“Tell me where you want me to touch you, angel.”
Fucking hell. “Everywhere.”
Shadows filtered in over his eyes as he set me down onto my feet and moved his hands to my jeans. He didn’t bother with buttons or zippers or the mere seconds it would take to undo them. He grabbed a hold of the thick fabric and ripped those open too. The sound of tearing denim sent shivers of excitement blazing down my spine.
With his eyes locked on mine, he slid his palms down the sides of my waist and over my hips, taking with them the tattered remnants of the pants that once covered my limbs.
My knees knocked into each other as he looked up at me on bended knee, a wicked grin blessing his face as he helped me step out of my jeans. I waited for him to make his way back up, but apparently, he wasn’t quite done yet.
Licking his lips, he picked up my leg and pressed his mouth against my calf, kissing and licking my skin as he moved to a spot behind my knee before continuing back up along my inner thigh.
It was all I could do to keep from moaning; from screaming out his name like a banshee.
That is, until he propped my leg over his shoulder and buried his face against my underwear. My hands grasped the bar counter on either side of me, my nails digging into the solid oak as his fingers gently brushed my underwear to the side, making way for his glorious mouth. Everything in me caught fire as he all but made love to me with his tongue, moving at just the right pace and touching all the right spots. He always knew exactly what to do to make me come undone, to make me melt into a million drops of liquid gold the way he’d done countless times before.
What started out as a steady stream of mounting pleasure soon exploded into a crushing wave that flooded my entire system like an illicit drug. I had come undone, unraveled at the seam before him and he hadn’t even broken a sweat.
Before I could finish riding the wave of my orgasm, he lifted me up into his arms again and positioned himself between my still trembling legs.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asked huskily, his jaw muscle rigid from his own failing self-control.
I shook my head and then dug my fingernails into his shoulders. “No—keep going.”
His eyes blackened to the shade of a solar eclipse as he pulled my lips to his and then pushed himself inside me.
I cried out as a sharp pang of pain kissed me where he’d entered me, but it quickly turned to pleasure as soon as he began to rock against my body. I whimpered against his mouth as the rest of my orgasm slammed into me, making it feel as though it had only just stated, and like it had no immediate plans of ever slowing down.
His hands gripped my hips, controlling my body as his thrusts grew stronger. Every nerve ending in my body was alive and firing off, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before he took me over the edge again.
It never took him long.
The things he did to my body…the things he made me feel. It was unnatural. Unfair. And I’d probably never feel this way again with another man for the rest of my life. Certainly not a human one. I was setting myself up for failure, for a lifetime of disappointment, and yet I couldn’t get my damn ass off the ride if my life depended on it.
His movements sped up and I knew I was close. Not wanting this to end just yet, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to block him out…to bring myself back from the edge of the cliff and drag the moment out as long as I could.
“Look at me,” he demanded, and I did.
My hands fisted into his hair as his lips caught mine, his eyes molten and his skin slick with sweat. “I love you, angel,” he said softly against my mouth, inadvertently sending me right over the edge all over again.
He watched me come undone in his arms, basking in the look on my face as I rode out the endless wave of aftershocks, and when I was done, he buried his face in my neck and growled, releasing himself inside of me.
It was dark and savage and fucking perfect.
And if this were any other person, I’d be bouncing off him quicker than a hand on a flame, afraid that he just sent me into the beginning stages of teen pregnancy. But he was a Revenant, and I was a Descendant, and a baby between the two of us was not possible. It was the way it was; the way it’s always been…
For better or worst.
And so, I didn’t concern myself with inconsequential matters. Instead, I let him hold me in his arms and basked in the steady drum of our two hearts beating as one.
11. GIRL TALK
I arrived at school early the next day. Half an hour early to be exact, which frankly, was a new record for me. After my mind-numbing romp in the sack with Dominic, I’d spent the rest of the night tossing and turning in bed after an all too real nightmare of apocalyptic proportions yanked me from my slumber.
As bad as my turbulent night of unrest had been, it wasn’t all in vain because if there was anything I’d gained from it it was that I’d had plenty of time to think about what the necromancer had said, and the more I’d thought about it, the more I found myself reaching the same conclusion: I had to protect Trace.
Even if that meant protecting him from his own memories. At least until I figured out another way to get him out of this horrible mess. One that didn’t include Trace going crazy or becoming a vegetable.
I just had to keep him together long enough to do it.
I walked through the halls in a strange, hyper-focused daze, peering down every corridor for the one person I didn’t want to talk to, but needed to. Nikki Asshole Parker.
Unfortunately, I was going to have to retract my claws and work with her. At least for a little while. The more people I had on my side the better, and while I was planning on working myself to the bone looking for a way to keep Trace safe and sound—to stop his memories from sinking him—it didn’t mean that me and Nikki were okay. Or that I was going to forget what she did to him. On purpose or otherwise.
But I did have to place nice with her right now…for Trace’s sake, and I definitely needed to make sure she knew exactly how dire Trace’s situation had become. The fact that Trace had forgotten me was the least of my worries right now. The only thing that mattered was making sure I stayed forgotten. Regardless of how much it gutted me.
