Strong though I was, when a woman opened her body to a man, she was vulnerable to him in ways only another woman could understand. Before I let loose my aphidy, before I had sex with him, I had to trust him enough to let go of the tight rein of my control. That was the only way I’d be able to glow. And I didn’t know if I could do that with him.
He was such a raw mass of seething pain. I sensed it, and that part of me that had always been drawn to pain was drawn to him now because of it. I didn’t try to resist it. Lifting my hand, I laid it again on his bare chest. Once again, the small pulse of power jumped between us. His face twisted, as if my touch pained him, but he did not groan as he had before—the sound that had startled me, made me jerk back away from him. He clenched his teeth, swallowed down the sound, and shuddered from my touch.
Just my palm laid flat against his chest with my Goddess’s Tears pressing into his skin, and something between us connected like a current flowing out of me to him. A circuit that cycled back to me. My pearly moles flared to life and did what they usually did around pain. My palm began to tingle, my hand grew warm, and my power, drawn forth by the suffering of another, spilled out of me and seeped into his flesh in a wide, assessing sweep, easing the pain.
God. Such agony he was in. What control it had taken on his part simply not to lash out at me in reaction to that pain. “Dante, can you say something? Anything?”
“Touch me more.” The words came out hoarse and guttural, as if they’d been wrenched from him.
I looked into his eyes and saw that tiny spark of sanity firm, grow stronger with our physical connection. “Thank God,” I whispered. Looking into his eyes, feeling him through my palm, reading him, I knew that we’d pulled him back—both he and I together—from that brink of madness he’d been teetering on. I knew that he would not hurt me, that I could save him. That I wanted to save him. Not just for the healer he would gain me. But for himself. For the valiant warrior that he was, the fierce will inside of him that had tenaciously pulled him back from the encroaching madness.
I stuffed the condom in my pocket, freeing my other hand, and laid it across his forehead, pushing my disquiet aside to just concentrate on him, the poor suffering creature before me. My palm flushed and tingled as that pain-easing power of mine spilled into him, soothing the jagged edges of his mind and body. His eyes closed and his jaw clenched. Wetness spiked his lashes.
“It’s okay. You can groan if you need to. It just startled me that first time,” I murmured. But he didn’t, and I was glad he didn’t. I still felt uneasy around him. “I’m taking away some of the pain, removing the symptom. Not curing the disease,” I told him.
His lashes lifted, dark wet crescents. “How can we cure it?” He spoke with less strain, but his voice still sounded rusty, sore.
I hesitated, then answered him with his own words. “Touch me.”
His right hand lifted slowly, hesitantly, the chains clinking with his movement. It came to rest cautiously on my shoulder. “Your shirt is wet,” he said. But it was his body that shook as I brought my other hand to his face and traced both hands down his cheeks, his neck, moving to his shoulders, pausing there a moment, then drifting down his arms, back up. Smoothing across his chest in gentle, tingling sweeps.
“I fell in a river,” I said, explaining why my shirt was wet.
Chains rattled as his left hand came up to rest on my other shoulder. He began an echoing refrain of my motions, gliding them down my arms. Back up.
“When you touched me that first time, I knew I could not let you go.” His voice was a raw and husky murmur. “Don’t leave me.”
“I won’t,” I promised, even though my heart sped up in disquiet at his words. The thought of being held by him, captured by him…I shook off the unease. “I won’t leave you unless you bite me. That is the only thing that will make me go,” I said, continuing my ministrations, learning his body, easing his pain. I tried to lose myself in the pleasure of touching him, my hands drifting down his abdomen, sweeping up his sides, skimming lightly up and down his back.
“I won’t bite you,” he said in that ragged voice of his.
“No biting. No blood. All other things you may do.” Meeting Nolan’s eyes over Dante’s shoulder, I gestured for him to leave and he slipped from the room, closing the door softly behind him. Taking that mental step, committing myself wholly to this, I swept a hand lightly over his groin, finding him long and hard, swollen full.
His teeth ground together audibly, and his body tensed to rock hardness. His skin stretched taut over the sharp blades of his cheekbones, and his pale blue eyes glittered down at me. I looked away, finding it easier to touch him, be with him, if I did not look into those eerie, familiar but unfamiliar eyes.
“This is the cure,” I said softly, taking the verbal step. “Touch me. Make love to me.”
His hands gripped my shoulders tightly before he consciously eased his grip. And that one moment of force, that hint of strength, drew my breath in.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said, alarmed, almost panicking, lifting his hands away.
“I’m not.” Warmth spilled across my cheeks in an embarrassed blush. “It was…nice,” I admitted softly. “I liked that firmness, the hint of your strength. Touch me more.”
I felt him heat at my words, but he stood there in an agony of stillness, fear that I would be frightened into leaving battling with his desire to do as I said—to touch me more.
I took his hands in both of mine, and some of that frightened tension left him as we connected once more. Until I slid them under my wet T-shirt and laid his hands against my bare skin. Then tension roared back into him again. Simmered between us as I swept my hands over his hips and slid them down his buttocks. He sucked in his breath, expelled it out when I continued on my journey, sweeping my palms down the back of his cloth-covered thighs.
He trembled as if a fever shook him, his cheeks slashed red. Breathing hard, his hands drifted slowly up my torso. The metal of his right restraint bumped up against my side, and I winced. In pain this time, not pleasure. His hands stilled. “You’re hurt.”
“Bruised a bit. There were some big rocks in that river.”
“Let me see.” He waited until I nodded, then drew up my T-shirt. And hissed.
“That bad, huh?” I swallowed. “Best to take the T-shirt off so you can see where to touch, and where not to touch.” I smiled as I said it, but inside I was not smiling. As my shirt was lifted over my head and tossed away, inside I was cringing. I was built modestly on top. Neat and compact were the best words to describe me. And the vivid purple and red bruises discoloring my left side and right arm did not help make me any more attractive. Despite my bold actions with him, I was far from confident when it came to sex. The men I’d been with had loved me, and I them. Dante hardly knew me. And his vision of me was not colored by love. My turn to tremble, to feel horribly vulnerable. I could not meet his eyes. Did not want to see what expression filled them.
If only Monères glowed from embarrassment. How easily then it would have been to cure him.
“Take off your pants.” A brief pause. Then he added, “Please,” like it was a word he was not used to saying.
Well, heck. Why don’t we just make it harder? But I nodded, and despite the trepidation filling me, undid the button, pushed down the zipper, and stepped out of my wet jeans and underwear, completely bare to him now. Still, I could not lift my eyes, even when he removed his own pants. He folded them neatly—an odd thing to do in this situation, I thought—and laid them on the floor. Then taking my hands, he drew me down to sit across his thighs as he leaned back against the wall.