasure crashed over her. A mini climax grasped her by the neck and shook hard, but it didn’t even take the edge off the hunger. Immediately it began to build once more, and Spar fed it with greedy kisses and clever fingers.

Struggling for air, she broke away from his kiss and gasped frantically. A vague thought edged with hysteria pointed out that if she’d wondered before how she could survive without him, now she should be wondering how she would survive this encounter. The man was killing her, and she couldn’t wait to embrace her end.

“Open your eyes,” he growled, the sound rough and feral, different from anything else she’d heard from him. “Look at me.”

It took several tries to force her eyes open. When she finally succeeded, the world looked hazy and out of focus. All but Spar. He stared into her eyes with fire heating his gaze and between her legs, his touch robbing her of sanity.

“You are mine, Felicity.” The words fell like hammer blows, fierce in their intensity. “My human, my woman.”

She knew she should hate the primitive statements, but they resonated inside her like church bells. Her heart could detect no lie in them, nothing false, nothing to take issue with. Even her mind was silent on the subject.

And her body? Oh, her body wept a rousing chorus of hallelujah.

“Say it.”

His voice was an order, a demand, a decree from on high. Within her channel, his fingers curved to stroke firmly against her inner wall, hitting the spot that made her see stars on every contact.

“Mine.”

How could he expect her to speak when she couldn’t even breathe? She struggled for air, struggled for a voice, struggled for a mind not shattered from the pleasure of his touch.

Suddenly it left her. His fingers withdrew, and despite their bodies pressed together, only his fist in her hair held her to him.

“Say. It.”

He scraped his teeth—were those his fangs? How were those his fangs?—against her throat and thrust his hips forward. With her leg pinned above his own, the movement brought the tip of his erection to her opening and taunted her with heavy nudges.

“Say you are mine,”
he snarled, and Fil felt herself nodding in agreement.

“Yours,” she breathed.

Then she screamed as he drove himself deep inside her.

He filled her up so full, stretching her, fucking
completing
her, the stony bastard. She was his. He had made her his, and now he pounded within her to celebrate his claim.

She could feel her muscles tightening, her pussy clenching, her whole being vibrating with the need to come. Her head thrashed, but his grip in her hair held her in place. His other hand cupped her ass, keeping her steady while he tore her world out from under her.

Their play and their positioning had started slow and tender, an exploration and sharing, but it had turned into a frank act of possession, her body his to hold and possess. She’d have given her next breath to possess him in return.

They strained together, each struggling to get closer, until it felt as if they shared the same skin. She breathed his air; his skin drank the perspiration from hers. Their hearts beat wildly but together, sharing a rhythm in perfect synchronicity.

Fil felt the claws of climax digging into her flesh, dragging her toward an explosion she thought might rip her apart. She wished that magic gave her to power to freeze them in time, so that they could always be like this, joined together, bathing in the bliss of their union, pleasure always drifting at the edge of their grasp.

Ruthlessly, he pushed her forward and she broke with a ragged cry. Her scream echoed in her head as her entire body clenched. She shook with the force of it, unable to do more than let it wash over her. Her body continued to absorb his thrusts. She felt his rhythm growing ragged, heard his breath catch, felt the rumble begin low in his chest. She tracked its progress as it built and built until it burst from his throat in a mighty roar.

She looked into his face and saw his eyes go blind a split second before they blazed with the white-hot fire she had come to associate with his magic. It bathed her in an unearthly glow as he poured himself inside her.

In silence, she lay beside him and shivered. Spar had touched more than her body, deeper than her heart. He had woven himself into the very fiber of her soul, and he would take a piece with him when he stepped back into his shell of stone.

Chapter Fourteen

Over the next week, Fil discovered she had absolutely no knack for doing tedious research. Apparently she would have made a piss-poor private detective. She did, however, appear to be developing an ability to ignore elephants in the room, eight-hundred-pound gorillas in the corner, and anything right under her nose with a skill that was sure to dethrone the reigning Queen of Denial.

Yup, that crown was hers, baby!

Spar seemed to be operating on the principle of don’t-ask-don’t-tell; he never brought up the status of their relationship, and she never told him that the minute he turned his back on her, she was going to sob like a little girl and crawl inside a vat of ice cream the size of a small, third-world country. The American military had nothing on the two of them.

It didn’t help matters that every time Fil tried to get Ella on the phone, either Kees answered or one of them was so pressed for time, they barely managed to impart the vital information they shared before the call ended. She had gotten not a single inkling of what Ella and Kees’s relationship might be like, but if it was anything like hers with Spar, she wouldn’t be surprised that it was the last thing her friend wanted to talk about.

The fact that Fil had finished a commission just before the explosion at the abbey and hadn’t bothered to line another up ahead of time meant that at least she had plenty of time to brood about everything. Oh, and try to find the elusive Hierophant in a world of over seven billion people. But mostly, she brooded.

To save her sanity, she’d turned over all the information from Onslow to Ella, along with giving her friend every last detail she could remember about her vision of the Hierophant. Ella had apparently developed some mad research skills over the past few weeks, and Fil was happy to take advantage. Maybe if both of them worked on the problem, Ella would come up with a solution. She was finding nothing.

