A sensual summoning, p.17
A Sensual Summoning, page 17
Bitter self-doubt, rancid disappointment, the scalding burn of stress, they all remained in the air, layering one on top of the other. No wonder she was upset. Anyone would crumble under that many emotions.
But as he stopped in front of the tree, just within the limit of their bond, he tasted something else.
Weaker than the others that overwhelmed his senses, an airy flavor whispered over his tongue. What was that? An emotion he’d never tasted before? Impossible…
He planted a hand on the closest trunk, leaning forward to find it again. Horniness was clouding his mind, fixated on catching what he’d locked onto as prey. If it couldn’t be her, it had to be this one thing she felt while thinking about him.
Where did it go? He growled to himself, eyes flashing in victory when he caught it once again, trapping it between his teeth so he could taste it leisurely without it being overridden by those other flavors.
It tasted like home.
Nostalgia slammed into him, to the nectar and starlight of his creation. A guiding hand of one older than him, who he had now outlived several times over. He relaxed his jaw to let the taste settle on his tongue, sinking into his tastebuds while he tried to define it.
Relief, mixed with gratitude, sprinkled with wonder, and surrounded by hope. From Faye, towards him.
A jolt raced up his spine, his emblems pulsing with awareness, and his cock felt heavier in his pants. The emotion disappeared down his throat with one measly swallow, the incubus already hooked.
His hand found the front of his pants to adjust himself, the touch making him shudder. He stalled, resolve nonexistent as he pulled out his cock. Stroking it once, twice, until he lost count, the memory of that taste and the woman who experienced it convinced him to keep going.
His eyelids grew heavy while he watched his larger hand work expertly over the thick length already weeping precum, imagining it was smaller, paler, hers.
When was the last time he’d gotten off alone? He wondered distractedly, swiping his thumb over the slit. Pleasure wracked his body, a tremendous shiver catching his breath when he imagined how her tongue might feel doing the same thing. Maker, when was the last time he’d gotten off at all?
Faye’s hazel eyes met his when his eyelids dropped closed, her face framed in soaked curls he wanted to bury his hands in. The memory of her soft body pressed into his when he carried her had his skin beneath his shirt burning. It tingled, making him want to touch it or better yet, be touched by her. Not in a dream, but in reality.
When he came, thick spurts of cum painting the muddy ground, Rafael’s mind blanked. He lost himself momentarily in the high of orgasm. How good it felt expanding beneath his skin until it exploded in a low groan that was lost in the rain.
“Shit…” He panted, eyelids lifting with some effort to find himself in the same place as before and not with Faye in her shower. The shower he was under was cold and damning, washing away the evidence of his release slower than he liked.
He’d crossed that bridge onto Faye’s island only to defile it, marking his territory like some rutting animal. He couldn’t help it, the taste of his own pleasure blanketing everything else around him and smothering that single emotion she experienced that he still couldn’t define.
The taste of his own pleasure sat like oil on water in his mouth, the incubus unable to absorb his own emotions even as he shoved his still hard cock back into his pants despite already feeling the hungry gnaw to jerk off again. Sense returned to him lethargically, his throat dry when he swallowed.
He’d definitely sank to a new low when he decided to leave his own isolated island ruined and desiccated by his presence, to take up residence on hers.
It was only a matter of time before he destroyed that too.
Chapter 35
It didn’t go away.
This… desire.
It clung to him, encouraging him to jerk off at the drop of a hat to experience a moment of mindless bliss that he deceived himself in thinking would dull the edge. That one more time would be enough to stop his body from reacting so strongly to Faye.
It never did. Surprising in how unsurprised he was when he once again found himself biting into the hem of his sweater to muffle his moans as he rubbed himself raw in the middle of the night to the thought of Faye while she slept.
She’d been dutifully guarding her subconscious from him, the door that always presented itself to him only needing a light breeze for him to open. He never did. She was holding up her end of the deal as much as she could, he wasn’t about to intentionally sabotage her.
But this was getting ridiculous.
He was like a horny whelp after accidentally seeing a woman naked for the first time. That obsessive attraction to everything about her was driving him insane. To the point that even her clothes were making him struggle.
Maker. Rafael wanted to burn her entire wardrobe. He probably would have too, had sense not reminded him that he’d be in an even worse situation than mindlessly jerking off each night with the scatter-brained little menace naked.
There was a clash of sophisticated chaos and primal wildness about the way she dressed that he couldn’t get out of his head. It called to a time when he would’ve had her up against a tree, deep within the forest, dragging the skirts of those damn dresses high enough to sink into her and ruin her for any other. Where he would ravage her with teeth and claws and pleasure so devastating that only he was fit to have her.
He came in his hand, cum leaking down to his wrist as he forced himself to stop stroking. Panting, he dragged his forearm across his damp forehead. He needed to clean up. The thought had him groaning even as he sat up and made a beeline for the bathroom to wash his hands.
He eyed the shower contemplatively as he soaked them under the faucet, the soap frothing under the ferocity of his scrubbing. His idea to shower was dismissed by the twitch of his cock still pressing against his pants.
No.
