Bitten by Ecstasy: 2 (Dark Judgment) (18 page)

“Again,” he whispered, never having imagined the disfigurements he’d detested could offer him healing and pleasure.

No. That wasn’t true.

Sinéad offered him the healing and, damn, so much pleasure. This beautiful, fierce, funny, sensual female who had been there in the most painful, desolate moments of his life.

She’d given him his life back and now she made it worth living, showing him he could have the things he’d believed lost to him—laughter, desire, passion…love.

Yes, he loved her. Both male and hippogryph adored her.

Maybe it had been from the moment he’d broken through the pain and darkness to see her hovering over him, a dark angel, his savior. Or maybe it’d been the moment she’d taken the wendigo victim’s life so he wouldn’t have the stain of death on his soul. Or maybe it’d been the moment she’d called him beautiful then worthy.

Maybe it’d been all three and he’d fallen a bit deeper in love each time.

She paid homage to his scars with her lips, tongue and teeth. Each nibble, rake and lick added another crack to the mortar he’d erected around his spirit even as it stoked the fire in his gut.

Untangling his fingers from her hair, he slid his palms down until he cradled her jaw. He nudged the corners of her mouth with his thumbs, applied the slightest pressure and she obeyed the unspoken command. Her mouth eased back from his chest, but not before planting several soft kisses along the damaged flesh. Tipping her head back, Bastien studied the swollen curves of her lips. Unable to resist, he sipped at the bow of her top lip, savored the full weight of the bottom.

“Get on with it, hippogryph,” she ordered breathlessly. He smiled both at the impatience she didn’t try to conceal and the shiver coursing through her as he lapped at the underside of her chin.

“I’ll do that,” he said, voice dark with promise. He hoisted her in the air, spun around and dropped her on the wide bed. She bounced once before he covered her, settling his hips between her legs. The high side slits in the skirt allowed him to nestle his cock against the soft mound of her pussy. He swallowed her cry with his mouth, tasted it with his tongue. It was so sweet.

She arched beneath him and the heels of her boots pricked his ass through his pants as she wrapped her legs around his waist. Sharp nails pinched his shoulder blades and he rumbled his approval, diving deeper between her lips. She met him stroke for stroke, thrust for thrust, as ready to duel in a sensual battle as she was in a physical fight.

He pushed off her, kneeling between her thighs.
Damn she was gorgeous.
Her eyes gleamed with the same heat surging through his veins, pumping through his cock. Her chest rose and fell with quick breaths, the plump swells of her breasts were fuller, rounder and threatened to spill free of the corset. She stretched her arms toward him and he barely managed to resist the lure of her embrace.

Instead he smiled and, as her arms lowered and eyes widened, he assumed the wickedness tickling him was visible in his grin.

He lifted a hand and with a tiny tug on his magic, his talons appeared, black, hooked and lethal.

“My turn,” he murmured.

* * * * *

Sinéad’s breath trapped in her throat as the dangerous claw descended. Any human or immortal with an ounce of reason would’ve been shrinking in fear at the sight of the deadly talon capable of ripping skin, muscle and bone apart with one swipe. Exhibit A—the vamp in the alley minus his head.

But trepidation didn’t make her heart pound like a
bodhràn
at a boisterous
céili
. Except the traditional Irish drum in the midst of a party bore no competition to the excitement and desire leaping and dancing through her veins. She was reminded of the beast that lurked under Bastien’s skin—reminded she wasn’t just dallying with the man, but the ferocious hippogryph as well. And damn if the thought of claiming them both didn’t send a shaft of pleasure to her nipples and the pulsing flesh between her legs. Squirming, she rolled her hips, seeking the amazing cataclysm she’d already experienced at his hands—literally. She wanted more, sensed she could shatter into even more pieces with his long, heavy cock rubbing over her sex.

She’d seen it once and the quick glimpse had been enough to sear the image in her head. It had also been enough to stir the embers of longing in a body that had lain dormant for three hundred years.
More
. The demand had seemed to become her mantra since he’d found her again.
More
.

