23. Ash

CHAPTER 23

Ash

The woman tensed and sucked in a surprised gasp as if she hadn't known what it was like to come. Then she released a long, loud moan that I had no doubt Lark and every one of her mates heard even in the throes of their lovemaking.

I pushed back the skirt of the redhead's gauzy red dress so I could look at her. She clung to the fence as if that was the only thing holding her up and her head had dropped forward. Her breathing was ragged, her small breasts heaving against the front of her dress, reminding me how much I wanted to free them from that barely-there fabric and suck on them, while light blazed from her mating marks, illuminating the look of pure bliss on her delicate features. It stole my breath and brought me even closer to coming myself.

Goddess above. All I wanted now was to bend her over the arm of the cushioned, backless bench in the middle of the nook and burry myself inside her.

But her spirit form shuddered and melted away, taking everything, her body and her cum around my mouth, and left me with only the memory of her luscious taste and her sweet moans.

I tipped my head back on the fence and closed my eyes. My own breathing was too fast, my cock hard and aching.

That had been a terrible mistake.

I shouldn't have teased her and I certainly shouldn't have offered to touch her. But she'd been watching Lark and her mates with such awe and need as if she'd never seen or experienced sex before. And it had been so long since I'd been with my own kind.

I ran my hands over my face and was suddenly too aware of the fact that my left side was smooth and normal, and my right side wasn't.

The rough, red scar that covered the right half of my face, ran down my neck, over my shoulder, covered my right peck, and showed up even in my spirit form, as if the results of that horrible night had been burned into my soul as well as my body. And with the Garden affecting my magic, making it difficult to change how I looked, I couldn't hide the truth from any woman. Not that I'd want to hide who I really was from my mate, but I couldn't even hide it long enough for a little sex.

My only hope was to find a woman who was new to the Garden who didn't know me and had never gotten a chance to get a good look at me.

Which had been something I'd been avoiding up until now.

It hadn't felt right, like I was taking advantage of someone who didn't deserve it, and I'd avoided going through with it… up until now.

I had no idea why I'd been unable to resist this redhead. From the look of her, she was very new, and was perfect for the plan I hadn't really wanted to try. I didn't recognize her, and her spirit form kept flickering as if she didn't have enough experience holding it together. This was probably her first time in the Garden, and I'd been selfish, satisfying a desire I'd been able to ignore for years.

Except I hadn't satisfied the desire at all.

After not being with a fae woman for half a century and getting a taste of her, I wanted more. From talking with the others, I knew they didn't connect with fae woman the way I did, which only made my situation more cruel. I felt a power, a sense of peace, a promise of something incredible when I was with a fae woman. Something I didn't feel with a fae man or a human woman.

But with almost three quarters of the fae population being male, females had their pick of lovers, and why would any of them take a lover who couldn't even look normal in his spirit form when they could have someone like Talon?

Even Quill with no magic who the Goddess would never bond to a woman at least got invitations from unmated women for a little fun or women with mates looking for another to join them for a night of sex. And if I was too scary to look at, then no one would fall in love with me, and the Goddess would never consider me a potential mate for anyone.

Lark cried out Blaze's name in pleasure, making my cock scream for a release. Blaze snarled, his feline nature overwhelming him and the sounds of flesh slapping against flesh grew louder and faster.

He hadn't lasted long at all. But then he'd said the pool had been blessed and Lark and her mates had been trying to conceive for almost sixty years now. I knew it was a scar on Blaze's soul that he and the others hadn't be able to give her the one thing she'd always wanted.

Most fae women conceived at least once within their first thirty years of being mated, and every year that passed, the odds that Lark would conceive got smaller and smaller.

And while I wasn't sure I wanted a family, I did want a mate. My soul cried for that connection, the one I always felt at the edge of my senses when I made love with a fae woman.

But that life had been taken from me, and if I was smart, I wouldn't torture myself by watching Lark with her mates or lose my control and play with anymore new arrivals.

Footsteps on the path outside of the nook drew my attention to the opening. They were soft, barely audible, but I'd trained myself to notice and pay attention to the slightest sounds — I was the spymaster and assassin of the Black Guard, and it would look terrible if I was ever caught unaware.

"Torturing yourself by watching Lark have sex?" Talon whispered as he stepped into the nook.

No, I'm torturing myself by making the new arrival come on my face.

I offered him a lazy shrug, trying to look as if nothing bothered me, but his eyes narrowed, seeing right through me.

"Maybe humans just aren't enough," I said, "Maybe I need a little more, even if I'm just watching."

Except I needed even more than that. I didn't get a connection from just watching, only a heighten sense of the memory of what the connection felt like, which was why I broke down and watched — sometimes even jerking off while watching.

The image of the redhead's face filled with bliss, her body trembling, her cum sweet on my tongue, swept through me, and my cock strained against the front of my pants. Goddess, I was a fool to have thought I could taste her and not want more.