My Dangerous Pleasure (29 page)

“I’m listening.”

“One risk for you is that I do more than I say I will.”

“Like what?”

He drew a breath and let it slowly out. “Assuming I can get past your resistance, things like take over your mind. Bind you over to me so your will belongs to me. I won’t do that to you. I promise. But don’t say yes unless you trust me not to, because it’s something I could do.” He studied her face while he slid his hands upward and around to her inner thighs.

“What about you?”

“I don’t know what kind of power you have. Maybe enough to be dangerous to me.”

Paisley gazed down at him. She touched the innermost stripe down his cheek and the contact flashed hot. Just as if she were a witch. He wondered if she felt the heat or if it was just him getting worked up and thinking ahead to more touching, more than what they were doing now. “You want me to say yes.”

“Hell, yes.” He curled his fingers around her wrist and drew her arm toward him, palm up. He traced the course of one blue vein from her elbow to her wrist. He bent his head over her arm and breathed in the scent of her, and all the while, the tip of his tongue followed the vein he’d traced before.

Her hand fisted but she didn’t pull away. His teeth ached with the desire to bite, to make a breach in her skin through which blood would flow and he could taste her again. That rich, human coppery tang of Paisley. He pressed a finger against the pulse in her wrist and looked into her face again.

“Yes,” she said.

He was a little lost without any mental connection to tell him what she was feeling and thinking. Then he lowered his head to her arm and bit her.

C
HAPTER 25

P
aisley felt the scrape of Iskander’s teeth against the inside of her forearm and flinched. He had too firm a grip on her wrist for the reflex to break her free. He looked up, and she saw his eyes were cycling between blue and gold-flecked green. No one’s eyes did that. No one normal.

Iskander wasn’t human. She had to keep reminding herself of that.

He brought her arm up between them. The break in her skin hardly hurt at all, though a trickle of red zigzagged over the side of her arm. She knew she ought to be worried, but she wasn’t. She trusted him completely. Without reservation.

“I’m going to try now.”

She nodded. She longed to touch the stripes down the side of his cheek, or run her fingers through his hair, touching the blue that gleamed faintly there, too. But he was still on his knees on the floor, between her spread legs, and he still had his fingers wrapped around her wrist, and she didn’t want to do anything to break the intensity of his gaze on her. He drew a finger through the blood on her arm, brought his finger to his mouth, and licked his skin clean.

The air around them rippled with a desert breeze and the scent of sunbaked sand. He went up on his knees and touched his fingertip to her forehead. Pressure built up at the spot where his finger pressed against her, and she could have sworn she saw his eyes change color again. Fully green, but not a green any human eyes ever were.

“Relax,” he whispered. “Let me in.”

Iskander would never hurt her. Not ever. Nevertheless, she was aware that he was holding her hand, and that she was squeezing his fingers, and that Harsh really was right about him. He was dangerous. She saw him in front of her, the stripes down his face, as perfect as ever. She let go of her instinct to keep herself separate.

She concentrated on not fighting the pressure, and then he was there, a presence in her head that hadn’t been there before. Here. With her. His hand fell away from her forehead and landed on her thigh again. The pain in her arm vanished.

He scored his own wrist, swiped two fingers through the welling blood, and held them to her mouth. “Yes,” he said, low and soft and honey sweet. Fever heated her skin when she took his fingers in her mouth. The connection between them strengthened. “Yes,” he whispered. “Just like that.”

Arid warmth spread through her, dizzying her, settling into her chest and inhabiting her very bones. Her sense of Iskander deepened, and with that came thoughts, reactions, and even memories that didn’t belong to her.

He stood and scooped her into his arms when it turned out she was too dizzy to stand on her own. He took two steps across the room and put her down on the desk. Quickly, he cleared most of the surface of the table. The coffeemaker went onto the floor, and he disconnected her laptop from the power supply and slid that under the desk. Her papers he stacked into a pile, and then he stepped between her legs and leaned into her, and just kept going until she was on her back and his hands were on her sternum.
Beautiful. Human.

Anticipation.

The magic is there and can be touched.

Need. Desire.

His eyes were a different color again. Not blue but a dark green-blue that moved and swirled and made her think there was something alive there that was more than Iskander. She blinked hard but that didn’t change. “I feel your magic,” he said in a low voice. His hands remained on her sternum, one over the other. She felt…
something
flow from him and into her. The sensation set off a vibration deep in her chest.

And then.

Everything changed.

It was like a switch flipped inside her. The vibration turned into an electric hum that roared through her, and when it ended, her skin rippled with gooseflesh as ice-cold fingers danced up and down her spine and along the back of her neck, her arms, and even her legs. His magic echoed in her and entwined with her. She reached for him, clumsy because this was too new for her. They shared the same mental space—what he’d said would happen. He was telling her so without words.

“Paisley.” He put his hands on either side of her face. His eyes fixed on hers, and she fell into the wide pool of this new part of him. She disassociated with herself and briefly thought she must be looking in a mirror. She saw herself, her eyes open, a slash of red hair across her white tank top. She saw a stranger who was familiar to her. Herself, but she was not in her body. Her body was bigger. She had to be careful of her strength, of desires that spoke to her of dominance and bonds that would tie them together forever. One of her hands—no, that was Iskander’s hand—rested on her upper chest, but the other slid down to the fastening of her jeans.