Seriously, fuck her lack of self-awareness. How casually she’d stood before him in a dress so saturated that it became a second skin. She didn’t realize how revealing it was, how it clung to her thighs and dipped into her bellybutton he was suddenly desperate to kiss.
The girl had no sense of safety, and that innocence only aggravated his desire to corrupt it.
Wide awake, he fell back on the sofa with an exhale. He wasn’t getting any sleep tonight, that was for sure. The fire had died out a while ago, the last embers still clinging to life, and Rafael considered restarting it just to have something to do.
Something to do other than anticipating Faye’s new nightly routine.
As if on cue, her bedroom door creaked open. Rafael told himself not to look, forbade himself from acknowledging her presence.
The moment the witch woke up and decided she needed a glass of water in the middle of the night was the moment he wondered if she wasn’t one of his female counterparts; a succubus sent to torture him.
Stay thirsty, he wanted to snap at her, even as his eyes meandered towards her of their own free will. It was as if he hadn’t just gotten off minutes before.
Wispy material of a near translucent white held her curves, the illusion of a ghostly apparition disrupted by the way she padded on bare toes to avoid as much of the chilly floor as possible on her way to the kitchen.
She caught him staring, her poor survival instincts making her halt instead of rushing into the kitchen out of his sight. He knew how he looked, hair unruly and face flushed from exertion. He knew she could smell sex in the air, and still she stalled long enough for his influence to wind its way around her slight form and refuse to leave.
“Would you like some tea?” she finally asked.
That wasn’t a glass of water. Rafael had been mentally prepared to refuse a glass of water.
Fuck.
She must’ve been cold and needed the tea to ward off the chill, he mused, noting the shawl draped over her shoulders for warmth. For as cozy as her cottage was, it was still winter, and she was all alone in that big bed of hers.
His dick stirred anew.
Why did he think there’d be plants in there too? Her favorites, even if she claimed to love them all equally. The ones she wanted to see when she first woke up in the morning. In place of a lover, she directed her sleepy smiles and soft waking noises to them.
Rafael was fucking envious of a few flowers. He was certifiable at this point.
“Sure,” he answered without thinking, his mind more pleasantly focused on the image of sleepy arousal that would have him fucking her in the early morning sunlight if he was in that bed with her.
It was clear she hadn’t been expecting him to agree. Neither had he.
Faye blinked, doe-eyes round with surprise. The thought of backpedaling evaporated as soon as it arose in his mind when a bright smile lit her face and made his stomach tighten with shocking attraction.
Maker, help him…
Pushing himself up to stand, he followed the moon beam trails of her nightdress into the kitchen, ducking to avoid some of the hanging baskets that weren’t so height friendly that he could walk beneath them.
The hiss of the tap filled the silence as she filled the cast iron teapot, the incubus taking a seat at the small two-seater table awkwardly. The chair groaned, the weight of his power putting pressure on the wooden joints while he continued to drink his fill of her greedily.
She fluttered here and there, the moon’s light saturating the room in an ethereal white glow that reminded him of times gone by where firelight and stars were all one could hope to illuminate the dark. Such light was made for women.
Gentle, intimate, warm. Painful if handled incorrectly and powerful when allowed to grow.
Yes, he mused to himself as the burden that daylight brought seemed to melt from her shoulders, this light was made for her. It turned everything quiet and dreamy. The mismatched mugs she pulled from sage cupboards stained in silver, the dry bushels of herbs a muted grey as they hung amidst her several hanging pots.
If her dress was the moonlight, then her hair was the fire. Tumbling down her back in thick tresses mussed by sleep, he absorbed it all. Every detail carefully noted so that one day, perhaps centuries in the future, he might revisit this moment when the loneliness became too much once again.
“Milk and honey?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at him, none the wiser to his musings.
“Uh, I guess?” He didn’t know how he liked his tea. But he’d seen her put it in her own like clockwork every day. Maybe he’d surprise himself and actually like it.
Sending him a quizzical look, she didn’t say anything as she turned back to fix their mugs. The aroma of the tea sweetened by honey filled his nose when she placed the mug in front of him and, instead of disappearing back into her room like he thought she would, sat across from him.
Now what? He cleared his throat, still sensitive to the taste of her emotions as they settled in his mouth and forcing him to try to distract himself from them with a mindless sip of the tea, only for it to scald his equally sensitive tongue.
Don’t make a face, he bade himself as he lowered the mug and forcefully swallowed the burning liquid, his tongue on fire. He caught the tremble of her bottom lip that she tried to hide behind the rim of her own mug, but meeting her eye seemed to crack her delicate hold.
Dissolving into a peel of laughter, Rafael tried to look unfazed.
“You really can’t handle hot things, can you?”
She was taking far too much enjoyment out of this. He gaped at her mutely, his tongue still sore and ego bruised at the insinuation that he couldn’t handle something as pitiful as a hot drink. “I—” A retort didn’t come easy, the gleam of tears in the corner of her eyes distracting him. Mercifully, she wiped them away, the incubus crossing his arms petulantly. “Since when is lava anyone’s drink of choice?”
