“I feel an instinctive need to make you come again, little human,” he purred, shifting his hand and pressing a second finger inside her. “Let’s see if I can manage that, hmmm?”
His fingers hooked and rubbed, and Ella gasped and arched and begged for more. He gave her more pleasure than she had ever imagined and simultaneously stripped away every last impulse she might have to resist him. She had propositioned Kees thinking to prove to him that he did feel emotion, that what was between them was more than just instinct, more than just the animal urge to mate, and here he had reduced her to little more than a female in heat. She would have done almost anything in that moment just for the pleasure of feeling his body joined to hers.
“Please,” she half sobbed, unsure if she wanted him to stop or give her more, unsure if she could take it either way.
He made the decision for her, adding a third finger, stretching her, preparing her, even as he pressed the heel of his hand hard against her swollen clit. The sensations quickly overwhelmed her, and she came again with a scream, hoarser this time, her throat already roughened by the first time.
Her body clamped down around his fingers, but he stroked through her grip for several long seconds, prolonging the orgasm, keeping the sharp sensations rolling over her in wave after wave. But this time, he moved before the pleasure could drag her under.
His hand slid away, leaving her empty and still reeling, but not for long. In the space between heartbeats, he moved over her, overwhelming her, bracing his hands beside her shoulders and using his knees to spread her legs even wider until she felt the burning stretch high in her inner thighs.
Her hands came up, damp and shaking, and she gripped his shoulders desperately, her gaze locking with his as he settled himself in the cradle of her hips.
She felt the head of his cock, wide and damp with his own desire, pressing urgently against her. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t moan, but she could shift her hips just a little, just enough to tilt them to a more welcoming angle. Just enough to lure him inside her, into the place that ached and burned to feel him.
His lips parted, and she thought he meant to speak, but he only groaned and eased forward, breaching the tight ring of muscle at her entrance and feeding her the head of his cock.
She felt the burn, the stretching, but it wasn’t enough. He had made her so hungry, she didn’t know if there was such a thing anymore. All she knew was that she ached, deep inside, and he was the only thing that could ease her.
Her lips parted as his gaze slid down, watching as she licked the dry, cracked skin before returning to lock with hers. She could see no blackness now, only fire. Flames leapt and danced in his eyes, a million shades of red and gold, orange and amber, blue and white at the center, where he burned the hottest.
The heat threatened to sear her, to leave scars like a permanent brand on her flesh. Instead of fearing it, Ella longed for it. She wanted to throw herself into those flames and emerge new, like a phoenix taking flight.
She lifted her head from the mattress, straining toward him. She didn’t know what she thought, if she honestly believed she could walk into the fire of his eyes. She just knew she needed to be closer, to be one, to feel him with every inch of her body and every fiber of her soul.
And oh, he gave her inches.
With a muffled roar, his restraint shattered. Gone was the slow, measured torment. Kees thrust inside her with the impact of a battering ram, forcing her tight channel to part around his invading shaft. She felt him so deep inside her, she pictured him bumping up against her heart. She felt him nudge her cervix, but the slight instant of discomfort only seemed to make her hotter.
After pulling back, he thrust again, this time causing nothing but wild, unspeakable pleasure. He settled into a fast, pounding rhythm, and all Ella could do was hold on and hope she made it through in one piece.
Her hands gripped him hard, her nails digging in when sweat made his skin slick and slippery. She felt her toes curl and drew her legs up to wrap around his pistoning hips.
Kees rode her like a madman. He seemed utterly lost in the moment, his breath billowing in and out like steam from a mighty engine, but his eyes never left her face.
He stared at her like she held the secrets of the universe, but the only truth she had to offer was the one he had already discovered: that they fit together like pieces of a puzzle, two halves of a whole. One being, separated by time, by space, by species and experience, yet united by magic and passion.
Despite the pleasure he poured on her like hot summer rain, Ella had thought she was finished. She hadn’t expected the second climax, but when a third threatened to gather deep in her womb, she wanted to scream for mercy. Another explosion like that might just rip her apart.
Kees didn’t seem to care. He continued to ride her, hard and desperate. His hands dropped to close about her hips. Shifting his weight backwards, he slid his palms beneath her and curled his fingers around her ass cheeks to yank her firmly into his increasingly wild thrusts.
In and out he thrust, but his rhythm started to break down. Now he just moved according to the force of his lust. Ella felt her body tighten, felt her clit draw up, felt her heart leap into her throat as sensation blew over her, rushing in like a tidal wave and sweeping everything but her and Kees away in its path.
Even as her pussy clenched tight, she heard his sharp curse and felt his hips jerk convulsively. His cock twitched inside her, and he came with a roar, bellowing her name as he released a torrent of heat deep inside her.
Still shuddering, he collapsed atop her on a long, strangled groan. It sounded as if someone had just wrung out his soul.
Ella knew precisely how he felt.
Chapter Eight
Kees felt nothing.
He reminded himself of that, over and over, but doubt continued to claw at his gut, unsettling him. He had intended to demonstrate to Ella that a Guardian was ruled by logic and instinct. He wanted her to realize that no emotion polluted his thoughts or actions. Sex, after all, was the most fundamentally instinctive of acts, an action ruled by hormones and the most primal and reptilian areas of the brain.