At one and the same time, she wanted him—Iskander, his naked skin against hers and their bodies intertwined—and wanted to unfasten Paisley’s jeans and touch, touch that human body, stroke, kiss, taste the salt of her, hear the intake of her breath, show her what he felt and bring her to orgasm and tell her he didn’t want anyone but her.

A moan slipped from her, and she did not know whose arousal she was feeling. Her own or Iskander’s?

Then boundaries reappeared. She saw Iskander normally, but with the link between their minds in place. She reached for him, connected with his warm, smooth skin. She wanted him to touch her the way he had before, with all the tender attention that didn’t hide his lust. Her body was primed for him. Ready for him. A fluttery sensation settled between her legs, a fullness, an aching longing for him, for the fullness of his penis inside her.

His breath came hard. He had his hands planted on the desk on either side of her head, and he lowered his torso to hers. “This is how I feel about you,” he said with his mouth close to her ear. “Paisley, I don’t know what the hell is going on with us. I really don’t. But this is how I feel, and I say let’s find out what that means.”

She pushed up, mostly sitting. Iskander stood between her legs, his hands clasped on the top of his head, his body bowed back, his lower lip caught between his teeth. She put her hand over his erection. “Does this hurt?”

“Worse than you can imagine. Can you help me out?”

“I can surely try.” She reached out and fingered the top button of his jeans, then pushed the metal button through the buttonhole. Her little finger slid along the side of his erection. “Is that better?” she asked.

He straightened his body but kept his hands on his head and his eyes on her face. His mouth curved up on one side. “Not yet, cupcake. Not yet.”

Carefully, she undid the rest of the buttons on his jeans while he stood there, and then she scooted forward and got one hand down the front of his boxers to cup him and the other down the back. His skin was fever hot. The muscles of his backside flexed as he pushed his pelvis toward her. “Now?”

“I’m hurting bad.”

“Maybe it’s because your clothes are in the way.”

With a growl that came from somewhere deep in his throat, he kicked off his shoes and stepped out of his jeans and his underwear. He stripped off his shirt, too, and Paisley could hardly believe he was here, ready, willing, and so wonderfully nude. Her awareness of his mental state hovered in her mind. She
felt
his arousal, too.

The blue stripes continued down his torso, and he stood unmoving while she touched all that lovely male body, that warm skin and taut muscle. He moved forward, then leaned in and kissed her. She put her arms around his shoulders, and twined her fingers upward to the back of his head. Her mouth opened under his, and their tongues met.

He moved his hand between them again and undid the top button of her jeans. He gripped the tab of her zipper. All the while, they were kissing like there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow for them. He let go of her zipper and pulled up her shirt, higher and higher. They separated long enough for him to get it over her head, and he went for her bra. “I think I should help you, too,” he said.

“Oh, please do,” she said.

He put his fingers on her chest and slid them down, over the curve of her breasts, trailing across her nipples, pausing, teasing, oh, teasing until she was ready to let him do anything he wanted, then angling down to cup her. “Beautiful.”

She lay back and he followed. His mouth on her breast was hot and wet, and if he hadn’t slid her zipper down the rest of the way, she would have done it for him. The edges of her reality narrowed to Iskander and her. The electric hum continued to zing through her with every breath she took. He yanked on her jeans and she helped him get them off her. He was as desperate as she was.

“Let me see you,” he said, peeling her arms from around his neck. His voice came at her, low and urgent and impatient. “All of you.”

He looked at her, his hands stroking her, fingers dipping into and out of her navel and heading down, and each and every touch was like lightning through her. The entire time, he was there in her head, and that electricity in her wanted him, sought him out. She wanted him. She wanted his magic around her. Her mouth around him.

She pushed him back and slid off the desk to her knees and cupped his balls with one hand and found a sensitive spot on the underside of his penis. He wasn’t circumcised.

“Oh, hell, yes,” he said when she took him into her mouth. She loved the salty tang of him, the heat, the soft skin and hardness, and she loved his reaction. He wrapped his hands around her head. His fingers tangled in her hair and helped her find the best motion.

He pulled away before he came, then picked her up to set her back onto the desk. He lay her down again and brought her hips toward the edge of the desk, and Paisley arched her body while he thrust inside her, because it was wonderful, this sensation of his filling her, the slide of him in her, and she nearly lost her mind.

“You’re who I want,” he said. His words tripped over themselves. “You. This. Paisley, I want this with you.” She clenched around him, and he threw back his head. “Fuck. Do that again.”

She brought up her legs while he held her hips steady, and, Lord, but the way he moved inside her was heaven—a roll of his hips, a push forward. Inside her, there was a pool of electricity, the source of the hum that vibrated through her, and Iskander reached for it, skimmed along the surface and drew back. He did the same physically, too. She shared in his arousal, the pressure of her body around his, the desire for the magic that could be brought up and intertwined.