38. WEN

For what feels like hours, I lie sprawled over him, my whole being rioting in disbelief, in delight.

Godric is touching me.

Touching me.

With that hand that has vanquished a fallen angel and decimated cities.

He lays it where my heart is trying to ram out of my back to smother itself in his touch, as if absorbing its frenzied tribute, gathering my heartbeats as a trophy.

“It’s a good thing I couldn’t imagine this moment,” I whisper against his chest, feeling I’ll come apart if I talk any louder, or make any move. “I would have gone mad.”

His exhalation is ragged, as if he’s been bating his breath. “More than you already are?”

I almost faint at hearing his voice rumbling below my ear.

Yeah. I’m certainly insane. Playing with the literal fire of this god, pushing him with my desire and cornering him with my need. Even after he said I ruined him.

But I want him ruined. Beyond all repair or sanity. He ruined me first. For anyone or anything else.

And that was before I had his touch. This promise of bliss and torment, of Heaven and Hell. A gossamer concession with the weight of the realms, the power of all existence.

But as he inhales, I know he’ll say something that will end this miraculous moment. “If you say you touched me by accident or to get me off you, I’ll show you mad”.

He does something even worse. He removes his hand.

No.

“Don’t you dare take your hand away,” I grit against his chest, mine heaving. “Or take your touch back.”

In response, he rises beneath me. I try every Melek technique he taught me to keep him pinned down. I would have sooner held back a tidal wave.

He flips me on my back with the mere move, looms above me. His eyes are on their hardest-hitting solemn setting as he whispers, “Shush.”

I gape at him, before a scoff bursts from me. “Did you just shush me?”

“Would you rather I do this?”

Those perfect, power-incarnate fingers wrap around my neck, rest there without pressure. I still suffocate, under a flood of emotion and arousal.

From the first day, I wondered if he’d created a strangulation fetish within me. After the leash/breath play number he did on me kindled my libido, and imagining him cutting off my air drove me to my first full-fledged, and spontaneous orgasm. Now feeling his hand for real, even imbued with a gentleness I never suspected him capable of, I wonder no more. He has.

His grip tightens and warms by degrees as he broods down at me, as if waiting for me to struggle.

If anyone else held me down like this, I would do my level best to rip them to shreds and bathe in their blood. But from him, with him, everything is different. I want his dominance and menace, and his every other appetite and kink, always.

I grab his hand with both of mine, pressing it harder to my flesh, wheezing, “I would rather you do this—and way more.”

Emerald flames swirl in his eyes as the grip that can squeeze diamonds out of coals tightens and heats until my head pounds with bated blood, my lungs burn with lack of oxygen, and my skin sizzles. I know he can literally burn my neck off if he wants.

I hold his assessing, aroused gaze as my vision swims, dims, and my skin begins to blister.

Survival instincts aren’t kicking in, dread only heightening the pleasure zapping from his searing, savage fingertips to my every erogenous nerve. My body tells me it will soon explode if he keeps this up. But I won’t have my first orgasm with him this way!

As if realizing my distress, but misinterpreting it, he unclenches his hand, muttering in some unknown language under his breath, pent-up storms raging around his pupils. “You have no idea what ‘way more’ from me would be like. I have none, either. You’re the one thing I can’t predict, or can predict myself with.”

I rub my neck, needing to feel the evidence of his cruelty marking my flesh before my healing takes it away. “I can take whatever you dish out.”

My gasp isn’t too convincing it seems, since his cruel lips twist in ridicule and incredulity. “Spoken like an oblivious novice.”

“You think I’m—inexperienced?”

“I know you are.”

I arch beneath him, trying to press my swollen breasts against the acres of chest he deprived me of. “Are you sure about that?”

His nostrils flare. “Are you telling me that you aren’t?”

I arch an eyebrow, repaying him for when his all but taunted me if I was jealous of my Unitas.

His eyes begin to bleed emerald again. “I changed my mind. You are not mad. If you want me jealous, you are bloody bonkers. Unless it is your objective to have me—Godawful out.”

I grin at the idea of him hulking out, before I cringe at the images of the havoc he’d cause.

I never thought he could experience jealousy, at all. On my account? Hasn’t occurred to me. His talk about murdering Lorcan and Gideon translated in my mind to control and territorialism.

Now, what he said, about ruining him, and no longer knowing how to be, makes me view everything from a different angle.

I can make him jealous!

That’s another first for me. Still a terrible thing, but I can’t help my smile turning smug as I rub a leg between his. My knee grazes the thick steel pipe that should scare the shit out of me. It only elicits a sharper stab of arousal in my core.

A rough inhalation reverberates in his chest and I spread my hand over it, collecting my tribute. “Being a ‘novice’ doesn’t mean I’m ‘oblivious’ to what I want.”

He exhales. “Me.”

“You.”

“You really have no fear, or limits.”

“Nope. Now you shush—and do it again. Touch me.”

An imperious eyebrow rises at my command. “You think now you’ve gotten one touch?—”

“Counting strangling me, I got two.”

Both eyebrows descend at my qualification. “That you will now get touches on demand?”

“Oh, yes. And on auto, too.”

“You’re my charge?—”

“Yeah, yeah, and your family are puritanical dipshits, and it’s some sort of taboo. But that’s in public. In private, I get all the touches I want. What you want, too. Admit it.”

He mutters something in that mysterious language, probably Nephilim, what sounds as if he’s reciting some incantation, before he groans and bends over me.

Everything in me revs in agonizing expectation. But he only buries his face in my hair, and inhales deep.

Ugh. I didn’t have time to wash it this morning.

But from the predatory sounds echoing in his chest, he doesn’t seem to mind. It actually seems my scent, sweat and all, is driving him out of his mind, too.

“Hurry up and do something more than sniffing me like a Hellhound, you semi-Celestial hunk of hormonal Hell.”

He coughs a chuckle, harsh and growly, abrading my nerves wholesale. Then that voice that has quaked my very foundations from the first time I heard it washes over me.

“You make me laugh.”

What?

The plummet from the heights of uniqueness, as the object of his single-minded hunger, into clownhood is brutal.

I push at him, rising on my elbows with a metal-melting glare. “Just what every woman wants to hear from the colossal object of her delirious desires. Thanks for that, Godawful.”

His gaze cocoons me in something that looks dangerously like indulgence. “No one has ever made me laugh.”

Oh. Oh.

Okay. Alright. That doesn’t sound so bad now. That actually sounds amazing. Tremendous. Yet another first for me. A positive feeling at last.

His eyes hood and simmer as they pin mine. “I never imagined I could laugh like you make me do. Humor never featured in my life. So many things didn’t. Until you.”

To add to the world-tilting blows of his confessions, he cups my chin and cheek, cradling my shuddering flesh as if I am the most precious thing in existence.

My heart does its level best to uproot itself as I drown in his touch, and soar in his eyes.

I want to sound sultry, but my voice only comes out whiny with a side of snide. “See? Touching me wasn’t so hard.”

His headshake is somber. “It’s the second hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“W-what was the first one?”

“Not touching you.”

I gulp down the heartbeats crowding my throat. “Why decide never to touch me in the first place?”

His thumb maps the trembling slope of my jaw in such absorption. “From the first night I captured you, I feared what would happen, what I would do if I touched you. Now that I have, I realize my worries were nothing compared to the reality.” A shudder rattles through me as his lungs empty on a ragged breath. “Now I fear I will never be able to stop.”