Maya slumped flat on the platform. He softened his kisses and eased off with gentler, affectionate licks before sitting back on his heels with a smirk.
“Think of all the time you’ve wasted,” he murmured, removing his fingers from her and stroking her thighs with those strong hands, smearing the wetness over her skin, “resisting those unspoken wishes from our first meeting in my tent. Hating me because of what your boyfriend wanted for you. Fearing the one who wished only to give you pleasure that you have never known.”
“I’ve known pleasure before, you egotistical jackass,” Maya said, although the way her eyes were hooded with satiation probably undercut any venom.
“I didn’t say you’ve never known pleasure. I said that the pleasure we can give you isn’t like any you’ve ever known,” Bell said.
Clear proof that lust negatively affects syntax. Not that her own thoughts at the moment could be lauded for their clarity. Especially as he slowly crawled over her, the weight of his erection beneath his trousers brushing against her stomach.
“Go ahead, Maya, look me in the eye and tell me that you have known pleasure like this.”
“It’s the incubus’ spell,” Maya said. “It’s not you.”
He plumped her breasts in his hands and took her nipple into his mouth. The scrape of his teeth coaxed it hard.
She saw stars behind her eyelids when he swirled his heated tongue over the firm bud of flesh. He bit sharply, although not particularly hard, and she jumped, crying out. Blood swelled and flushed her nipple dark from the bite. Then he licked over her breast with the flat of his tongue, catching the nipple firmly and bending it until he could hold it no longer and her breast settled back into place, the nipple now aching and needy.
He proceeded to do the same thing with her other nipple as he pinched, stroked and twisted the one he had just finished tormenting.
A line of saliva dripped from his lips, breaking from her breast as he rose up to his hands and knees over her again. He wiped his smug mouth deliberately, daring her.
“Say it again,” Bell purred. “And this time, make me believe you.”
“It’s not you,” she said, circling his small nipples with her thumbs as she stroked his chest. She had no idea how he could walk around the circus without getting accosted by women and men wanting to touch his bare upper body.
“You do realize lying to a psychic is a fool’s errand, right?” Bell asked. He bit his lip and grunted when she pinched his nipples, much harder than he had hers, but the bulge in his trousers didn’t lessen.
“It’s not you,” she repeated, as though saying it over and over again would make it true.
She tugged him down by the sensitive flesh she still had at her mercy. They slid their tongues against each other before he sank into her mouth. Her whole body shivered in a minor orgasm just from that. She released his nipples and wrapped her arms around his back, as though she was drowning and he was the only one keeping her above water—even though he was the one who’d pushed her under in the first place.
“Just lying to yourself, then,” he murmured before returning to the ravished length of her neck. His hips slotted between her thighs as she curled her legs around his, spurring him with her leather boots. Her juices permeated his trousers and plastered the thin cotton to his cock as he thrust against her, unhurried in spite of its rock-hard, hot thickness. She canted her hips up to meet him, but all he seemed willing to do was simulate the act, slow but unbearably firm frottage against her naked cunt.
She found the ties to his belt and undid the knot. As soon as it slithered to the floor, she slid her hand under the waistband of his trousers. They were loose enough on his hips that she could push them down over his ass, but his erection strained against the fabric, and she couldn’t remove them without his help. He chuckled low into her shoulder as she dug her nails into the muscles of his buttocks in frustration.
“Shut up and fuck me,” Maya said through gritted teeth.
“Oh, was one orgasm not enough for you? You have to demand two?” Bell mocked.
Maya shoved the both of them upright. Without breaking eye contact, she wrapped her hand around his cloth-covered erection, dampened with her moisture and his pre-cum. She exhaled a shaky breath, pulling the fabric taut over his cock as she stroked down then tugged back up. She kept her grip tight, his skin sliding over the thickest, hardest, hottest cock she’d ever held in her hand. Trying to tease him, she only whetted her irrevocable desire to touch it with no barriers between them, to experience first-hand—so to speak—whether it was as silk-over-solid as it had seemed when she’d seen it before.
