Heart of Stone (25 page)

He’d meant it to be slow, a gradual, incremental joining of flesh to flesh. Something to be savored and lingered over. He wanted to embed this memory in his brain for all time, something he could call up and relive over and over through all the centuries of eternity. This alone could sustain him.

But Ella didn’t cooperate. Her legs gave out, the trembling bleeding into total collapse, the weight of her body driving him into her with one brutal stroke.

He heard her scream, but it echoed in the distance, drowned out by his own bellow of ecstasy. He’d forgotten how perfect she felt around him. Or maybe he just hadn’t believed his own memory. Nothing, he’d believed, could really be that good.

It was better.

She fit around him as if her body had been designed to take his. Her muscles clamped tight, squeezing until he had to struggle to draw back, resisting as he pushed forward. He’d have worried that he hurt her, except that she cried out with every stroke, her body aching to meet him, her pussy already quivering with impending climax.

Kees grunted and jerked her head down for a kiss. His mouth claimed her, conquered her, devoured her. And she surrendered so beautifully, giving him everything he asked, meeting every demand with a generous spirit and a whimper of pleasure. Stones, she was perfect.

Starving and desperate, he released her hair to grasp her hips and began to move her up and down over his shaft, thrusting up into every stroke. Her head fell back against her shoulders, exposing her throat, and his mouth began to water. He wanted to sink his teeth into the soft, white flesh, to mark her like an animal. To show the world she was his.

But first, he needed her to come again.

His fingers tightened until he knew they would leave round, purple bruises in her delicate flesh, but Kees couldn’t bring himself to care. They only represented more proof of his possession. Increasing the speed of his thrusts, he hammered into her. Her body arched back and her hands braced against his thighs, offering her the leverage to give as good as she got.

He knew he wouldn’t last much longer.

A snarl broke from his lips and he shoved a hand down to where their bodies joined, finding her swollen clit and closing her fingers around the little peak. Her body jerked against his, and her breath froze as he pinched the nub with quick, hard pressure, sending her screaming into climax.

He loved the way she came. Her eyes went blank and hazy; then they snapped shut and her mouth opened as her body struggled to vocalize her pleasure and draw in oxygen at the same time. Her nipples drew up so tightly, they looked almost red, and just the stirring of his breath over them made her hips jerk against him. Every muscle in her body clenched under his hands and around his cock and he knew he would never see a more beautiful sight if he lived until the ending of the world.

His thrusts never paused as he rode her through the crisis. He continued to drive hard and deep into her core until he felt her soft around him and her body melted against his chest. She pillowed her head on his shoulder and mumbled something in a voice slurred with exhaustion.

She thought she was finished, he knew, but he had other plans.

Holding back his own climax had taken every ounce of determination, but the struggle had been worth it—he’d gotten to watch her some as well as feel it, and now he wanted to feel it again when he finally loosened his reins and emptied himself inside her.

He let her rest for a moment, and then slid his hands around to cup her ass, his fingers teasing the shadowy valley between the rounded cheeks. Her still-sensitized skin heated immediately and he felt her jerk against him, her pussy clenching.

Murmuring wordless encouragement, he let his hands squeeze, then stroke upward, over her hips and back. His arms wrapped around her, holding her tight against him as he altered the rhythm of his thrusts, moving slower now, but more intently. Every thrust carried force, and he changed the angle to rub against her most sensitive spot on every stroke. The head of his cock teased her cervix on this deepest entries and he heard the way her breath caught in her throat.

Her fingers clenched against his skin and he felt her arousal returning quickly. She began to whimper again, her hips rocking against his almost involuntarily. He felt his mouth curve and reached up to cup her cheeks in his hands. He wanted to look into her eyes while he came, wanted her to see what she did to him.

What they did to each other.

Ella’s whimpers turned into breathless pleas and her body began to tighten once more. The intensity of their passion remained, but it had shifted gears into something quieter, something deeper. It wrapped around them like an intimate cocoon, until the world fell away and nothing existed but the two of them, moving together as one.

Kees felt his balls tighten. He knew he couldn’t hold out much longer. Shifting forward, he changed his angle again until the base of his cock rode against her slit with every thrust. He laid his forehead against hers and breathed her in as he strained toward climax.

In the end she pushed him over, not with a touch but with a word. Three words. They trembled on her lips even as he felt the pleasure roll through her, her third climax like a building wave. It began with tiny little flutters of her pussy and slowly gained strength until she clamped around him like a fist, milking him of pleasure.

“I love you,” she breathed, and he exploded. One hand jerked her head to the side as his human teeth gave way to Guardian fangs. He sank them into her shoulder with fierce pleasure and a primitive thought of,
Mine.
His vision went not dark but bright, a blinding flash of light like fireworks behind his eyelids.

He came forever, shooting burst after burst of fluid into her tight heat. He felt as if a piece of his soul was ripped out with every pulse, and it felt glorious. The little human was his now. His Ella.

And he never wanted to let her go.

Chapter Thirteen

The irony of being the one to wake alone was not lost on Kees. He knew almost before he regained consciousness that Ella no longer lay in the bed beside him, and before he opened his eyes he sensed she was not in the room.

He sighed and gazed up at the ceiling. He probably deserved this.

A glance to the right showed him an empty bathroom, the lights extinguished. Looking to the opposite side of the room, he saw sunlight flooding in through the bedroom window and frowned. It appeared to be later than he’d expected.

The clock told him he’d slept until almost 10
A.M
.

Kees cursed and sat up, throwing back the covers. He remembered exhaustion weighing down on him when he carried Ella to bed in the middle of the night. They had both dozed off on the sofa after that amazing bout of lovemaking, but he’d woken after a few minutes and realized they would both be more comfortable in her bedroom. He recalled settling her gently onto the mattress before crawling in beside her. The last image in his mind was the sight of her hair spread over the pillow as he curled himself around her and drifted into sleep.