“Oh c’mon.” She dared to dismiss his statement with a roll of her eyes and, as if to prove herself right, took a long sip of her own tea easily.
“Am I wrong?” he pushed stubbornly.
“Yep!”
Rafael didn’t think a human had ever disagreed with him, on anything. Big or small. It went against everything an incubus was designed to be. The thought silenced him as he looked away in a huff. He didn’t know how to respond to opposition.
“Are you sulking?” she asked on a giggle, craning her head to the side in an attempt to get a better look at his face. He shot her a sideways glare, unimpressed.
“No.” He was lying, naturally. But she didn’t need to know that. “Considering the only drinks you’ve ever given me have either been lava or rotten detoxes, I take my life in my hands every time I drink them.”
Sniffing incorrigibly at the suffering he’d been made to endure, he leaned back in his seat, refusing to acknowledge the still steaming mug until it had cooled to a more manageable temperature. In the meantime, a slice of citrus burst on his tongue with her indignation.
“You can’t compare my tea, which is delicious, thank you very much, to those detoxes.” Her cheeks puffed as she spoke, turning everything about her soft and round in her frustration. He refused to admit he liked the backtalk.
“Oh?” He wasn’t supposed to be fueling the conversation, but his mouth had taken on a mind of its own, like the rest of his body. “And why aren’t they the same?”
“For one—” She lifted up a finger, the delicate length tipped with short nails. “Tea is for pleasure, detoxes are for… detoxing.” Rafael arched a brow silently at her flustered words while she continued. “Secondly, tea does its job in making you feel warm and relaxed. Those detoxes… they didn’t do their job. They were useless.”
His ears pricked on the nuance of disappointment in her tone. He hadn’t even tasted it before realizing. Was that why she was so upset when he found her in the rain, because the detoxes hadn’t severed their chain?
“And?” he rumbled, suddenly uncomfortable with the idea that her distress had somehow been related to him, inadvertently or not. “Apart from the war crime you committed in making me drink them in the first place, them not working isn’t the end of the world.”
“But—” She began hotly, catching herself as she dropped her gaze into her mug, avoiding him when before she’d been so cheerfully trying to see his face. He didn’t like it. “But it might be, if I run out of time.”
Time? The question had only risen in his mind when the memory of their month-long deal reminded him of the answer. Manually loosening his jaw from clenching so he wouldn’t grind his teeth, he decided to give his lava another try.
Not as hot, but hardly enjoyable even if the flavor was pleasant.
There was a sense of doom in her words, that the end of their month together would be the end of her. He didn’t know much about how the Covenant had evolved since the Necromancer turned everything on its head, but he was fairly certain his word remained law.
They wouldn’t dare lay a finger on her.
Still, his suspicions around her isolation from the rest of her kind rose in him once more. For as many weeks as he’d been living here with her, he knew very few things about her. Even that was a stretch when he tried to recall anything she’d told him that he hadn’t deduced by himself.
Her name. Her flowers.
“Hey—” He started, unsure what he was planning to say. Reassure her? He wasn’t the best with words. Demand answers? He didn’t even know what he wanted to ask her. In the end, he said nothing as she clutched her mug tight, fingers digging for the support she’d never find in ceramic.
“Never mind that.”
She steered them away from the topic with far more expertise than he’d been expecting. Exhaling sharply, she looked up at him finally, a determined set in her brow. “Do you remember what you told me in that dream?”
Rafael blanched, blindsided by the question.
His face gave nothing away as he sifted through the memory of her mouth on his, her thighs framing his lap, the shattered taste of pain when she pulled herself away from him.
“I guess not.”
She sighed, taking a measured gulp from her mug before setting it back down on the table.
“If I shut the door, then you’d answer my questions.” Her fingers tapped nervously against the side of the mug. “I did that. And… I might not be good at it, but I learned to guard my subconscious like you asked when we made that deal in the first place.”
It returned to him in an instant. He had hated the sadness that stung his tongue like salty tears in her dream. In that moment, he offered what he thought she wanted without thinking, what he could feasibly give her to wash away that terrible flavor.
“I held up my end, so…”
He gave her his word, and now the little witch was expecting him to follow through with it.
Oh.
Shit.
Chapter 36
She held her breath as she waited for his reaction.
Experience would tell her that explosions of anger or scathing accusations would be the expected reaction for putting him on the spot. History would suggest a passive dismissal that allowed the person to ignore her words entirely as they answered someone else.
But Rafael did none of that.
He just stared at her. Marbled where he sat as his once relaxed muscles tensed to granite. And then he exhaled, his head dipping woodenly into a nod. It appeared he wasn’t lying about taking his deals seriously. She felt bad for doubting him.
“Straight to the point, that’s unlike you.” He laughed humorlessly, the sound void of the hot coals that usually turned it smokey and warm. Ignoring his jibe, Faye reached for the closest thing on the table, her saltshaker.
Uncapping it, she poured it in a pile between them before flattening it out to create a blanket canvas of white. With her finger, she slowly began dragging it through the salt. Every stroke darkened Raef’s expression further, a storm looming above her as she kept her eyes fixed on the sigil she was drawing.