“Exquisite,” he hissed, jerking into her hand. “But if you insist on making this into a contest, I will win.”
“What makes you so confident?” she asked.
“Experience,” he replied. He cupped her breasts, taking advantage of their fullness while she was sitting up. He kissed the cleavage that he made, snaked his tongue through it to lick up her sternum. Maya moaned, pausing in her strokes. “Remember, my dear, you can stroke me into five orgasms, but you’ll only postpone your own release if you continue to deny your desires. I am not like your men in the past. I can wait to be inside you. Can you?”
He grasped the front and back of her corset and lifted her up. Bell mostly limited himself to surreptitious magic and the intricate web of spells his words could weave. But when he made a spectacle of his strength, either through the play of his muscles or by how easily he picked her up, Maya couldn’t help how it intrigued and impressed her. Nor could she ignore how her cunt clenched at the fantasy of him applying that same strength to her in other ways.
He deposited her closer to the center of the platform, as though he wanted her on display for him. In the process, he also put himself on display for her. There was another reason for these golden lights. They were absurdly flattering, doubtlessly even for the reptilian man for which they’d been intended.
Bell and Maya sat in the light, briefly entranced. Bell stroked gently up from her breasts, over her neck, her jaw. He tangled his fingers in her mussed hair, pulling the rubber band out and freeing it to curl over her shoulders and brush her breasts in full waves. By this time of the night, it had begun to resist Kitty’s straightening efforts.
“To kheili khoshgeli,” he whispered. “Male khodami.”
He could have been insulting her or casting a dangerous spell, but it didn’t feel like either.
It did, however, feel dangerous.
Maya’s fingers trembled as she untied the fastenings of his trousers. It was a matter of seconds before she had freed him, the cotton crumpled at his knees.
“Beg me to take you, Maya,” he said again. Before had been a plea for permission. This was different.
She caressed his cock with her fingertips, hesitant to take him fully in her hand because that would somehow make everything else more real. Like all the other lines she had crossed, she couldn’t turn back and change her course if she crossed it.
Maya slowly circled his shaft with both hands, one over the other. Neither of them could close completely around him. She exhaled sharply, unaware that she had been holding her breath. Touching him like this made her want him so badly that tears pricked the corners of her eyes. He kissed the paths they made, pressing his tongue against the skin to taste them.
“It can’t… It’s too…” Maya said.
“Jinn have discovered it serves us well to cause great pain with the gifts we are given,” Bell replied. “Or, as I prefer, great pleasure. I won’t hurt you. You will not get so much as a scratch that you don’t want.”
“Well, now I know you’re not talking about your power to grant wishes,” Maya said.
“No, that is a different gift,” he said, quietly amused.
He panted against her cheek as she began to move her hands over him in a gentle wringing motion that drew a bead of pre-cum over the head and onto her fingers. His flesh was feverish, alarmingly so, but she reminded her
self over and over again that he wasn’t the man he appeared to be.
That was his lie, but it was a lie she welcomed.
She crept one hand down to his balls and kneaded lightly, testing the difference in pliancy and firmness, the sparse hair tickling her palm as she stroked and twisted her other hand over his shaft. Her mouth watered. Maya wanted to test his flesh with her mouth, feel the weight of such a big cock on her tongue. As hot as he was, Maya wondered whether humans felt cool to him, the oasis to his Sahara.
But her mouth wasn’t the only part of her that hungered for him. Her skin prickled and her head swam in a lustful fog, as though Bell himself were the incubus that made her need him enough to embrace death beneath him. In spite of her saying she was simply under Lord Mikhail’s influence, she thought that particular magic had since faded to white noise behind a truer attraction—a simpler, baser desire that listened to no warning and cared little about the content of a man’s character.
