by Robin Hale
It was too much.
“You’ve been…this is going to sound cheesy as hell and I know you’re a storm witch — but you’ve been the eye of this hurricane for me. The calm spot in the chaos. I can let down my guard with you. I know you’re going to be there if it all falls apart.”
The longing in the base of my skull, the heat low in my hips grew more and more intense as Laurel’s lips climbed from my shoulder to the side of my neck.
“You showed up out of nowhere to save me from my own stupid decisions going after Absalon. I should’ve trusted you. I was — embarrassed. And angry. And I felt like I’d lost — anyway. I thought I had to do it on my own. That I should.”
The words were a whispered confession and my tongue burned with the need to apologize. What was she supposed to think after that shit at Barleywick? How could she have thought I’d help her with Absalon? How could she have even known that it would be dangerous? I hadn’t exactly been forthcoming.
“Seeing you there? Knowing what you were risking?” Her fingers clutched at mine. “I never wanted to be a danger to you, Rhea. I promise. And I hate that I was. I hate that I let my own impulsiveness get in the way of taking care of you. But seeing you do those things for me…” Her words trailed off in a ragged exhalation against my neck. “I knew that no matter what happened, I loved you more intensely than I thought I was even capable of. And even if you don’t want this, want me…I can’t regret loving you.”
The tightness of my throat broke and the sob I’d been holding like a lifeline ripped from my chest. I clung to her hands, her arms wrapped around me, and felt her try to drape herself over me. Maybe she thought she could block out the rest of the world.
“I want you,” I said in a ragged whisper, barely enough sound to travel the few inches from my mouth to her ear. “Goddess fucking take me, but I want you.”
It was terrifying to lay it bare, to feel this rush of lust and love and know that the last time I’d felt anything even remotely similar I’d paid for it.
And it hadn’t felt even close to this. If history bore out, if it was proportional…no one would survive it. “I love you.”
Laurel’s hands tugged free and turned me around to face her. She spread her fingers over my cheek, brushing away tears and taking my face in her hands.
“Stay with me?” She asked, hazel eyes wide and questioning and full of hope.
I nodded, apparently too far gone again for words to form. And something incredible happened. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, I was sure about that. It was supposed to take more than a nod, more than sheer fucking relief, but it happened.
The soul bond completed.
It was Dorothy opening the door in Oz. The first taste of water on a hot day. It was releasing tension I couldn’t have named, restoring a part of myself I barely comprehended.
And from the look of surprise on Laurel’s face, the way she pressed a palm to her chest, she’d felt it too. “Did you just…?”
“I didn’t think it could happen that way,” I confessed.
Laurel’s fingers stroked my hair, my neck while she looked up at me in amazement. “Doesn’t it take a spell? Or a ritual?”
I shook my head. “Mom always told me that it usually takes sex.” I quirked an ironic brow as Laurel laughed.
“In that case,” she said. “I might be a little disappointed. I was sort of looking forward to that.” Her eyes went comically wide and she sputtered as she tried to backtrack. “I mean, eventually. You don’t have to…I didn’t want to assume that you — if you stay, we can just sleep, I promise.”
“No,” I rumbled low in my throat, leaning closer to Laurel’s face. “If you’re asking me into your bed and you want me to touch you? We can’t just sleep.”
“Why does it usually take sex?” Laurel asked and I almost blinked in her face.
Right. Still Laurel. Still curious and full of questions even when half a second before she’d been blushing and stammering over not wanting to push me into bed.
My shoulder lifted in a half-hearted shrug. “Something about vulnerability. Letting your guard down. Most star-born are naturally defensive about their power, especially when they can feel someone else getting close to it. Apparently orgasms help people relax.” The corner of my mouth lifted in a sly smile. “That’s the rumor, anyway. Want to help me test it out?”
“Test it out? Do you mean you’ve never — oh! Oh, no.” Laurel’s cheeks flamed red. “You’re — that was sexy banter. Flirting. Yep. I can do that.”
