His hands latched around her arms, and he lifted her clear off her feet and dropped her to the couch.
The breath whooshed out of her, stealing her squeaked protest. When he loomed over her, his eyes were blank, dark. Unseeing.
Three heartbeats stretched out to a lifetime. Her stun gun was in the other room, but even if she had it in her damn hand she wasn’t sure she could have forced herself to use it on Andrew. Knowing it was futile, she couldn’t stop her hands from flying up, bracing against the dangerously hot skin of his chest. Pushing him was like trying to push a brick wall, and the first hint of real fear uncurled inside her. “Andrew—” His eyes cleared, and a roar of fear eclipsed that tiny thread inside. His fear, not her own, though it vanished in the space of a heartbeat as Andrew released her. “Sorry, that was—sorry.”
She hadn’t expected her powers to recharge so quickly. After a burnout it could take days for them to come back online at full strength. Kat reinforced her shields to be safe, but didn’t move. She barely breathed. “I know better than to poke a shapeshifter when he’s asleep. It’s my fault.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Something inside her broke at the utter lack of self-forgiveness in his eyes. He looked exhausted. Worn out. “I was just going to let you know that I’m ordering some room service…and that you can take the bed.
I’ll fit on the couch better than you do.”
He rubbed both hands through his hair and stood. “It’s a king. Plenty big enough for both of us.”
Share a bed with him? If she’d had a masochistic streak, maybe. Or if he was going to sleep in a parka.
Fear had a funny way of waking up all of her nerves, and a lot of them seemed to be tracing the memory of his chest under her palms.
Which made her feel warm—and she could only hope it wasn’t an obvious kind of warm. “We’ll figure it out. You need to eat something before you go back to sleep. Wanna look at the room-service menu?”
Andrew shook his head. “Whatever you get is fine. I’m not picky.”
Kat swallowed and eased herself upright, then rose to her feet. “Okay, but if you leave me to my own devices, I’m ordering like, every expensive dessert on the menu.”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Two for me.”
Maybe that was how she looked when she was shaking and scared that her empathy was a weapon that would destroy the people she loved. Not the mirror she’d expected to look into, but a powerful one.
So she did what he’d done. Reached up and framed his face with her hands, and shivered at the texture of his beard against her palms. “I will never be afraid of you, Andrew Callaghan.”
His chest heaved with shaking breaths, and he groaned as he grabbed her wrists. “It’s dangerous, Kat.
I’m dangerous.”
“So am I.” She swiped her thumbs over his cheeks and willed him to believe the same words he’d told her the day before. “Andrew, I’m still mostly burned out, and you’ve got strong shields for someone who’s not a psychic. But I couldn’t just hurt you—I could destroy you. I could drive you to your knees and make you crawl for me. I could take away everything you are.”
He closed his eyes, but he didn’t release her. “Then that makes this a doubly bad idea.”
Andrew was going to walk away from her again, and the tense parts of her that had started to unwind over the last few days would shatter. The only way to save anything was to let him go before he came up with a polite, stilted reason. “I understand.”
“No. No, you really don’t.”
He bent his head and kissed her.
The world stopped.
His lips were warm. Firm. As firm as the fingers locked around her wrists, holding her hands to his face. She’d played out this moment in a thousand girlish daydreams and more than one guilty adult fantasy, and imagination hadn’t provided the little details. The heat of his body, the strength of his grip, the way she melted, like chocolate left in the July sun, and from nothing but that innocent contact.
His lips, on hers. Parting, and oh God, he knew how to kiss, like he was hungry, like he loved the taste of her, and Kat became mortally certain that her knees were going to give out if he got his tongue in on the action. Her body throbbed with the rhythm of his mouth moving on hers, until she was one exposed nerve, and she would have begged him to touch her anywhere—everywhere—if she wouldn’t have had to stop kissing him.
When he released her wrists, it was only to grip her hips and lift her, mold her to his body, and she moaned her gratitude. He was harder than he looked, an unforgiving wall of muscle and smooth skin, so distracting and arousing that she didn’t realize they were moving until he stepped over the threshold.
Into the bedroom.
“Open,” he rasped, and lowered her to the bed.
Her back touched the mattress—gentle, so damn gentle—and Andrew stretched out over her, shirtless and beautiful, and her brain fritzed out like a fried circuit board as she obeyed and parted her lips.
He touched them with his tongue, a soft sweep of one lip and then the other, and kissed her again, deeper, one hand winding in her hair. That stirred old memories, brought to life every unacceptable fantasy she’d had of their anger and hurt and longing all coalescing into a dark passion that would satisfy her body even as it cut her heart to pieces.
But there was no darkness in the grip of his hand, just a gentle control, a sweet hint of dominance that barely deserved the description, but thrilled her anyway. The throbbing was back, magnified into an ache that pulsed in time with the stroke of his tongue. Every time she tried to catch a breath it escaped in tiny, helpless noises that would have embarrassed her if she hadn’t been burning alive.
He dragged his mouth to her chin and then her throat, nipping lightly when she tilted back her head. The scrape of his teeth curled her toes, and the sheer insanity of the way her body reacted splintered fear through her.
She fisted both hands in his hair and dragged his head back, panting for breath. “What are we doing?
Are we—” He panted too, his eyes glazed with pleasure and need. “Are we what?”
If she let him keep touching her, she’d fly apart before she got her pants off. “We can’t do this without talking about it. Sex with an empath as strong as I am—it’s not that simple. I could hurt you. Hurt both of us.”
Andrew’s chest rumbled, as if a growl formed that he didn’t quite voice. Then he rolled away. “I didn’t think.”
Disappointment made her voice shake. “You shouldn’t have to. It wouldn’t be that bad if you were anyone else…but with you I’m—I’ve got—” She covered her face with her hands, and now she was disappointed and embarrassed. “My empathy might as well be hardwired into my sexual responses. Is there a girl version of premature ejaculation?”
He choked on a snort. “I don’t think anyone minds it, usually.”
Maybe her violent reactions had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with chemistry. Maybe wanting Andrew so long had built a tension that would make even innocent touches feel fantastic. Maybe she was in denial.
Maybe she didn’t care.
The room seemed too warm as she rolled to her knees. Andrew had his hand over his face, which made asking the question a lot easier. “If it gets too overwhelming…can we stop?”
He rolled to his side, propped on one elbow, and studied her, his expression intense. “We can stop whenever you want. Whenever you need to.”
Christ, she was a teenager, making rules about where her prom date could touch her while they groped in the back of his car. Except she’d never gone to prom. She’d been sixteen her senior year, struggling with the violent surges in power that made puberty a worse nightmare for a psychic than for the average hormone-riddled teen.