by Michele Hauf
He swallowed. Now was not the time to reveal he’d climaxed while walking through her dreams.
“Like I said, I don’t think this will work—me and you. And I don’t want to piss off your werewolf. Maybe I should locate Rainier myself, bring him back here, and then you can do the bridging.”
A pout had never worked so devastatingly upon his heart. For a woman who was innocent in the whole love-and-emotion department, Aby could work him like a puppet.
And when she leaned in to kiss him, Max knew pushing her away would damage her far worse than another innocent kiss might chink his armor.
A simple kiss was all she asked. And he complied. But the press of her lips upon his mouth stirred him so quickly, he deepened the kiss and held her tight.
Was it because of her strangely innocent sexuality that he was attracted to her? Talk about the Madonna and the whore. But Aby was reversed in such a manner that he didn’t know how to take her.
“How can you leave me here alone, when if I come along with you there will be more kisses?” she asked. “Don’t you like kissing me, Max?”
“Your kisses, I can honestly say, I love.”
And he kissed her again, pulling her close, his hand spreading across her back. The way she moved into him was so automatic, as if they had been made for one another. And maybe they were. In two centuries he’d never met a woman who had dreamed about him so viscerally.
“There could be more than kisses,” she repeated.
He skated his partly open lips across her collarbone, yet their contact was only building his frustration. A man shouldn’t complain about getting to touch and kiss a woman like Aby.
So he wouldn’t.
A moan, deep and throaty, came from him, not her. He was letting this woman get to him in a way that he’d not allowed a woman to breach his defenses since Rebecca.
The wet skim of her tongue to his lip surprised him. He broke the kiss and searched her eyes. Dazzle and redirect was how the magicians did it. She’d dazzled and now she was switching the game to the redirect.
“More please,” she whispered eagerly.
So he took his time, tracing the underside of her lip with his tongue and allowing her to re-create his actions. It was exquisite, this teaching and in turn, learning how willing he was to surrender control, to follow Aby’s signals.
Or was it merely the power of her sparkle that distracted him as if he were a damned magpie?
When she undid the top two buttons on his shirt and the flat of her palm seared his flesh, he sucked in a breath.
“You like that?” she murmured against his mouth.
“I feel your touch all the way to my toes.” A roaring need coursed through his system. A need that could never be met—at least not in Aby’s waking hours.
This was going to be a long trip.
“We should go. The flight leaves in little over an hour, and we’ve got to check in, even if it is a private jet.”
“A private jet?” she said, picking up her suitcase. “Really?”
“I’ve a few contacts. I’d hate for your first flight to be in coach in those cattle cars they call an airplane. Hand me that pink monstrosity, and let’s head out.”
The jet was luxurious, and owned by a philanthropist friend. That’s all Max would tell her. Didn’t matter. Aby enjoyed the whole experience. She could even find the fun in her ears popping as the plane increased altitude.
The interior was done in butter-soft russet leather that Max had commented was the same color as her hair. The chairs and couch were plush and a sound system displayed flashing red and green lights, waiting the touch of a button.
When Max returned from talking to the pilot, he announced they had seven hours to get to know each other. And Aby knew exactly how she intended to do that.
He’d finally shucked off the huge dark coat and hung the whip near the door. He offered her bottled water and sat on the couch opposite her.
Aby sipped the cool water and twisted on the cap. Then she slinked across the aisle to sit beside Max. As if drawn to him, she couldn’t resist his warmth, and his stoic need to somehow keep distance between them.
She’d change his mind about that.
A kiss was met with no resistance. He tasted delicious, clean like the spring water he’d sipped. He touched her, gently, yet holding on as if no one else could have her. He was reluctant, and she knew it was because she had requested they go slow. That was fine. It would keep him respectful.
The more she thought about it, she knew this was a bold step. Taking off to another country with a man she hardly knew. Though he was legend, she couldn’t be sure the demon shadow he carried wouldn’t suddenly rise up and make Max evil. If he was so desperate to be rid of it, it must be because he thought that would happen, too.
No, he just wanted to be normal, to eat and sleep.
Aby would exercise caution. But curiosity was both her boon and bane.
She wondered if he ever truly relaxed. And what about his sleepless, dreamless nights?
“Don’t people go insane if they can’t dream?” she blurted.
He laughed at her sudden question. Stroking a thumb over her lips, he asked, “Is that all you can think about me? Worried I might freak out on you?”
“No, but I thought a dreamless mind was a mad mind. I’ve seen TV shows. Do the dreams your shadow sees act as your own?”
“I witness them but I never feel them, not in real life. Only in the dream. Like if you pinched me now it would hurt. In the dream, I’d just know it hurts.”
“So you don’t experience the high of sex in a sex dream?”
“Aby, this conversation is treading a line I can’t cross right now. Can you be okay with that?”
There were many things about Max Fitzroy she didn’t know yet.
Aby sighed. “Yes, I can. But I’ll have you know we cats are curious.”
He toggled the diamond necklace. “I did notice that.”
“So, you go to Paris often?”