The words poured from Laurel’s mouth like someone had taken the bolt off a fire hydrant and it wasn’t long before she was cringing as hard as I was grinning.
“Save me,” she whimpered.
“Gladly.” I slipped my hands beneath the hem of her sweater and pulled it up over her head, sending her hair down around her shoulders in a sweet-smelling cascade. “Let me know if you need me to stop or slow down.” I took her nod as a sign to continue and pulled her close by the waistband of her jeans. “Kick off your shoes,” I whispered against her lips, then dipped those final millimeters for the kiss I’d been aching for since…well, since I’d first seen Laurel running after that damned scarf.
She tasted like coming home, finding the whole coven in the living room watching a movie and laughing about it, the scent of spicy cookies in the air. She tasted of laughter and comfort. Heat and desire. Everything I’d been dying to touch and never thought that I would again.
The taste of her moan in my mouth was the sweetest thing I’d known in ages, and I wanted as much of it as I could get. She shifted, kicking away her shoes and I teased my fingers beneath her waistband, stroking soft, hot skin to feel the tremors that ran through her before thumbing the button open.
Laurel tore her lips away from mine to whisper, “You, too.” And I rushed to comply.
My shoes clattered against the floor, jacket falling to join them in a careless heap, and Laurel’s delighted laugh was more than enough reward for how ridiculous I knew I looked. My tank top fluttered to the ground and I reached for my jeans only to be stopped by Laurel’s soft fingers on my wrist.
“Wait,” she said. “I want to touch.”
There was nothing I wanted more than for her to touch me. I swallowed hard against the urge to reach out, to find the spots that would make her gasp and shake and moan, and instead let her find her way to me. Her hand slipped over my waist, raising goosebumps and sending a flutter of sensation down my spine. Then her lips were on my collarbone and the whole front of my body basked in her ambient heat.
She nipped at the curve of my clavicle and swept greedy touches along my stomach, my sides, my back. Her lips teased at the lace strap of my bra, stroking against she whispered against it.
“Didn’t take you for the lace bralette kind of girl,” Laurel said with a fond laugh.
“They might be the only pretty things I own,” I agreed, heat rising in my cheeks.
“I like it. Suits you.” She pushed the strap down my shoulder and the slight roughness of the lace against my skin was a firm reminder of how desperate I was to feel her fingernails pressing into my flesh.
“It should come off now, though.” Her fingertips pushed under the bra band and pulled up, dragging the lace in an intoxicating sweep over parts of me that I ached for Laurel to touch.
My nipples pebbled in the slightly cool air, and the sight of Laurel’s eyes going dark while she watched them would fuel every fantasy I had for the next month.
“Oh, you’re gorgeous,” Laurel breathed.
“Fair’s fair,” I whispered and brought my hand up to pluck at her dark purple bra.
I pushed forward, sliding my hands over her hips, her waist, her chest to feel her breasts in my hands and admire the way they bulged over the edges of their cups when I did. I dipped forward, traced a line with my tongue down her sternum and blew a stream of cool air over the trail I’d left.
She was perfect. Sexy and generous and exactly as eager to
get her hands and mouth on me as I was on her. I rubbed my cheek against the swell of her breast and swept my thumbs over her bra-covered nipples.
Laurel arched against my hands with a helpless little grunt of pleasure matching the way she shifted her weight — a telltale sign she was dying for pressure against her clit and not getting it.
I knew because I was feeling it too. I wanted to writhe, to press our bodies together and rut and grind until we shattered in each other’s arms. And I had every intention of making that happen.
“Good noises?” I asked, even though I was confident that they were. Never hurt to check.
“Very good,” Laurel agreed. “Kind of sensitive there.”
I left open-mouthed kisses across her chest, sucking faint red marks into her breasts that would fade before we fell asleep that night, and dipped my tongue to taste the edge of her taut nipple. It was silky and soft and hard and rough at the same time, tense with arousal but made of the softest skin I’d ever touched, and I growled against the bud I’d caught between my lips. It was nothing to unhook her bra, to tear it from her arms and send it to join the rejected clothing on the floor.
