His hands brushed her breasts, slid under her sweater and into her bra. Her nipples tightened as one rough finger grazed the tip. His mouth nipped her jaw, kissed its way across her skin and settled on the soft skin beneath her ear as he played with her breasts and brought her to new heights of sexual arousal.
Her strokes grew longer, bolder with every touch from his hands. On the downstroke she slid her fingers lower to grasp the twin weights beneath.
He groaned against her neck. “You’re playing with fire. In a moment I won’t be able to stop.”
“I don’t want you to stop. I want to know what you feel like when you come.”
Whatever restraint he’d been exercising broke with her words. Her sweater was quickly wrenched over her head, her bra ripped free of her breasts as if it were paper. He bent, and his mouth captured first the right nipple and then the left, until she thought she would explode from just that attention.
Just as she was about to beg him to finish her, he turned her quickly and pushed her to her knees on the seat of the couch. One big hand pressed her torso into the cushions so she was leaning over the back of her grandmother’s blue-and-orange-checked afghan.
“Gods, you’re beautiful,” he growled at her back. His weight depressed the sofa as he braced one knee on the cushions between her legs and nudged her thighs wider. “I can’t wait to find out if you’re as tight as you were in my dream.”
His dream? Oooooooh, yes.
It struck her then that she should probably be a little afraid. She was with a massive man she didn’t know, in a submissive position where he could do just about anything he wanted to her and she’d be hard-pressed to fight back. Considering what those two guys had tried to do to her outside XScream a few months ago, she should have been scared out of her mind. But she wasn’t. Somehow, she knew instinctively Theron wouldn’t hurt her. And his erotic words were sending her into a complete mind-melting frenzy.
One of his rough hands wrapped around her torso to cup her breast, the other clamped onto her hip. His mouth found her ear and nibbled her lobe until she wanted to scream. And when he pushed his hips into her from behind and rubbed back and forth, white light erupted behind her eyes.
The pleasure was swift and electric and not nearly enough. She didn’t realize until moments later that they were both still clothed—he in his boxers and she in her underwear. He pressed forward again, retreated, teasing them both, mimicking what he would, in a moment, do to her naked flesh.
“Theron,” she rasped.
His lips slid to the nape of her neck. Trailed lower. He drew his hand down her spine as he rubbed against her again. Both hands found the sides of her underwear as his lips kissed the base of her spine. He lifted his head slightly and pulled the edge down.
“Oh, yes.” Casey arched her back and closed her eyes.
She was so swept up in the moment, she didn’t realize Theron had gone still behind her until she pressed back and met only air.
She turned slightly to find him staring at her skin with wide eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
His finger brushed over the lower left side of her back, just above her buttock. “This marking. Is it a tattoo?”
She knew what he was looking at. And he wasn’t the first person to comment on it.
She chuckled. “I’m too afraid of needles to get a tattoo.”
When he didn’t respond, only continued to stare at her skin, apprehension crept into her chest. “I was born with it. It’s just a birthmark.”
His eyes lifted to hers. Though he’d removed his hand, heat radiated from his fingers where they hovered over her skin. “This doesn’t look like a birthmark. Tell me about your parents.”
He wanted to talk? About her folks? Now?
Apprehension turned to wariness, and the skin near her birthmark began to tingle. She pushed up from the couch and turned slowly, sliding down onto the cushions until she sat and her mark was hidden from his view.
His jaw was tight, his eyebrows drawn together until a deep crease lined his forehead. One glance confirmed what she’d already suspected. That heavenly erection that had been pressed up against her moments before was gone.
Her skin prickled, and a blast of self-doubt at her near nakedness washed over her. She reached for her sweater, dangling from the arm of the sofa. “My…my parents?”
“Your mother and father. Where are they?”
Unease knotted her stomach. She pulled the sweater over her head and, by the time it was once again shielding her breasts, discovered he was back in his jeans, staring at her with an intense expression she couldn’t define.
This was what she’d wanted to avoid, right? This awkwardness. Things had gone too far, and now he regretted it. Just what had happened to change his mind? He’d been all over her before—
“Casey,” he said sharply. “Focus. Your mother and father.”
She gave her head a sharp shake, unsure why her brain seemed so muddled. “My mother died just after I was born. My father…I never knew him. They had a brief affair years ago when my mother was studying in Europe. She came home after she found out she was pregnant. I…I never met him.” She glanced up. “Why do you want to know this now?”
He ignored her question. “Who raised you?”
“My grandmother. This is her house. Was,” she amended as she looked around the living room and a sick feeling settled in her stomach. She could actually hear Gigia’s disapproving voice in her head over what she’d almost done. “She passed a few months ago. Cancer.”
His jaw clenched as he studied her with narrowed eyes. Then he uttered one word.
“Skata.”
She knew enough Greek to recognize a few choice swear words. And at that moment, Casey was reminded that he was a complete stranger. She didn’t know anything about him besides his name. Why had she helped him? What had actually happened to him? And what was he really doing in her house right now?
She pushed up slowly from the couch as questions pinged around in her brain again. Ones she’d somehow—and foolishly—brushed aside earlier. “What’s going on here? Why the sudden interest in my genealogy? Just who are you anyway?”
His expression softened. Just a touch. Just enough so those black-as-sin eyes engulfed her attention.
Or maybe she only imagined they did. But for a moment, for a split second, he was the sensuous almost-lover she’d kissed and fondled wildly just a few minutes before.
“No one,” he whispered, as he reached for her hand. “No one important.” His fingers wrapped around her wrist and pressed into her skin ever so slightly, right over her vein, and though she knew it couldn’t be, she thought she heard a note of regret in his voice. “No one you will remember. Close your eyes now, meli.”
And like a lamb being lead to slaughter, she did.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Isadora smoothed the covers over her legs and plastered on a smile as fake as the cubic zirconium some human women went gaga over as she looked up at her father’s personal physician.
The crease between Callia’s perfect eyebrows wasn’t a sign of optimism.
Not that Isadora needed confirmation from the race’s greatest healer. She was growing weaker by the day. She knew it in her head, felt it in her bones. She just didn’t understand why.
Callia replaced the tools in her bag with quiet care. “No visible injuries. Your vitals are strong. Whatever agents you encountered in the human world shouldn’t be affecting you like this. Is there something you aren’t telling me?”
Now, there’s a question. How in the name of Hades to answer that one?