“Haven’t been there for over a century. I like America. And since I’ve been here, I’ve found plenty of demons to keep me busy. The States absolutely reek of them. Not to say the Americans have a market on evil. It’s everywhere.”
“I know. Heck, I live in Minnesota, but I’ve seen some bad stuff.”
He hooked his boots on the opposite couch and leaned back. The move tightened his black button-up shirt across hard abs. Aby toyed with the next button.
“When you were a real highwayman,” she asked, “did you ever say ‘Stand and deliver’?”
He chuckled. “All the time. We Frenchmen borrowed it from the English.”
“I had a dream about you robbing my carriage.”
“Did you now?”
She slid the necklace across her lower lip. “You wanted my jewels, but I didn’t have any.”
He nodded appreciatively. “So what did you offer instead?”
A blush heated her neck. “The dream ended too quickly for me to find out. What made you start riding the high roads? You said you were orphaned?”
“My father was killed by a highwayman when I was six. We were well off. But then it was just my mother and I, and my mother fell in with a bad man who stole all our money. He killed her one night. I escaped to live on the streets.”
“Max, I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “I’m still here. Good, bad or otherwise.”
“So you chose to do what the man who killed your father did.”
“Aby, there wasn’t much opportunity for a kid in those days. If I didn’t get enslaved by the lechers then I had to steal to survive.”
“I understand. But still it makes me sad to think of that lonely, orphaned boy.”
“I got by. Rainier and I hooked up a few years after that. We looked out for one another and we mastered the fine art of theft.”
“You’re doing good things now.”
“You didn’t have that opinion when I first met you.”
“I didn’t know you then.”
“Come here, kitty cat.” He patted his lap and Aby snuggled to him. “I’m not sure you know what you’re doing to me, Aby.”
“Seducing you.”
“All right, maybe you do know. But what if it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to?”
“I have no expectations, Max. I know what you are, what you do. You’ve already said love isn’t on the table. Why don’t you stop worrying about everything for a while and just kiss me?”
“Because I need you to understand how I work. I could kiss you all day, Aby. I’d like to make love to you. But you have to realize if we start something and I suddenly walk away, it’s because I have to.”
“Is it the shadow?”
“Yes and no. It’s something I can’t talk about. Not yet.”
“All right. But if you want to shadow, just tell me. I’m cool with it.”
He drew her head close and kissed her forehead.
They must have kissed for ten minutes when Aby decided she wanted to feel Max’s skin against hers. She pushed her hands under his shirt that strained at the buttonholes. His muscles tensed but he didn’t break the kiss. Everything about him was hard and hot. Gliding her fingers lower, she counted the ridges strapping his abs.
So that’s what they meant by a six-pack.
She shifted and the shoulder strap of her dress slipped, exposing her creamy skin. Max’s hand cupped her bare shoulder, then slid lower, dragging the fabric down to expose the top of her right breast.
“I love your skin,” he murmured. And she loved when he kissed her there. His kisses there always made her squirm with ridiculous joy.
A lazy, wanting groan accompanied the slow glide of his tongue. His murmurs hummed in her being, becoming as much a turn-on as his touches. Aby could gauge his rising desire as Max’s voice grew lower and deeper, lingering across her flesh as he devoured it slowly.
The first touch of his tongue to her nipple sent delicious tingles up and down her spine. Clutching his shoulders, she dug her nails into his shirt. Arching her back, Aby drew up her leg and hugged his hip with her knee. She wanted to hold him in the worshipful position until she flew higher than this jet could ever take her.
“Max, that’s better than kissing with our mouths open,” she said.
He stopped suddenly and bracketed her head with his hands. Putting his forehead to hers, he then said, “What would happen if you…you know?”
“Came?”
He nodded. “You wouldn’t accidentally—”
“An inability to control the bridging only happens with first-life familiars. I can’t bridge a demon all by myself. You need a spell or summons. We’re safe.”
“Just checking.”
His concern gave her little worry. He was the Highwayman. Of course, he’d be wary of any chance a demon might apport to this realm.
Aby traced her tongue down the center of his chest. Max spread out his arms and took in her ministrations with another lingering moan.
He tasted wonderful. The movement of his muscles beneath her tongue and fingers forged liquid iron and she could command its shape with a stroke of her finger.
Seven hours until landing? This was going to be a blissful flight.
He could strip her bare right now. He needed to. She was giving him all the go signals. But Max restrained himself from tugging Aby’s dress over her hips and slipping it off her.
Wrapped about him, her ankles crossed behind his back, her arms about his shoulders, she dropped kisses to his chest and neck and mouth and sparked a long-lost desire he’d once thought dissipated in his soul.
But he wasn’t ready to claim her, to slip inside her. How could he when it would only result in disappointment? Sure, he could please her, get her off, but he wasn’t prepared to explain why he couldn’t in return.
He would have to tell her sometime. And then she would learn about what walking in her dream had done for him.
He would tell her later, when he figured how best to put it. Such knowledge would change things. It would complicate everything.