Instead, he had ended up making love to her, showering her with pleasure as if she were the most precious thing in his universe. And he’d done it all for the simple joy of hearing her sigh.
What in the name of the Light was the matter with him?
Kees lay in the dark of the bedroom and stared at the ceiling. Sometime ago, he had rolled off his human lover for fear of crushing her and settled onto his back. She had followed, soft and sleepy, and curled against his side like a contented kitten. She’d nestled her cheek into the hollow of his shoulder, draped an arm across his chest, and promptly drifted into sleep. So, at least one of them was getting some rest.
Not that he really needed any. He’d been resting for centuries, after all, and could go for days at a time before adjusting to the pace of the waking world. Even then, he’d need no more than three or four hours of rest a night to remain at full energy. His problem, then, wasn’t lack of sleep; it was the thoughts keeping him awake.
Thoughts, he told himself firmly. Not emotions.
Just the idea that he might be experiencing human emotion for the first time in his long existence filled Kees with unease. He’d battled and slept through ages of men without ever suffering such an affliction. He hadn’t thought it was possible.
It shouldn’t be. The Guardians had been formed from stone, carved by the powers of the Light, and summoned from the ether into bodies as hard and enduring as their mission. They needed to be tough, strong, impervious to all but the fiercest attacks; otherwise, they could never succeed in keeping the demons of the Darkness at bay. Like mountains of rock, he and his brothers withstood the forces of evil that buffeted them, wearing down the opposition until it could be banished into the prisons of the barren planes.
Never had he heard of a Guardian who felt as the humans felt. Guardians experienced rage and f
rustration at the continued existence of the Seven. Those glimpses of feeling fueled their warfare, made them stronger and deadlier, but beyond that, they existed in an eternal state of cool detachment.
Even for the Wardens who served them, no Guardian ever developed feelings of caring or love. Kees still raged over Gregory’s death, but not because he cared about the mage; he raged because the nocturnis had dared to strike against him while he slept. Part of his task was to protect the Wardens of the Guild so that their mission continued for as long as the Seven continued to exist. Failing at that task angered Kees, and he had to remind himself not to clench his hand around the soft human female beside him. He had no desire to injure her, and less to wake her.
He still needed to think.
How could an emotionless Guardian define what he experienced around his small human? The lust was easy. Lust was simple, as he’d told Ella, animal and instinctive. Kees had known lust before, mostly after battle, when the hot tide of fury still coursed through him. In those times, he and his brothers had taken women, some human, some mages. Occasionally a minor guard who had joined in the fight. Sex acted as a release and a pressure valve, allowing the Guardians to let go of the intensity of the fight so that they could settle once more to sleep. That made it even harder for him to understand why sex with the human beside him didn’t make him feel relaxed and ready to slumber, but awake and electric and hungry to taste her again.
Was this some sort of magic she possessed that he had never encountered before?
Kees had a feeling such an explanation was much too easy.
In actuality it didn’t matter how or why he experienced these unfamiliar sensations around Ella. What mattered was that such a thing could not be allowed. Lust he could tolerate, but from now on, Kees would ensure that no more than lust would color his view of the small human. He would not allow it.
When dawn broke, he would make certain that the woman knew exactly where she stood. There would be no more tenderness, no more of her attempting to probe his soul and convince him of impossible ideas.
Kees was a Guardian, and while the loss of so many members of the Guild of Wardens made finding someone with Ella’s magical talent critical to their future, he must make her understand what the future would hold.
Stone and magic, not sweetness and love.
Resolved on his next moves, Kees closed his eyes. He would need his rest if he intended to follow through with his plan, and Kees always followed through.
* * *
“Today we must begin your training.”
Ella stepped out of the bathroom wearing a stretchy tank top and baggy pajama pants, holding a towel to her still dripping hair. She froze at the bark in Kees’s voice. Why did he sound angry?
“What?”
Kees stood in the doorway to the bedroom, his natural form filling the doorway, his wings actually rising above the lintel on either side of the opening. He appeared even more enormous that usual. And more intimidating. His harsh features were drawn tight into a fearsome scowl, and he glared at her as if he found her a particularly bothersome irritation.
What the hell was going on?
“You need to learn to control your magic, then you need to learn to use it,” he snapped, his expression never changing. “I had hoped Gregory would take on the responsibility, or at least contact the Guild and ask them to assign you a proper mentor, but neither of those options is available to us any longer. Until we locate another Warden and discover the current state of the Guild, I will have to do it myself.”
Ella had been a little surprised to wake in her bed alone an hour earlier, but she hadn’t worried. Maybe she should have. The Guardian currently staring at her like something nasty on the sole of his shoe—you know, if he had worn shoes—bore absolutely no resemblance to her lover from the night before. All she could remember were stunning mutual orgasms and the sense of peace that filled her as she had fallen asleep in his arms. Had she slapped his face in her sleep or something?
Clearly something had gone on that Ella wasn’t aware of, because this was not how she’d been expecting things to go between them this morning. Awkwardness she could have dealt with. Hell, everyone felt a little off the first time they woke up next to a new person, but she did not appreciate being treated like a mistake.
