Page 8 of Trick Of Light

Every time it was the same. With his kiss came a feeling of rightness that rolled through me, spreading heat and desire in its wake, making me want to grab him and keep him close. Once upon a time, before him, I thought I’d been in love. When my boyfriend left me for another, I was gutted. But it turned out, I was on a different path I’d never anticipated.

With Raphael, the epiphany was not some bolt from the blue, but instead the easy, simple, remarkably obvious revelation that I loved him, heart and soul. Raphael, it turned out, was the one for me. Which didn’t mean he didn’t drive me insane on occasion. Our house in Potrero Hill wasn’t big at twenty-five hundred square feet, but since my loft had been half that, it felt like a castle when we moved in. It had been newly remodeled, had an open floor plan, and the best part, to Raphael, was that it was gated. He was amazed at the thought that on one side it was public domain and on the other his alone. Having never had anything that belonged solely to him, he guarded our home with almost the same intensity he guarded me. He was also, surprisingly, a neat freak. And he was insane about coaster usage. We fought and yelled, sometimes a lot or about really stupid crap, and we both complained about whose turn it was to cook. Taken as a whole, it was good. Friends as well as lovers, we never took each other so seriously that we couldn’t laugh. It was, we discovered, the most important thing.

“Tell me,” Raphael demanded, his hands sliding down my sides, beneath the blazer, to my tucked-in dress shirt. He tugged on it quickly, and then I had hard, callused fingers skimming over my skin, the small of my back, my hips, and across my stomach.

I pressed forward, jolting as a digit traced the top of my crease. “Don’t,” I warned him. “I won’t be able to focus on the rest of everything if you get me too hot to think.”

“Then tell me,” he rasped, kissing along my jaw, yanking my shirt to the side, baring the skin and delivering the bite where my neck met my shoulder. His canines pierced deep, but somehow, however it worked with kyries and their mates, there was no pain, only my thrall to him and the taking of my blood. I shivered in his grasp, hands holding me still as he drank from me. He needed it sometimes if he exerted too much energy—he was a kyrie after all, and the nourishment was welcome, but it tethered us as well. He only ever drank from me. Because we were bonded, I was the only one he could take blood from. And I had noticed lately that he was taking it almost daily. Normally it was just a sip, part of sex, until now.

“What––” I gasped. “––do you want to hear?”

He didn’t answer, instead working my belt open, then the button of my jeans and the zipper.

“Raph, we need to go back in and—”

“In a second,” he said gruffly, sliding a hand under the elastic waistband of my briefs and wrapping cold fingers around my already thickening cock.

“Raph,” I moaned, and I suddenly felt his tongue, licking, soothing the wounded skin, and would have fallen on my ass if he didn’t grab and kiss me.

One hand cradled the back of my head, the other milked my cock, and I could taste the blood in his hot, wet mouth. Any second now I would surrender right there, not caring who saw, who knew, just wanting to give myself to my man.

He smiled as he broke the kiss, panting, resting his forehead against mine. “When I take your blood, it feeds every part of me. You know that, right?”

I tried to catch my breath as I nodded.

“I love that you give yourself to me, that you trust me. You’re the only one who ever has, who ever will. It’s why there’s no way I’m staying here without you. It could never happen.”

“Raph…”

He turned me around to face the wall, pressing my cheek there as he shucked my pants and briefs to my knees. “Stay,” he ordered roughly, and I heard the hunger in his voice that was always there, that never left, because I was solely his.

“We can’t just…oh,” I husked as two slippery fingers pushed into my ass. “I see—fuck—that you’re still carrying lube around.”

No answer, just him screwing, drilling his fingers inside me, curling them forward, making me thrash and twitch on the wall before pushing back, trying to get those long, thick digits of his in deeper.

“Hurry,” I begged him, too far gone to do anything but.

The head of his cock was at my entrance for only a second before he pressed inside, breaching me slow but steady, filling me, stretching me, the pain as razor sharp as the pleasure, nearly unbearable until my muscles gave all at once and he slid to the root, his groin flush with my ass. He gave me a moment, a heartbeat of time to breathe, to get my bearings, to adjust to being impaled.

Sometimes I forgot that I lived with a supernatural being and not a man. I was reminded, most often, when he took me.

Without him pulling out, I was yanked off the wall, turned, and bent over, his snarl at me to grab hold the only thing that kept me from rapping my head on the wooden railing.

I clutched it as he withdrew, only to thrust back into me, shoving forward, lifting me to my toes. My shoulders, now held with claws instead of hands, were easily pierced through my jacket and shirt. The jolt of pain made me buck in his hold, push back against him, driving him deeper inside. A claw tangled in my hair, fisted and yanked, bowing my back, lifting my ass, so that pinned there, immobile, he could pound into me, over and over, the rhythm hard and fast, unbreaking, unrelenting, savage.

I rode his thirst for me, his insatiable need that sent heated blood searing through his veins, the possessiveness that demanded that whenever he got scared of losing me, his base animal response was to have me in the most primal way.

I belonged to him, and he would show me.

With most other lovers, I had topped. When I didn’t, I had to have my cock held and worked so I could come. But with Raphael, something about his dominance and my submission, about how he held me, leaving bruises, marks, and sometimes even more damage, drowned out everything else in my head and sent me hurtling toward my release. He was seconds behind me, and we were left panting, him draped over my back, nuzzling his face into the side of my neck.

“We’re supposed to be in there with everybody else,” I muttered, still shivering with aftershocks, my body settling from the high of the give-and-take of sex.

“Stay out here. I’ll run to the car and grab your change of clothes.”

We were supposed to go to dinner with a friend of mine, Gene, who had just gotten engaged, but we were going to have to cancel. I had packed chinos, a long-sleeved shirt, and a cardigan in the car to change into before meeting his fiancée.

“I’ll freeze out here without you,” I assured him as he gently eased free of my body. I gasped at the emptiness, and his smug grunt made me growl.