Page 48 of The Scarlet Ball

“Where are we?”

“A place where I can build you this.”

He gestured, and I looked back and up at the palace he had crafted. It wasn’t the old aristocratic manors in France or the villas in Italy. It looked more like the palaces I’d imagined as a little girl sneaking novels at the convent. The fluted spires pierced the blue sky, and the ice, shaped into window casements and thick walls and even gargoyles on the roofs, sparkled in the sun. Even now the detail was melting away like a dream upon waking, and that was where I knew it from. He hadn’t built me a palace, he’d built me a dream.

I laughed again. “I know this place now. And you live here, don’t you?”

“I live everywhere, over the water and under it, under the sky and over it. But no. In this place, for now, I am only a visitor. Someday, though, perhaps I will be asked to stay.”

I ran the tip of my tongue over my canine teeth, relishing how sharp they were.

“And who will ask you?”

The look he gave me was half desperation, half hope, and there was no grace left to him as he turned to me. Every warning Mielle gave me about his kind screamed in my skull, and then was abruptly silenced as Sebastian dropped to his knees before me.

He made a pretty picture there, one hand fisted in the wool of my coat, his face tipped up to me and empty of everything except please. When I reached down to plow my fingers through his hair, he moaned as if that was all he had ever wanted, even though we both knew that that was the most dangerous lie.

I knew I had to portion myself out for him. Whatever I gave, he would take. He’d never restrain himself. That was up to me, and for a moment, I hated it.

Something of what I felt must have shown on my face, because Sebastian looked suddenly alert, his quick eyes flicking left and right. Something had displeased me, and if I let him, he would make it very very dead.

Every moment with him was a walk on a tightrope. Perhaps there was a net, or perhaps there was a stone floor, you had no way of knowing, and I decided for that moment, if only that moment, that I didn’t care. He was handsome, of course he was handsome, but he was more than that—he was a force that could shake the very earth, and as much as I wanted him, I wanted power over him or something like him even more. That power would be mine like he could be mine. The thought dizzied me, and I couldn’t bear denying myself any longer.

“I want your fingers. Perhaps I want your mouth. Do you understand? Nothing else.”

“I want all of it.”

“I don’t care.”

A human man might not have suffered it, the denial of sex or the undisguised lack of concern with his wants and needs. Sebastian only nodded, intent on my face. If I gave the word, he would bring this place down around us. He would kill the man whose name I would whisper in his ear. He’d wait while I decided what I wanted, and I had decided I was tired of waiting.

“Stand up. Come to me.”

I clambered up to sit on the balustrade, the drop behind me, the storm before. When he came to stand between my knees, he had to lift his head to look at me. I took him by the chin and held him still so I could kiss him as I liked best: quick, bruising, and with no regard for who might need to go to work tomorrow morning. It was never me, and I left my marks on bankers, lawyers, once a famous vaudevillian who performed that night with a necklace of love-bites on her throat.

I wasn’t patient or gentle with him. Perhaps he had memories of the real Sebastian’s exploits, or perhaps he was new to all of this; either way, I didn’t care. What I did care about were the noises he made when I latched my teeth into his throat, how he shuddered, how his hands flexed on my thighs and he had to fight to restrain himself when I bit too hard.

“Please,” he murmured at last, resting his head against my shoulder. I laughed at how overwhelmed he was, and finally pulled my skirts up over my hips. The balustrade was wide enough I could lean back on my elbow, and with my free hand, I stroked myself through the open seam between the legs of my combination.

“Come on,” I whispered. “Just your hand. Impress me again.”

He came to lean over me, one hand snaked down between us. I showed him the rhythm I needed, and then I tilted my head back to let him kiss me.

Sebastian was a quick study, rocking two fingers deep inside me as he rained hungry kisses over my face and my throat. He didn’t kiss my mouth until I showed him how, and then he did it as if he was made for it. When he drew my tongue between his teeth, it was all too easy to imagine how that was where he would start, but he would not stop after he had my tongue. No, he’d do a lip or two next, a strip from my cheek, an eye …

“No, stay here with me,” he murmured against my breast. “Don’t think of someone else, think of me, be here with me.”

But it wasn’t someone else, it was him, or at least him as he would be one day. I opened my mouth to say so, to hell with how good his hands were, and then I shouted as my entire body went rigid before going boneless. My skin tingled, fire and cold both, and when I saw the brief flash of cold white-green in Sebastian’s eyes, the penny dropped.

“You little monster,” I laughed. “You shocked me!”

He looked so hangdog and so terrified that he might have ruined everything that I pressed his hand harder between my legs.

“Do it again. On purpose this time, and—ah!”

Freezing fire skittered over me, inside me, traveling up to my brain and burning me to a crisp. The more I had, the more I wanted, and I took a hard grip on his hair to keep him from going anywhere. The shocks came faster, hit harder, built up and up, and then—

I was close. I was so close, and then he paused, making me thrash underneath him.