A mistake. That was exactly how Kees was looking at her, and Ella felt her spine stiffen in response. Gathering up the resulting anger made it easier to ignore the hurt.
And there was a lot of hurt.
“Don’t do me any favors,” she bit out, squaring her shoulders and meeting him glare for glare. “Frankly, I’m not sure I’m up for any lessons at the moment. Particularly not if you’re teaching them.”
“We don’t have a choice.” His words stopped her as she made to turn back to the bathroom. Right now, she wanted to slam the door and get a bit of space to regroup, but Kees didn’t appear inclined to cooperate. “It doesn’t matter what either of us would prefer. Your magic is out of control, and that makes you vulnerable. The nocturnis have clearly made Wardens a target of attack for whatever reason, but we can’t assume that they wouldn’t also go after latent talents like you. You need to learn control, so that you can then learn to defend.”
Ella gritted her teeth. “Trust me, big guy, if I weren’t in control of my magic, you wouldn’t still be standing. Right now, I wouldn’t let you teach me to finger paint, much less cast spells or some shit. I think a better idea would be for you to get the hell out of my apartment and come back about half past kiss-my-ass, okay?”
He ignored her. “Finish dressing. I will wait in the other room.”
“Yeah, well, you can wait until hell freezes over.”
Ella swept around and stalked back into the bathroom, slamming the door hard behind her. No sound from Kees seeped through from the other side.
Sagging against the wooden panels, Ella let herself sink to the floor. What the hell had just happened? she asked herself, drawing her knees up to her chest and cupping her head in her hands. How the hell had they gone from lovers to opposing sides in a new cold war without her even being conscious for the opening skirmish?
Sometime while she slept, a bug of gigantic proportions had crawled up Kees Livingston’s ass. (Yeah, don’t think she’d forgotten about that little pun of his, but him having a last name—even one as obvious as that—made being mad at him a lot more comfortable. It was easier to mentally yell at someone with two names than with just one. Better scansion.) Ella really couldn’t think of a better explanation. After all, the last time they’d interacted with each other, she’d been too busy coming to somehow piss him off. And considering that he’d made her do it three times, somehow she didn’t think her orgasms were the root of his issues.
And boy, did that gargoyle have ’sues. Big floppy clown ’sues, as a matter of fact, but that didn’t give him the right to take those out on Ella. She was the only one helping him at the moment. The least he could do was treat her with a little human decency.
Of course, Kees wasn’t human, so what would he know about that? Maybe gargoyle decency was an entirely different sort of thing. Or maybe gargoyles didn’t have any decency to begin with.
She wanted to stick with that explanation, just to make it easier to hate the big, winged jerk, but she couldn’t do it. Kees had proved to be remarkably decent in the short—ridiculously short, considering what they’d done last night—time that she’d known him. He’d never hurt her, he’d defended her, tried to protect her from the police, and shown her appreciation for the help she’d given him, even if his impatience simmered at the lack of immediate answers to all his questions.
No, Kees was a decent guy, for a gargoyle.
Sighing, Ella pushed to her feet and reached for the hair dryer. Sitting on the bathroom floor brooding wasn’t going to get her anywhere. Whatever Kees’s problem was, she couldn’t figure it out from behind a closed door. For that, she’d need to be with him.
Which, on the bright side, w
ould also give her the opportunity to gift him with a good, solid kick to the nuts, if he continued to act like an asshole.
Feeling the tiniest bit better, Ella turned on the noisy machine and set about preparing for the day. Whatever it turned out to hold, she would deal with it, even if that meant voluntarily taking instructions from the grumpy, bug-up-his-ass gargoyle in the other room. On top of everything else, Ella was just too damned proud to hide away just because the jerk had hurt her feelings. Oh, no, she was way better than that.
When she stepped out of the bedroom fifteen minutes later, she had her hair pulled back in a loose braid and her armor on, in the form of comfortable black yoga pants and a slim-fitting T-shirt in soft pink. She didn’t see any reason to dress up for magic lessons, and the yoga pants gave her lots of freedom of movement.
You know, for ball-kicking.
Drawing back her shoulders, she spoke clearly and without expression. “I’m ready.”
Kees looked up from where he’d been moving her furniture out of the center of the room and nodded. His face remained carved in harsh lines, but Ella ignored it. Let him enjoy his bad mood. She had better things to do than worry about him.
“Fine. Come here and sit.”
He pointed to a spot on the carpet, roughly in the center of the room. Ella walked forward and sank to the floor, folding her legs in front of her tailor-fashion.
“So, what now?” she asked flatly.
“Now we get to work.”
* * *
Two hours later, Ella appreciated why Kees called it work. A fine sheen of sweat covered her forehead, and she felt as if she’d just run a half marathon in really old sneakers.
The first thing he made her do was open the door, and frankly, it had been the hardest. She still cringed at the memories, expecting to lose all control and hear the screaming and the grinding and the explosive crash of metal on metal. She knew Kees must have seen her expression, but he said nothing, only told her to let the magic through until she gave in and allowed it to escape.
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