A white-blond eyebrow arched high and his green eyes darkened with deviltry. “More, sweetheart?”

Lady.
She sucked in a breath. Had she inadvertently passed the thought along the mental path she’d opened? Such carelessness had never happened before. It seemed as if this hippogryph had weakened her natural defenses along with her resistance.

“I have what you need.”

Sweet Nef.
She gasped as the tip of his talon hooked under the seam of her top and slit the boned garment in half, mimicking the surgery she’d done to his shirt. The pieces fell to the sides of her torso and before she could utter a word, Bastien swooped low and sucked a nipple between his lips, nearly taking half her breast in his mouth.

“Bastien.” She grasped his head tight. Coherent thought fled her brain as his tongue curled around the taut tip. If his fingers in the pleasure den had been wonderful, this was…phenomenal. Wet heat lapped at her, played and stabbed. She shuddered. Groaned.

Why hadn’t anyone told her breasts could convey such pleasure? She shuddered as he switched breasts, captured the other peak between his teeth and raked the sensitive skin. A hand cupped and tormented the other nipple. Rapture bolted down her spine and she arched into his caress like an unbroken filly. She’d gone without this knowledge for centuries and yet the section of her brain still functioning whispered what her soul had already acknowledged and accepted. If Bastien hadn’t come into her life five months ago, her body would have slept for another three centuries. He’d awakened this hungry beast inside her, much like the one existing in him. It insisted to be fed, satisfied. Fucked.

“Beautiful,” he praised softly, his lips brushing her wet nipple.

Confounded and energized by the need jolting through her, she tried to drag him back down to her flesh. “Stop talking and suck,” she growled, yanking on his long, bright hair.

Bastien chuckled, but didn’t comply. The place at the top of her sex he’d stroked and rubbed in the pleasure den throbbed in a relentless rhythm of demand. The more he tongued her breasts, the more adamant the pulsing spot became to be touched. Her legs scissored on either sides of his hips. With a last-ditch effort to assuage the ache, she ground her pelvis over the rock-hard plane of his abdomen. Immediately delight swelled from her flesh, up her belly and to the wet tips he continued to pinch and roll lazily.

“Does it hurt, little cruxim?” he asked in a lethal voice she hadn’t heard from him before. The sultry rumble carried a hint of the hippogryph and more than a little of the
other
creature—the creature of blood and fangs.

Desire chained her voice, holding it captive. All she could do was nod.

“Where?” He gave her nipple a slow, protracted lick. “Here?”

She moaned. Nodded again.

“Or,” he planted his palms on either side of her head, levered his chest off her and circled his hips against her sex, “
here
.”

She cried out as flames coursed through and over her with the force of a dragon’s blast. She wouldn’t have been surprised to look down and see ash coating them both.

“Look at me, Sinéad,” he commanded.

She lifted her lashes.
Lady
, when had she closed them? She blinked, staring up at him. The male, hippogryph and other studied her through enlarged, crimson, eagle pupils. His head was cocked in a way that was more animal than human and his sharp cheekbones pressed harder against his skin.

Slowly, he leaned to the side. Cupped her sex through the skirt. “Is your pussy wet?”

Pussy
.
The word tumbled over in her mind as he massaged her with the heel of his palm.
Yes.
She trembled as molten lava replaced blood and pooled where his hand cradled her.
That fits
.
Until him, she’d thought of the place between her legs as purely anatomical, not sensual. But with Bastien there was nothing cold or sexless about the flesh clamping and releasing for his presence. Sex. Vagina. Mound. None of those terms suitably described the swollen, damp, aching flesh he’d brought alive. But pussy did. Erotic. Carnal. Feminine.

“Yes.” She clutched his upper arms and delighted in the bunch of muscle beneath her fingers. “I’m wet. My pussy’s wet.” She turned her head, sank her teeth into the tough flesh of his wrist. “
For you
,” she sent along their telepathic link.