“Morning, Blackburn,” said Caleb as he fell into step with me in the hallway.
“Morning,” I answered flatly, distracted with my search for my number one nemesis.
He quirked his brow at me. “Bad night?”
My cheek flushed with heat as my thoughts returned to Dominic. At least that part of the night wasn’t bad, though I couldn’t say the same for the rest of it. “I didn’t get much sleep,” I answered, keeping it vague.
He made a sympathetic face and then looked me over. “Where are you off to in such a rush?”
“I’m looking for Nikki.” I stopped abruptly and turned to face him. “Have you seen her yet?”
“Yeah—she walked in with Trace about ten minutes ago,” he said and then eyed me wearily as though trying to gauge my intentions.
I rolled my eyes at him. “I just want to talk to her,” I quickly clarified in case he thought I was looking to put my foot up her ass. I mean, I was, but I wasn’t going to do that. Not yet anyway.
He thought it over for a moment and then nodded. “Last I saw, she was headed into the girl’s washrooms with Morgan.”
“Thanks. I’ll catch you later,” I said and then spun around towards the washrooms.
I should have known. If she wasn’t stalking Trace’s locker like a lioness in heat, she was gossiping in the washrooms with Morgan. Because what else does a psychotic troll do with her free time?
“Contouring is so out. It’s all about color-blocking,” lectured Nikki as I walked into the washroom. She was standing at the sink beside Morgan who was applying what looked like a thick coat of paint to her face.
“Can you be any more basic?” I said, crossing my arms as I came to a stop beside her in front of the mirror. “How does this even remotely matter with everything going on right no
w?”
“Keeping up appearances is always important. Something you obviously know nothing about based on that thing you call a face.” She fake-smiled at me through the mirror. “You should really check out some YouTube tutorials. There’s people that can help with that,” she added gesturing to my face with her hand.
“I wish I could say the same about your personality,” I fired back.
“That might’ve hurt…if I was less fortunate in the looks department.” She turned to Morgan and laughed. “Who needs a personality when you have a face like this?” Her laughter turned into a cackle and I couldn’t help but shake my head at how low she would go just to make herself feel an inch taller.
“Keep telling yourself that, Nikki. Whatever gets you through the day.” Her cackle abruptly stopped, and I took that as my cue to throw a fake smile right back at her. “So, anyway, if you’re done complimenting yourself, we need to talk.”
“Here we go again,” she said, sounding annoyed as she grabbed a lip gloss from Morgan’s makeup case and started applying it over her cherry red lipstick. “I swear, Jemma, if I didn’t already know you, I’d think you were into me.”
“You would,” I deadpanned. “Your delusion knows no bounds.”
Morgan snorted, though quickly buried it as soon as Nikki shot her a dirty look.
I hadn’t even been in the room with the witch for a full minute and already I was getting a migraine. “Listen, I think Trace is starting to remember me,” I blurted out, deciding to cut right to the chase. The sooner this conversation happened, the sooner I could get the hell away from her. “You do know what that means, don’t you?”
Her hand stilled in front of her lips as her eyes darted to me through the mirror. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“You heard me, Nikki. Or is all that makeup affecting your hearing?”
She schooled her features. “And what prey tell makes you think he’s remembering you?”
“Well, for starters, he’s been having dreams about me.” As much as I wanted to rub that it her face—that despite everything she did to erase me, I was still in his heart—I couldn’t bring myself to feel the small victory.
Trace remembering me was a time-bomb waiting to explode, and there was nothing good about that.
She whipped around and faced me. “How the hell would you know that?”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Because he told me, dumbass.”
“He talked to you?” I couldn’t tell if she was jealous or just straight up panicking. “When?”
“Yesterday, after school.”
Her shoulders sunk for a moment, but she quickly recovered, apparently shaking off whatever it was that had just hit her. Standing taller now, she said, “So what? It doesn’t mean anything. They’re just dreams.”
I gaped at her and her asinine level of denial. “They started before I got back to town.”
“And?”
My anger erupted. “I seriously hope you’re not that fucking clueless about what you actually did to him!”
“I saved his life!” she shot back, but it had less punch than it did the first time she said it to me at All Saints.
I pinched the bridge of my nose and groaned. “I’m not here to argue with you about who did what,” I said, irritated that every conversation with her led to a pissing match. Gripping the edge of the sink, I pushed forward into her personal space and dropped my voice. “I’m here to make sure you get how bad this is for him. How dangerous this is becoming.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” she snapped back in the familiar icy tone I’d grown accustomed to from her.
Morgan had stopped caking on her makeup and was now facing me too.
They both looked like a couple of deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming trunk. Unfortunately, I was that truck about to hit them with a dose of reality.
“Do you have any idea what will happen to him if he remembers? If the wall around his memories actually comes down?” I asked expectantly. For her own sake, she better be damn well aware of what was at stake here.
“Of course, I do,” she said and folded her arms across her chest, but for some reason, I wasn’t buying it. If she knew the consequences, she’d be a hell of a lot more worried about the fact that Trace was dreaming about me.