She had been under other men’s control before. Not men like Bell, but it wasn’t so out of her experience. Never in Maya’s life had she felt so out of her own control, though. In her previous life, before Arcanium, holding a man’s cock had been like snapping a collar on him. She’d had him entirely at her mercy. Even when a relationship had been crumbling into shards of glass, the sex had almost always been good.
With her hand around Bell’s erection and wearing little more than him, Maya understood that mercy was his to give, not hers. If she had to beg, then she’d beg, because she believed his promise that it would be as good or better than she could imagine.
“Take me,” Maya said. “Please. I need this.”
He moaned at her concession, kissing her and guiding her back down.
“You need me,” he murmured. He swept his hands under her thighs and raised her hips up. His thick cock split her folds. She whimpered at the heat.
“I need you,” she agreed. She still held his shaft, and he let her guide the head to her dripping cunt. “I need you inside. I beg you to take me. I beg you, Bell, please…”
His cock stretched the entrance of her cunt around him. She tossed her head from side to side, clutching his arms for dear life as he entered her, filling her to the brim. It was so good that she felt condemned. Yet her body yielded to him as though she had been made to yield, created to the exact specifications of his erection, and his cock created not just to fill her but to fulfill her every pleasurable desire—to grant her every unspoken wish. That more than anything confirmed to her that Bell wasn’t human, but, dear Lord, there was no question he was a man.
Fully sheathed, Bell lowered himself to cover her. He kicked his trousers off before rocking his hips in short, sharp thrusts. She moaned with each one. Behind her closed eyes, within the flames that the stage lights created on the lids, she remembered the first time she had seen him, the interplay of his muscles and the inexorable arousal in spite of her trepidation. If anything, her fear and even her anger had since transformed her arousal into something else. Not transcendent. That was too morally pure of a word.
Spectacular.
After all, what was Arcanium without spectacle?
She couldn’t contort her body into sexually adventurous positions like Valorie, and he didn’t threaten to split her in half with the power and speed of his thrusts. He simply took her, claimed her pleasure from the inside radiating out, little synapses sending fireworks into her brain. Whatever chemistry he stirred up within her, the reaction was like an explosion run in slow motion.
His chest pressed against her breasts, and he cushioned her head with his arm so that he could watch her as she shuddered apart. Her labia swelled and tightened around him, her cunt clenching at his cock every time he pulled out, as though to keep him in. She was so aware of the sensation between her legs that it seemed like she could feel every square inch of him—the mini-ranges of veins that traversed the length of his shaft, the ridge of the head where it rubbed against a spot that made her cry out every time the head stroked over it. If he had been really pounding into her, she thought she might have been able to see the stars through the roof of the tent.
As it was, she only saw him, and in his eyes gleamed galaxies of time.
His face shone with sweat. Maya was sure hers looked the same. Her hand moved more smoothly over him as she stroked his back, digging her fingers into the muscles as though to remind herself over and over that he was there and this inadvisable decision was really happening. Regret mingled with arousal, ice and fire in the pit of her stomach. It only intensified the jolts of arousal forking down her spine.
“Bell, I…p-please.”
“No,” he said. He pushed himself all the way in and ground against her, mashing against her clit. He alternated between rolling her nipple between his fingers and pinching hard. “You’ll come when I am ready to come. After all, Maya, it’s not always…about…you.”
He punctuated the last three words with harder thrusts. Her back arched. The combination of his cock in her cunt and the pain in her nipple connected the two places, the two feelings, in her mind. The next time he pinched her nipple, her cunt tightened in memory. Maya’s body learned quickly who and what gave her pleasure.
“Do you understand that now?” he asked.
“You may need to pound it in a few more times,” she replied breathlessly.
Bell laughed, taking her hair by the fist and pulling just enough to be painful as he slammed into her again to the rhythm of the wish.
“It’s not…always…about…you. Not…always…about…you,” he groaned. “All your pleasure is mine. Your orgasm is mine to give. Never forget. None of this is about you. You have this pleasure because I want it, because it pleases me. I want you to come with me. Come with me, Maya.”