Fire blazed hotter in his gaze. She caught the flash of fangs beneath his full upper lip. For several long, heated seconds he stared at her. Tension invaded his big frame, fairly vibrated in the muscles straining under his skin. Then in a burst of motion, he leaned back and her skirt and boots fell off her body in silken and leather tatters.

His breath rushed from his chest in loud bellows as he shoved the scraps of clothing from the mattress and dove between her spread thighs.

His mouth latched onto her sex, his tongue spearing between the folds into her clenching, empty core.

“Bastien,” she screamed, plucking at his shoulders, grasping his head.

Her body bucked as if fighting against the shocking, alien pleasure consuming her. Bastien firmed his grip on her inner thighs, keeping her open and vulnerable for his claiming.

“So sweet,” he rumbled against her. “So fucking sweet and tight.”

He lapped at her as if she was his favorite dish. His tongue licked a fiery path up her crease then swept across
that
place.

“Hmmm,” he murmured, sliding a finger through her slick slit and tucking it in the entrance of her pussy, gently penetrating and filling her. She bowed into the erotic invasion, craving it now that she knew what awaited her.

Again he stroked the top of her sex. “No wonder you’re hurting, sweetheart. Your clit is all swollen and hard.” He purred a hum of sympathy that didn’t sound
at all
sympathetic to Sinéad’s ears. It sounded more like a sensual threat. “Do you ever touch your clitoris, cruxim?”

Her heart hammered as she peered down her torso to meet his bright gaze. Touch her clitoris? Or clit, as he’d called it? Another name she latched onto. Before her exploration in the shower? Hell no, she thought breathlessly. She hadn’t known it existed—

His lips pursed and drew on the flesh. Need pierced her gut, drove the air from her lungs.

Ah. Yeah. That’s why. Though she doubted her finger could generate the pleasure his fingers and mouth did.

“Not before today,” she admitted, quivering as he tenderly shafted her core with his finger and watched her with inhuman eyes.

“Today?” he growled, the flames in his gaze leaping higher. “When?”

“Shower,” she said, breathless as he twisted his finger and crooked the tip, rubbing a place high in her sex.

“The shower.” A wicked smile curved his lips. “Is that why you were taking so long? You were touching your pussy for the first time?”

She nodded, bucked her hips, pleading for more of his evil—delectable—torture.

“Give me your hand.” He didn’t wait for her to agree or disagree, but plucked it off his shoulder and, curling all but one finger into a fist, guided the single digit to her clitoris. “Show me,” he whispered as he slid her fingertip over her mound for the first time.

Oh
. She gasped. Her sex spasmed at the hard punch of desire. It was small—it still amazed her how something so small could contain so much pleasure. Slick, hard. She groaned. Her thighs tightened around Bastien’s shoulders as she circled the beaded flesh no bigger than a tiny button, demonstrating how she’d caressed herself.

“That’s it,” he praised, his voice adopting the low, sinful tone again. “Don’t stop.” Then he added his tongue and they danced an erotic duet over her flesh. And all the while he continued to plumb her pussy with increasingly hard thrusts of his finger.

Her skin tightened, tingled. Helpless cries spilled from her lips as she writhed to the sensual tune he played over and in her flesh. The devastating, delicious pressure built…built…

And exploded.

Dazed, she barely acknowledged Bastien leaving her, dimly heard the muted rip of something but was too shaken by the catastrophic event that had split her apart and somehow left her whole to investigate.

The whisper of calloused fingers across her abdomen, breasts and arms brought her back to reality. Bastien had returned to her. The torn black shirt no longer hung from his shoulders and a quick glance down revealed he’d rid himself of his remaining clothing as well.

That
cleared the euphoric haze from her head.

Sweet Lady
, he was beautiful. Hunger tightened the features of his lovely face, throwing the scars in stark relief. So fierce it made her sated flesh pulse in renewed need. His wide shoulders and warrior-marked chest, narrow hips and muscular thighs—gorgeous. And the thick, flare-capped column covered in clear latex. She huffed out a wavering breath. His cock hung between them, long, veined and…
mine
.
All mine
.