“I want you on a bed,” I said between licks of those tempting nipples. Each flick of my tongue, each stroke along that pebbled flesh earned me another whimper, another groan. I knew that if I had my hand between her legs that she’d be slick and hot and ready for me — and damn, I was dying to touch her there.
Laurel stepped back, wriggling her hips and slipping her jeans down her thighs to reveal a cute, high-cut pair of bikini-style panties in the same dark purple as her bra.
I grinned. “They match!” I teased. “Ms. Pearson, were you planning to seduce me?” I knew that she hadn’t been, that this was a particularly unforeseeable conclusion to an unforeseeable sequence of events, but I couldn’t resist.
Her cheeks went dark and her fingers plucked at the waistband of her panties in a self-conscious twitch. “All of my underthings are either nude or purple. They usually match!”
A single push sent my jeans sliding down my legs and I joined Laurel in standing in the middle of the room in a pair of briefs. “My buying habits are too haphazard for that, I’m afraid. If matching underthings are important to you, this is the first in a long line of disappointments.”
Laurel’s fingers left the elastic at her waist and she stepped closer to me, easing her fingers under the boy-cut briefs that clung to my hips. “It’s more motivation to get you out of them,” she breathed against my neck, sending a shiver down my spine to chase my panties down my legs.
My lips brushed the soft shell of Laurel’s ear as I leaned in close and growled, “On the bed, Pearson.” A finger hooked around her waistband sent her panties to join mine on the floor and I nudged her toward the bed that dominated the room.
She sat back on the bed, looking shy for the first time since we’d walked into her apartment, and scooted back to make room for me. That bashful cast to her expression brought me up short and a niggling thought rose in the back of my mind.
Laurel was younger than I was by a few years. She’d left her hometown explicitly because she’d never connected with anyone there. Did that mean that she’d never…connected with anyone? I wasn’t exactly Casanova, but I’d had Zora when I was figuring out what I wanted from women and being the beneficiary of a vampire’s — even a young one’s — lifetime of experience was significantly more than nothing.
“Is this…” I began, trying to find the right way to ask the question, wary of ruining the mood we’d built. Secretly, I was sure that it couldn’t be ruined. There’d been too much between us, laughter and heartache alike, to keep us apart for long. “Have you done this before?”
Laurel blanched. Direct hit. Damn. I stood from the edge of the bed, knee braced against the side and swept a hand through my hair.
“Laurel, we don’t have to — it’s late. It’s late and you’re tired and if you want, you know, wine and roses — there can be wine and roses.” Hell, I was starting to sound like Laurel. “I’m not going anywhere. You can have — I want you to have everything that you want from your first time.”
Maybe it was stupid but about the only redeeming thing about the mess with Zora was that I’d had my first time with a woman who took her time with me. Someone who’d made sure that I was comfortable, that I was enjoying myself. It may have been the spark that had set fire to my entire life, but no one could say that Zora hadn’t been careful with my virginity. And I didn’t want Laurel to have to look back on her first time as something she fell into after the worst day of her life.
The other witch rose onto her knees and drew close to me, lifting her hands to trace gentle patterns along the line of my jaw, stroking through my hair. Her hair fell around her in riotous waves, the tips of her breasts brushing against me in the most tantalizing tease I’d felt in years. Fuck, I wanted her.
“Rhea,” Laurel murmured and brushed tender kisses against my neck, my cheeks, my brow. “I love you,” the words were lightning firing up the pleasure centers in my brain. “But if you don’t stop trying to protect me from — well, everything — I’m going to hide every left-handed glove that you own,” she said somberly. “And you will never find them.”
The laugh that burst from my mouth startled me, and Laurel’s serious expression was replaced with a mischievous grin.
“I want you,” she said firmly. “Now get over here and have your wicked, wicked way with me, you deflowering brute.”