Why hadn’t she woken him?

He didn’t find her in the rest of the apartment, but he did find a note. Not propped on the pillow, the way a lover might leave it, but stuck to the door of the microwave.

Kees frowned as he reached for it. True, it was a good place to catch his attention, since even Guardians ate during their waking cycles, but it struck him as a little cold. As if she was trying to put distance between them.

The tone of what she’d written offered little reassurance.

Kees,

I had to be back at work before 9:00. I plan to call Fil from there and let her know what we need. I don’t imagine she’ll say no, but I’ll catch you up tonight.

Also, I think it would be a good idea for me to learn some more useful spells in case we run into more
nocturnis.
Maybe we could work on that during our lesson tonight. I marked a couple in Alan’s books I thought looked interesting.

—E.

What the hell?

Kees snarled and crumpled the paper in his hand. That was all she had to say to him? Last night she had told him she loved him, and this morning all she wrote about what their mission. As if they had nothing more between them.

His first instinct urged him to head right over to the museum, drag her into the nearest dark corner he could find, and demonstrate for her with brutal clarity exactly what they had between them. She was his, damn it, and she needed to understand that.

Sanity held him back.

He knew his little human well enough to realize that interrupting her at work and exposing her private relationship to public scrutiny wouldn’t win him any points. Ella held herself a little apart from most people, and he had learned that she valued her privacy. As much as he wanted to demand she explain herself to him immediately, waiting for her return and discussing the matter here would probably get him an answer faster.

And without feeling her shoes against his shins.

The thought was almost enough to make him smile. His anger still simmered at the idea of her sneaking out while he slept and leaving him with no more than a terse, impersonal note, but he could bide his time for a few hours. Paging through the books she had left him might help.

Besides, he thought, shifting back to his natural form and smiling until the tip of a fang peeked out from between his lips, if they resolved their differences here, maybe Ella could help him understand something. There was a term humans used that had always made him curious. Tonight, maybe Kees would finally discover the definition of something called “make-up sex.”

*   *   *

Ella pinched together a bite of bread and rolled it between her fingers while the phone rang in her ear. She’d like to blame her lack of appetite on nerves over calling someone she hadn’t talked to in more than five years in order to ask for a favor, but not even at her most delusional would she ever buy that lameness. The knots in her stomach had nothing to do with her college classmate and everything to do with the monster she’d left in her bed.

And she wasn’t referring just to his penis.

“Bonjour.”

Distracted by her own thoughts, Ella hadn’t even noticed that the phone had stopped ringing. She almost choked getting out a hasty reply.

“Uh, hi. Is this Fil? Er, Felicity?”

She knew that English was the woman’s first language, but living and working in Montreal would make a French greeting pretty normal.

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“Um, hi,” Ella repeated nervously, wondering how she was going to explain things to her old friend, or if they ever were friends. Would friends have lost touch for so long? “I know this is totally out of the blue, and you might not even remember me, which would be really embarrassing, but you and I went to school together, and I—”

“Oh my God. Ella Harrow, is that you?”

Oh, wow. Maybe Fil did remember her.

Ella let out a relieved laugh. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“El, this is awesome. I haven’t heard from you in, like, forever. How are you?”

The warmth in Felicity’s voice made Ella’s heart swell. She’d liked the other woman from the first moment they met in a Renaissance art class during their sophomore year, but she’d never been very good at making friends. Since she’d gone into foster care, she learned that losing people hurt too much, and keeping them at arm’s distance was just easier. She and Fil had worked together on several projects and occasionally grabbed coffee or a snack together, but they hadn’t maintained contact after graduation.

Ella had to admit that was probably her fault.

She knew her own weaknesses, and she remembered how Fil had dealt with them—mainly by ignoring their existence. As far as Ella could remember, all of the time they had spent together outside of their assigned class projects had been at Fil’s instigation. For some reason, Fil had never taken offense at Ella’s quiet reserve. Most other people thought it meant she was a snob or cold or unfriendly, but Fil had just acted as if the distance wasn’t even there.

Nothing Ella had done—or more precisely, not done—had managed to push the other woman away. Fil had dug in her heels and decided the two of them were friends, so friends they were. Even the accidental revelation of Ella’s magical secret hadn’t frightened her off. Since the magic terrified Ella back then, back before she’d known what it was, that had left her speechless.

The girls had worked late—until well after midnight—on a project at the university library. By the time they left the building to return to their respective dorms, it had been pitch black and silent in the wooded section of campus that separated student housing from the library. Fil—practical, rational Fil—had seemed unfazed by the creepy atmosphere, but something had set Ella’s nerves on edge.

She’d felt eyes on her from the moment they first left the library, but seen no hint of any other people along the trail. Telling herself it must be her imagination, she had tried to push aside the feeling, but her skin continued to crawl as they walked through the quiet night.

When one of the overhead lamps that illuminated their path blinked out without warning, Ella had jumped out of her skin. Whirling around, she peered into the trees at the side of the path and saw something move. Then she lost it.

The door walling off her magic had sprung open and the force of the power breaking through had tossed both women onto their asses. Maybe Ella’s scream had scared away the figure in the trees, but by the time Fil had leapt to her feet and shouted for whoever was scaring her friend to show himself, the odd menacing feeling had disappeared. The night air felt entirely normal, and Ella felt like an idiot.

Fil had just grabbed her hand and helped her to her feet, given her a hug, and told her it was fine. There had been curiosity in the other woman’s eyes when she stepped back, but she hadn’t said a thing about what knocked her down, and she never brought up the incident again. Still, Ella always remembered it, and it had made her even more self-conscious when they saw each other. When graduation separated them, she felt something almost like relief.