I took a step towards her. “Then you know that if that wall around his memories starts to crack that Trace is going to crack right along with it, right?”
Her eyebrows pulled together as she swallowed noisily.
“And you’re obviously aware that if that happens, Trace could very well end up as a vegetable or worse, be stuck reliving his death over and over again in his mind. Right?” When she didn’t answer, I pushed harder, “RIGHT?!”
“Nikki? What the hell is she talking about?” barked Morgan. Her emerald eyes were wild with horror as she grabbed Nikki’s shoulder and spun her around. “Why aren’t you answering her?”
“I’m trying to! Give me a damn minute to think.”
“A minute to think about what?” asked Morgan, flabbergasted. “You either knew about this or you didn’t. Which one is it?”
It was obvious then that Nikki had never mentioned any of this to Morgan. Which either meant she had no idea what she was getting Trace into when she brought him back from the dead, or she knew and she hid it from Morgan anyway, knowing that Morgan would not be okay with the risks if she’d known them.
“Oh, my god, Nikki. I can’t believe you!” Morgan’s wild eyes snapped to mine. “I swear to god, Jemma, I had no idea. I would have never been okay with this if I knew that was even a possibility,” she said, distancing herself from Nikki and her crimes against nature. “Trace is my friend. You know that.”
“Oh, come off it. He’s my friend too,” barked Nikki, probably feeling as though Morgan were turning on her. Which she kind of was. “Nobody here cares about Trace more than I do.”
I scoffed at her definition of caring.
“Then how could you do this to him knowing what the risks were?” challenged Morgan, her eyes glowering with anger—with disgust for her friend.
“Well, obviously, I didn’t exactly know all the risks, Morgan!” she shot back with the kind of indignity she had no right feeling right now.
“So, you just brought him back without even thinking about the consequences? You can’t be that desperate, Nikki!” Morgan looked horrified that her friend was capable of doing something so dangerous and thoughtless, and I was just standing there like, did you just meet her? “My god, Nikki. How could you?! You had no right.”
“Oh, piss off, Morgan, would you!” snapped Nikki, turning a sickly shade of gray now. “Trace is completely fine. Jemma’s just mad that I have him now and that he can’t remember her, so she’s trying to come up with a bunch of what-if scenarios that don’t even apply. Because he’s fine!”
“He’s not fine,” I said, choosing to ignore the rest of the hogwash she’d just spit out. “The only reason he’s functional right now is because his memories are being blocked. That wall is the only thing protecting him, but he’s starting to remember me subconsciously, so whatever the hell you did to him isn’t holding up anymore.”
Morgan squeezed her eyes shut and ran a hand through her auburn curls as Nikki’s face turned from ashen to snow white. She looked as though she were about to be sick.
I didn’t let that stop me from saying what needed to be said. “It’s only a matter of time before it all comes crashing down on him…unless we do something. Right now.”
Spinning away from me, Nikki all but launched herself through the bathroom stall and then hurled the entirety of her breakfast into the toilet.
I stood back and waited for her to finish, though I felt nauseous just listening to the sound of it. And by the look on Morgan’s face, she was feeling the same way I was. That or she was just completely repulsed by what her best friend had done. Either way, she made no attempt to help her or comfort her.
Nikki emerged f
rom the bathroom stall a couple of minutes later with a wade of toilet paper in her hand, wiping her mouth and blinking back the tears that had sprang to her eyes.
If it hadn’t been for all the horrible things she’d done to me, I may have felt bad for her.
“Look, I’m not here to go to war with you, Nikki, and I’m definitely not here to argue about who Trace loves more, because, let’s face it, we all know the answer to that. I’m here because I want to protect Trace and you should be here for the same reason.”
She didn’t answer me, but I knew she was getting my point loud and clear.
“You need to fix whatever is breaking, and you need to make sure it doesn’t go any further.”
“How does she do that?” asked Morgan, her eyes were filled with determination as though she were ready to ride off into war and singlehandedly win it for us.
Nikki looked up at me and waited for my answer, her eyes still glistening from the force of getting sick.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” I snapped back and then fixed my eyes on Nikki. “You’re the one that did this. Are you telling me you don’t know how to stop it, or at least slow it down?”
“I never said that,” she said icily and then blew her nose into the tissue paper.
“Good,” I said and breathed a sign of relief. “So, what are you going to do?”
When she didn’t answer me, Morgan prompted her, “Nikki?”
“I don’t know…yet.”
Unbelievable. “That’s not good enough, Nikki.”
“Back off, Jemma! I said I’ll figure it out! I just need a damn minute to think, and I need you two to get out of my face and stop stressing me out!” she barked and then barreled out of the washroom without bothering to wait for her friend.
Morgan looked over at me, her eyes churning with fear and doubt and worry. “Is Trace going to be okay? I mean, do you really think she can help him?” she asked me, as though I had any more insight into her friend than she did.
At this point, judging by how clueless Nikki was about the danger she’d put Trace in by bringing him back from the dead, I had absolutely zero confidence in her ability to figure this out.
Incarnate: A Dark Paranormal Romance (The Marked Saga Book 5) Page 10