But, Christ, he wanted her. Much as it would increase his ache, he wanted to glide inside her. To spill over and over. His erection was so hard, it was painful. After all, man was not created to withstand pleasure for so long.
If and when he ever did shuck the demon, would his next lovemaking see him coming endlessly? What a relief that would be.
But he couldn’t deny giving Aby pleasure vicariously served his own unslakable pleasure. Every moan from Aby, every touch, every hug of her skin against his gratified him. It had been a while since he’d indulged in the physical flesh.
She would be his undoing, if she didn’t drive him mad first.
“You’re so hard,” she said. Her fingers eased over his crotch.
Max caught her by the wrist. “Don’t, Aby, please. It’s tough enough to not take you right now.”
“Then why don’t you? I want this, Max. Don’t you think I have needs? Don’t you think I’ve been imagining what it would feel like to have you inside me?”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you said you wanted to go slow. Bleeding cowboys, this isn’t right.”
He pulled away and settled against the chair, panting, sweating. Shoving his hands through his hair, he struggled with the need to do as she asked and the need to maintain his own decorum.
Decorum? Hell, it was sanity he needed to cling to.
She sat curled on the sofa beside him, her breasts bare and wet with his saliva. The nipples were hard. Her mouth red, bruised by his determination to take what he could from her.
He’d kissed her so deeply. And there were other places on her body he’d like to thrust his tongue into for a deep kiss.
“Don’t you want me, Max? Are you still afraid I’ll bridge a demon here? Because I won’t.”
“It’s not you, Aby.” It was his damned curse. “You’re gorgeous. I want you. Damn, but I want you.” And he could have her—in her dreams. “What happened to going slow?”
She drew curved fingers across the luscious mounds of her breasts. “You’ve stirred me to a wanting tangle of need and now you think to pull away and it’ll all be fine?”
Exactly. What a bastard you are, Fitzroy. And yet, he’d given himself an out.
“You’re forgetting the one rule I gave you if we were to be intimate.”
She crawled over and straddled him. The vixen in her glinted in her green eyes as she spread her fingers through his hair and tugged his head back against the chair cushion. “When you pull away, you mean it.”
“I…I should have shadowed before we left. Things are…” So hard.
“Are what?”
“God, Aby, I need to shadow. Just to take the edge off, you know?”
“I don’t know, but I promised you I’d step back when you asked.” She pulled back from him. “Can I watch?”
“Nope.”
Chapter 15
C urled into a ball, Aby was purring softly by the time Max returned from chatting with the pilot. Opening the overhead bin, he tugged out a blue thermal blanket and laid it over her body. He’d used the excuse of checking in with the pilot to get away, hoping Aby would drift into a catnap.
She did not disappoint.
He stretched and decided to go wash up in the bathroom. They’d be in Paris in a couple hours.
In the bathroom he leaned over the sink, staring at his reflection. The shadow had but two options to dream walk. The pilot had better not be sleeping.
Which left Aby.
He’d already peered into her dreams once without asking.
When had he ever asked before? It wasn’t as though the shadow allowed the dreamers it walked a choice. But not until now had Max considered the dream walking an invasion. A step into the dreamer’s private life. He had no right to take that from Aby.
Because, depending on the topic of her dreams, he could be taking more
than she was willing to give.
On the other hand, she was the one who’d suggested they go all the way.
God, he wanted to feel that climax again. To know it was real.
“If I don’t,” he said with gritted jaw to his reflection, “I’ll be testy and angry when we arrive. She doesn’t deserve that, either.”
He needed to confirm that first time had been a fluke. She couldn’t possibly have been the catalyst to him climaxing.
“Time to find out.”
With a nod, he rescinded his human shape and the shadow slipped under the bathroom door.
The dreamer lay beneath a blanket on the couch. He moved over her, cringing at the strange air that squeezed upon his edges. This did not feel like usual shadowing. Perhaps because of the different place, different atmosphere. Retaining this form was difficult…
Instantaneous images flooded him with experience. Bodies entwined. Gasps, moans, fingers scratching softly across sweat-glistened flesh. A cry of immense pleasure.
The shadow shuddered, feeling the sensation on a visceral level, but unable to grasp it for any length of time. Only the dreamer climaxed. The other—him—lay beside her, watching her pleasure.
The joyous cry of orgasm suddenly changed to a scream. The dreamer clung to the other—yet slipped away. Water splashed. Hands frantically slapped the surface but to no avail. Glugging. Waves rippling.
Then silence.
Her green eyes flashed open. “Max?”
The shadow crept away toward the back of the airplane.
Max held Aby’s hand when the rough landing made her nervous, and he held it again as they disembarked and went through customs.
He lifted her hand to his cheek, brushing it over his stubble, then kissed each knuckle tenderly. Like a boyfriend.
She’d often wondered what it would be like to have a boyfriend. A lover. A man who would have sex with her for reasons beyond summoning demons. Now she didn’t have to wonder. They’d gotten close to making love.
Okay, so calling him her boyfriend was probably putting the cart before the horse, but they had something going on between the two of them. And Aby intended to keep it.