He moved her head where he wanted her and kissed her, making her ignite and clamp down around his cock just as he shoved himself in all the way to the base. His cock twitched, and unbearable heat filled her even deeper than he, spreading his fever like desire.
He snapped his hips to prolong her pleasure and his as he kissed her through the cries of her climax. She embraced him as tightly as she could, riding the orgasm out as he finished riding her. She caught her breath through the tingling after-waves that rocked through her.
“Golam, Maya,” he murmured into her ear before kissing her neck, reminding her of the bruises that were going to bloom there by the morning. “Mine.”
Maya slowly slid her hands down his back and let him go. Whatever connection that had bound her to Bell tonight had snapped by now, although she couldn’t say whether it had broken after her first climax or the one that they’d shared. Either way, the compulsion was gone.
But while the desire had calmed, it hadn’t waned. She bit her lip and held back a whimper as he withdrew his still-hard cock from her. He leaned in to kiss her once more, but she put a hand on his chest and sat them up again. Their legs remained entwined. Bell couldn’t keep his hands off her, bestowing his favor in whispers of his skin on hers.
“Why me?” Maya asked. The benefit of asking a psychic was that she didn’t have to clarify what she meant, and he didn’t have to ask. Maya reeled with emotional vertigo. She felt worn down, as mentally chafed as her healed wrists, as though she had stripped away a whole thin layer of skin.
“I didn’t fulfill your boyfriend’s wish with a punishment of wailing and gnashing of teeth because it was not my will to do so,” Bell replied. He caressed her breasts with the backs of his fingers, the way he might pet a cat.
“Why fulfill it at all?” Maya asked. “I mean, you sought his wish out and made sure you heard it.”
“Because I knew he was going to make a wish and his wish would bring you into Arcanium. I had to be prepared for it,” Bell said.
“No. No, you didn’t. You could have stayed away and not heard the wish. You haven’t punished me like some of the others, but you didn’t exactly reward me,” she said. “He wished me away from my life. He wished away my fr
eedom. No matter how nice you’ve decided to be, I’m still essentially a slave, aren’t I? You can’t claim that you were just following fate. It was your choice to make your psychic vision or whatever true by going out of your way to be present for his wish. You ensured that you could add me to your collection. So…why me? You don’t even know what to do with me.”
“Oh, I had a few ideas from the start,” Bell said with one of his subtler smiles. “I’m fairly certain we shared a few of them back then.”
“Bell, I’m serious.”
“You might not understand my reasons,” Bell replied.
“By ‘not understand,’ do you mean your reasons were entirely selfish and therefore suck?” Maya asked.
“I followed you and your boy to hear the wish because I like you. But more importantly, I didn’t like him,” Bell said.
“You’re right. I don’t understand and still think you’re a selfish, cruel bastard,” she said.
“A selfish, cruel bastard you don’t mind boning, I notice,” Bell said.
He had her there.
“Why like me and not him?” Maya asked. “I have many bad qualities.”
“I’ve been told I have a few myself,” Bell said, stroking the line of her jaw affectionately. “I like your bad qualities as well as your good ones. They don’t make you less than who you are.”
“I still don’t understand,” Maya muttered.
“You will,” he said. It resonated like an ultimatum, but before it finished ringing her ears, he was kissing her again.
She wanted to close her eyes and immerse herself in the blissful, uncomplicated sensations that he conjured within her. But the fire behind her eyelids burned dark red, and the scene that had started this unholy night came into focus. The sex demons had distracted her, but now their spell was finished.
A few dozen yards away, there were at least two places where she’d witnessed bloody murder, and who knew what other murders had occurred right under her very nose in the last week? What about the other demons? Did they have cravings that they slaked after the lights went out? What about Bell? Whose wish had led some unfortunate soul to his grave? Bell claimed this place was more purgatory than hell, and the case could be made that this was true for his cast…but what about his clientele?
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