“Deflowering brute?” I asked, brows raised. My hands had barely touched Laurel’s shoulders before she was following the implied nudge and moving further onto the bed. She propped herself up on her elbows. She looked like every fantasy I’d ever had since I first realized what sexual attraction even was. “I mean if that’s the way you want it…”
Her knees parted, her legs fell open, and I nearly swallowed my tongue at the image she made: the dark, heated look in her eyes, her hair in its soft cloud around her, begging for my hands in it, the way her soft skin flowed over curves that made my mouth go dry, the invitation in the way she spread her knees for me. It was almost too much.
Almost.
I slotted my hips between her thighs and pushed forward to claim her mouth in another searing kiss. Her legs wrapped around my waist as she followed my movement, letting me fold her in half while I drove my tongue between her lips to stroke along hers.
I could do ‘brute’. Hell, right then I wanted to do ‘brute’.
She whimpered beneath my mouth and I sucked at her sensitive lower lip, dragging my teeth and nipping there without letting her get used to the movement. I took that kiss from her, heat growing in my belly at the helpless way she let me. I kept after her mouth until her lips were red and slick and swollen from my attention, then dragged my teeth along her jaw to the tempting line of her throat. I held myself up with an arm tucked behind her head, cradling her in the crook of my elbow, and let the other delight in the feeling of her breasts in my palm. Everything about her was intoxicating: the way her skin felt against mine, her smell, the way she whimpered and moaned when I touched her.
My thumb worked her nipple back into its peak, tormenting that bit of skin with soft strokes and sharper flicks. I sucked a mark into her neck, low and private and mine. It wasn’t long before I could feel the heat of her, the slickness of her slipping between our bodies where I pressed her harder into the mattress.
I shifted, pressed her thighs further back, canted my hips — and found the alignment that brought the desperate ache in my clit against the slick heat of Laurel’s body.
“Oh fuck, Rhea,” Laurel moaned and her hips jerked against mine in a reflexive buck.
Pleasure sparked behind my eyelids when I rolled my hips against Laurel’s body. The slick slide of my flesh against hers, the evidence of her desire for me…it drove me crazy. I couldn’t have formed words if I’d tried. Instead, I moved my hand to her hip and braced Laurel against the force of my thrusts, feeling the b
uildup of friction where I most needed it, the feeling of my body against that hard little nub at the apex of her heat.
I teased the lobe of her ear with the edges of my teeth, never biting down, never delivering that sharp bit of pain, just the suggestion, the drag of something dangerous. Her breath came in gasps in time with the rolling of my hips and I was close — so close to pulling her over that precipice with me, feeling the way her body would jerk and tense and finally go loose and limp.
Everything I did to her seemed to be the right thing — and there was nothing like confidence after hiding for so long. Every press on her thighs dragged a groan from her mouth so that the sounds melded with the delicious stretch of muscle in my own body. Every stroke of her skin, every roll of my hips, every touch of my tongue that lapped up sweat and salt and the scent of her…it took her apart and I had never felt so powerful.
There was something primal about the way I could drive her deeper into the mattress with every thrust, and soon I was clinging to the near side of my own orgasm with desperation. I wanted to feel her first. I wanted to feel her body trembling with the force of her climax.
I shifted, tilted my hips upward and drove forward until the cadence of Laurel’s gasps changed. Her whimpers were constant and I drank in the sound.
“I want to feel you come,” I whispered and the resulting cry sounded like victory.
“Close,” Laurel whimpered.
I pulled my hand from her hip and dipped my fingers in between our bodies. The pads of my fingers stroked around the hardness of her clit. A little more stimulation, a little slower rhythm, and I watched the first beginnings of her orgasm overtake her.
“Just like that,” she gasped.
Never let it be said that I couldn’t take an order when I ought to. I stroked, drawing those same ellipses over and over again, dipping to pass over the opening to her body, slicking my fingers, easing my way, and her thighs started to tremble. She locked her ankles around me and I was crushed against her hips by the sudden pull of her legs — and then she fell apart.