Anything but gray.
She clutched the open edges of his coat. The row of buttons cut into her palm. With an impatient moan, she shoved at the opening.
The leather resisted, but his shirt ripped to his navel.
She blinked in surprise. She hadn’t meant . . .
Hell, whatever. She reached around the width of his chest, while reveling in the heave of his breath, the shudder in his muscles, the scalding heat of his skin.
The chill lifted, burning away like fog, the dismal flavor of ash lost to the wild spark of his tongue rimming the inside of her lips and the edges of her teeth.
She should pull away—regain some space and her senses. But she felt the void all around them, between the leaves and lights. Even in this serene jungle lay shadows of death.
So she kept her gaze and hands on Archer, anything to hold on.
His hips pressed hard against hers, forcing her into the daybed, but he reared back to look at her. He spiked his fingers through her hair to pin her in place.
“What is this?” His voice was a harsh rasp. For the first time, she saw uncertainty in his eyes.
Sure, he’d face down ferales or malice, but ask for a little foreplay. . . .
“Last hurrah.” She curled her fingers into the muscles of his back and urged him closer.
He resisted. “When I may have to kill you later?”
“I’ve always hated that awkward, breakfast small talk.”
The violet sheen she knew was the demon gleamed in his eyes. “Unfair.”
She hesitated. He was right. What she was asking . . .
“If I were your lover,” he added, “you wouldn’t be talking the next morning. And not because I’d killed you.”
An arrogant assassin. Better than an uncertain one, she supposed. She tightened her grip. This time he relented, lowering himself so that each inch of him found a resting place against her and squeezed out any place for the void.
“Don’t let go,” he warned.
She wouldn’t, but before she could answer, he kissed her again, hard. The pendant had slipped behind her—the stone ground into her spine between the shoulder blades, the cord tight around her neck. She squirmed, and the friction of her body against his made her gasp.
She arched her back, less pressure on her neck, more on her hips. He took it as an invitation to skim her T-shirt over her head.
She wasn’t well-endowed enough to always require a bra, a sometime regret of hers. But now it saved time, time she wasn’t sure she had anyway.
Archer’s fingers grazed her skin. She caught a deep breath, raising herself to fill his hand.
His breath left in an explosive burst. She would have laughed—if she hadn’t been breathless herself.
His thumb stroked the ruched flesh around her nipple, and sensation pooled through her veins, driving back every thought of the void. Only this, now.
It had been so long. She craved the raw silk touch of skin on skin. Not cold steel flensing tissues, not impersonal latex hands describing range of motion.
She was strong and alive. At the moment anyway. She wanted this.
The cool leather of his coat draped around her, but the heat off his skin scalded her as she buried her hands in his shirt. She pushed the material back, baring his shoulders, and trapped his arms against his sides.
He wrenched back, as if reluctant to be restrained. She followed him up and pressed a kiss to the base of his throat, then flicked her tongue into the hollow. She heard his groan, felt the vibration under her mouth. She traced her hand down the crinkle of hair at his chest to the button of his jeans. With a flick of her thumb, the button popped open.
He pushed her back, eyes wide enough to fill with the gleam of little white lights.
In the second heartbeat, he was shucking out of his coat and ripped shirt, tossing both onto the ground.
For a moment, she feared the separation would leave her floating again in the demon realm. But the sight of him, all hard muscle and hot skin, seemed enough to keep the otherworldly chill at bay.
He sat back on his haunches, his expression harder than his abs, which, she thought, was saying something. “I am mad.”
“Just possessed,” she corrected.
His gaze swept her. Her nipples tightened under the almost-tangible sweep of his dark eyes. She stretched.
He growled and lunged forward. She didn’t flinch as he buried both fists with a thud in the pillows next to her head. From the corner of her eye, the reven on his forearm was a black curl touched in violet. When he leaned forward to nuzzle her neck, his teeth scraped on the cord of her necklace.
“It has been so long.” His low growl in her ear, the Southern drawl more pronounced with his tension, made her nerves dance. “What possessed me to . . . ?”
“Like I’d know.”
“You should.” His hands were busy at the fly of her jeans. He grabbed both flayed edges and yanked upward, bringing them hip to hip.
She gasped. In retaliation, she tucked her hands inside his waistband. He sucked in a harsh breath, giving her room to delve a little deeper past the top of his boxers.
His zipper parted with a resigned sigh that was lost in his groan as her fingers grazed the length of his raging erection.
His turn for revenge. Tit for tat, she thought hazily, as his mouth closed over the curve of her breast.
The damp warmth of his lips urging her nipple to a peak drew an answering moisture lower down, his big hand coaxing her. For a moment, she thought she’d drifted again, because when her senses returned, her jeans were gone, as were his.
Poltergeists or passion, she didn’t care. She wanted only for him to push back the void, with that big hand, his big other parts.
With her fingers, she measured him, teased a pearl of wet from his tip. His long, inhaled gasp made her smile. She traced the pearl down his length. Hard as that part was, the rest of him trembled like the leaves above them.
She folded her legs around him. For a single instant, her spine, hips, and thighs seized, locked as if in ice, a cruel reminder of her accident. Then the hot insistence of him was burning at her core, melting the ice that froze her.
“Now,” she whispered.
He hesitated.
“Right now.”
Fighting and dancing, he’d been all lethal grace. Now he flowed like winter molasses, slow and sweet. She wanted to scream, but she lost her breath as he eased into her, filled her.
He started to move with sure and steady strokes. She clamped her hands around his forearms braced beside her head, her fingers digging into his flesh, distorting the lines of the reven. Her vision blurred, starred, and she was dazzled by half-unseen auroral lights that limned his body where they touched.
Pleasure bordering on torture radiated endlessly outward from the center of their joining. She moved as if through an illuminated hall of mirrors—each lit glass reflecting an infinite cascade of feeling back at her, completely opposite the cold, vague demon realm that beckoned her.
He plunged into her, faster and deeper now. A new abyss threatened. With each rising caress, she moved nearer the edge. And she welcomed it.
Over her own panting breath, she barely heard his chant beside her ear, speeding in time to his rhythm. Her name, a whispered endearment, a hoarse command that she come, come now.
With jackknife violence, she did.
Eyes wide, she stared up, met his dark gaze, and saw nothing of violet. There was only the brilliant bronze glaze of his desire as he followed his own suggestion, driving her into another bone-deep contraction of ferocious pleasure that curled through her pelvis and thighs, incinerating the memory of her wounds, blazing high as she reveled in every sensation, and then swept away on Archer’s half-strangled shout as he spent himself inside her.