By Sunday afternoon, she had reached her breaking point. Snapping her laptop closed, she thumped it down on the coffee table and glared at Spar. He hadn’t done anything in particular; in fact, he’d simply been sitting in an armchair wading through some of the resource materials Onslow had mentioned in his packet of info. He’d speculated that knowing as much about the Order’s summoning rituals as possible might help in searching out their location. His lack of transgressions didn’t matter, though. Fil was bored and frustrated and angry, and she still had this damned demon mark on her hand, which in the past day or so had started to itch like a bad case of poison ivy. So goddamn it, she was entitled to glare whenever and wherever she wanted to.

“I’m going for a walk,” she snapped, surging to her feet.

Spar looked up at her and frowned. “It is too dangerous.”

“What’s dangerous is keeping me cooped up in this building like it’s Alcatraz. We haven’t left the damned place since the trip to Ottawa and I, for one, have cabin fever. I need some fresh air.”

“Have you forgotten what happened on that trip to Ottawa? You were attacked by a golem.”

“Yeah, I was the one who nearly got her hip dislocated. I remember it pretty well.”

Spar set aside his papers and rose. “Then you should know that the Hierophant is unlikely to have given up his attempts to reach you. Whether he wants you ritually dead dead or just plain dead do you truly wish to risk falling into his hands?”

She lifted her head and stuck her chin out, barely suppressing the urge to slam her fist into his straight-lipped, clench-jawed face. She knew she’d just come away with a broken hand. The man’s head was made of rock. Literally.

“At this point, I could do with a new set of hands,” she snarled, almost surprised at the vitriol of her own tone, but the rage drove her on. “You’ve been putting your hands on me pretty regular for a while now, haven’t you? Maybe I’m starting to get a little tired of it.”

Spar jerked back as if she had punched him. The look on his face tugged at something in her chest, but it barely registered under the heavy weight of the fury that drove her.

Fil could swear the edges of her vision had begun to turn crimson, as if
seeing red
was more than just a turn of phrase. Maybe she really had burst a blood vessel or something, to bring up another cliché, but she couldn’t pull herself back long enough to care. She needed to get out of this fucking apartment and she needed to get away from that fucking Guardian. Who the hell was he to keep telling her what to do and where to go? He didn’t fucking own her!

When her thoughts darted into the kitchen and danced briefly over the big chef’s knife that sat in the top of her knife block, she screamed a word in Lithuanian she hadn’t even remembered she knew and threw herself toward the front door. If she stayed here one more second, there was going to be bloodshed.

She felt a cold jab of terror when something inside her cheered at the idea.

“Felicity!”

She ignored him and fumbled for the doorknob, finally managing to grasp the solid metal and yank open the heavy panel. Instead of an empty landing at the top of a narrow stair, Fil found herself looking into a pretty face and a pair of warm brown eyes.

Those eyes took one look at her, darted over her shoulder to see Spar hovering behind her projecting enough worry and frustration to light up the province, and went cool and sharp in an instant. She shouldered her way into the apartment, forcing Fil back into Spar’s solid body.

“She’s in trouble,” the woman said, her voice coolly efficient, her tone broking no opposition. “Grab her before she tries to take a swing at me.”

Fil’s arm was moving before the words were past the stranger’s lips, but Spar’s hand darted out from around her back and caught her fist before it could make contact with the side of the woman’s head. Frustration detonated inside her, and her rage became a living thing, more powerful than Fil herself. Her vision went entirely red and she lost herself in the madness.

*   *   *

“Tim told me she was worried, but I had no idea it was so serious. I should have come sooner.”

Spar looked up from where he had Felicity wrapped in his embrace and saw the unfamiliar woman shaking her head. In his arms, his mate thrashed like a wild woman, throwing herself from side to side, kicking and growling, acting more like a wild animal than like his Felicity. He had no idea what was happening, but he believed the woman when she said Felicity was in trouble.

He fought back his rapidly escalating concern and glared at her. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

“My name is Wynn, and Tim Massello at the university told me he thought your girlfriend could use my help. Anything else you want to know will have to wait.” She gestured to the sofa. “Get her down there and hold on to her. I have some things in my car I need to fetch. This could get messy.”

She turned as if to leave the apartment. Grunting, Spar adjusted his hold on Felicity after she sank her teeth into one of his forearms, and raised his voice to be heard over her screeching. “What is going on? What is happening to my mate?”

“It’s the mark, and we’ll talk later about the big picture here. If you want her to get through this, let me go get my things. I can help her. I promise.”

Unable to do anything else, Spar watched Wynn head back down the stairs, then returned his focus to Felicity. Her face was contorted into a mask of rage unlike anything he had ever seen before. She hissed and spat and snapped at the air like a rabid dog, all the while fighting with surprising strength to break his hold. He had her pinned against his chest, but he realized that getting her down onto the sofa might make her easier to contain. If he pinned her against the cushions and used his weight over the top of her, he could minimize her ability to move.