This is it! This was what she had been looking for! This amazing, incredible feeling! It was like flying. It was all about dissolving into the ultimate and perfect passion. How? How could she possibly be finding this passion with a total stranger? Why now, of all the moments and of all the situations, why now? Why him?
And why, when he asked her to touch him, was she unable to resist doing exactly that? Suddenly she needed to feel him. All of him, everywhere she could possibly reach, just as quickly as she could. She kissed him until she could scarcely draw a breath, her hands running down the bare contours of his fine chest and tensed abdominals. Her skin was burning with the need to feel his hands and she tried to satisfy it by rubbing her body sinuously against his.
“Oh my God! Oh God, you feel so good,” she cried out blindly, splitting her focus between the feel of him against her wriggling body and the sensation of his hot skin under her palms. Then the feel of his skin was replaced by the coarse thickness of denim and the burning heat of hardened flesh beneath it. The next thing either of them knew, her deft fingers were unbuttoning and unzipping his pants. She reached into his briefs and wrapped an eager hand around the incredibly thick circumference of his erection.
Kane broke from her mouth and shouted a vivid curse. His hips surged up into her grasp, forcing himself through her fingers. “Corrine!” he gasped, choking on his next demands when she slid her fist straight down his jutting length.
“Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. .” she hummed as she looked down the landscape of his body to see the prize she’d taken hold of. She couldn’t get her hand completely around him and the realization made her body go wet with anticipation. It was as if she were possessed by something within herself that she had never encountered before. For a moment she tried to focus on the remnants of suspicion and confusion that had hounded her before she had touched him. Before she had tasted him.
Tasted him.
The craving for his taste seared through her mind an instant before it seared through his. Realizing what she was going to do almost unmanned him. The fever in his blood reached a boiling point as her fiery hair trailed down his torso. Tensed tight in anticipation, Kane threw out a desperate plea to his mentor, the man he called Siddah.
Let me be free! he begged Abram.
You know I cannot. Not without Noah’s leave, was the reply.
I was seized in order to protect her from unwanted advances! You see she is willing!
She is possessed by the Samhain moon, Kane. You’ve used it against her to have your way. She is young, unskilled, weakened, and uninformed. The fact that she is being the aggressor at the moment is a mere technicality. Jacob and I raised you better than this.
Kane threw back his head and roared with the agonizing pain of his needful body and his stabbed conscience. It was the feel of her breath coasting hotly over the wet head of his erection that jolted him back to the issue at hand.
“Corrine, stop! Don’t do this. Sweet Destiny, you have to—”
Her tongue touched against him and he felt it like a match burning a fuse into life. It was nothing tentative or shy; it was the bold stroke of a woman starved for the flavor of her lover. Kane jolted and his entire being seemed to gather energy up all at once. He had been suffering in need for so long beside her that this single contact had the power to drive him out of control. He was going to lose it all. Like an overeager boy fumbling clumsily with the precious gift of a young girl’s innocence, he was going to create damage that could never be undone.
“Jason Deaver!”
Chapter 4
Kane blurted out the accursed name, a last ditch effort to rescue himself from the disaster he had created. He dragged the offensive moniker out of the deepest, darkest place in her mind and slapped her with it. She drew back so sharply and so suddenly that Kane had to fight not to sob with relief; to sob with devastation and loss. But now her suspicion was back, and pain and hurt were welling up fast and fierce in her eyes. She backed away from him as if he’d suddenly sprouted plague symptoms and curled her back into a cringe.
“What did you just say?” she asked him hoarsely, even though they both knew what he had said.
Kane needed precious moments to catch his breath, to calm the rage within his body. Abram was right. He could claim no satisfaction from Corrine while she was lost in the blind fever of the Samhain moon. When that haze cleared she would feel used and betrayed. . and she would be right to feel that way. And even though it made him suffer vicious jabs of pain from unrealized release, he confronted her with the name again.
“Jason Deaver. You were fourteen to his eighteen. Infatuated and innocent, you thought you could trust him.”
“Shut up,” she hissed darkly at him.
“But he just wanted to get off, and he didn’t give a damn about how you felt. He blundered around on top of you for what? Ten seconds? And then it was over and you—”
“Shut up!”
“—never saw him again.” Kane drew a deep, unsteady breath. “I won’t let this be like that, Corrine. I lost it for a minute there, I know, but I am not going to let you get all caught up. . only to come down from it calling me the names you called him for years.”
The Demon watched with no little suffering as she withdrew even further and curled up into her own body. She took Yoga, he knew, and so was in the habit of flexing her limber arms and legs around herself, but this was strictly protective. She was trying to erect an armor of limbs around her hurting heart and spirit.
The wound he spoke of was deep in her past, and it was true that she rarely even thought about it or took it out for examination. Corrine had considered it a hard lesson learned and had never forgotten since then to take everything a sexually invested male said with a very large grain of salt.
But she didn’t know how to apply that lesson to this situation. She looked at him from the side of her eyes, seeing the way he struggled for control of himself, his breath coming so hard and his skin bright with perspiration. He was nearly stripped to his thighs, her eagerness and haste to hold him in her hands having been so sharp that she had. .
Corrine’s face flushed with new heat as she recalled exactly how she had felt and how driving that need had been. She felt a heavy thread of mortification for her unexpectedly wanton behavior. She closed her eyes, hiding her face against her updrawn knee and trying like hell to hide from her own embarrassment. What had gotten into her? It was to have been a simple kiss! How had that so rapidly evolved into her having his musky flavor on her tongue? What had. . what had he done to her?
“It wasn’t like that,” Kane said, interrupting her thoughts.
“You’ve already proven you can take control of my mind and manipulate me like a marionette!”
“Do I look like I want a marionette?” he demanded in a sharp temper. “If I wanted a brainless sex toy, Corrine, I have the power to make you forget everything you’d do! You wouldn’t be sitting there questioning me because you’d never even realize you’d missed a step in your daily life. And frankly, babe, if you and I are going to burn up the sheets together, I want you to remember every damn minute of it!”
“Why? Why me?” she yelled at him sharply and suddenly. “Why are you here like this”—she indicated his lashed down state—“and why am I here with you? You won’t explain any of this to me and yet you expect me to simply accept and believe whatever choice bits of information you feel like doling out! Just tell me what is happening to me!”