She brought her arms down, her hands on the table as she lowered herself onto her back. “Yes, sir. Anything to stay out of magic prison.”
“Smart ass.” His voice held a smile as his hands curled beneath her thighs and spread her wide. He growled. “Sweet pussy. So wet for me.”
He lowered his mouth and Aziza couldn’t hold back her cries. The sensitive lips of her sex were being scraped deliciously by his coarse beard. Soothed and caressed by his soft lips. His tongue was firm and inhumanly talented as he traced every inch of her flesh, circling her clit before thrusting inside.
She arched her hips, wanting him deeper. Loving the way he groaned and pulled her even closer, as if he were unwilling to take the chance she’d move away. “Brandon—” she reached down for his hands and tugged on them, pulling them up to her aching breasts, “—I need…”
She showed him. She scraped the rough pads of his thick fingertips across her nipples, her shoulders arching at the electricity that shot through her body. She loved how even with this, even with his lightest touch, she could feel it. Strength. Power. Man.
He was groaning again, his fingers grazing her nipples once more, this time without her guidance. Pinching them and caressing them in turn until she was writhing on the table, his hands and his hungry mouth driving her crazy, bringing her to the edge of oblivion.
He lifted his mouth. “I can taste it, Aziza.” His voice was so gritty with need each word sounded like a snarl. “I can taste that you’re close. Put your legs over my shoulders and give it to me. Give me everything.”
She lifted her legs and called out his name, over and over as he fucked her with his tongue.
So good. Never stop. Deeper—yes. Curve it just like that—yes.
“Yes!” she shouted, lifting her hips in the air to press them hard against his mouth, pushing his tongue even deeper inside her.
Her climax washed over her with a flood of sensations. A storm of fire and lightning, robbing her limbs of strength and her mind of all coherent thought. Just this. Just him. The waves of it crashed against her skin, inside her, so consuming she didn’t realize he’d moved until the head of his cock was pushing inside her.
“Oh God, Brandon.”
She looked up at him and saw a conqueror. A Spartan claiming his spoils. His skin was tight across his strong features, his eyes shimmering like gold in water. He held her thighs, bending her knees and pressing them up and out until she was spread out for him like a feast. His own personal buffet.
He’d said he was hungry.
She whimpered at that first shallow thrust, feeling the muscles, still clenching from the climax that hadn’t faded, grip his cock tightly, halting his progress.
“Fuck,” he growled. “You’re like fucking fire, Aziza. Burning me. Gripping me so— I knew. I knew you’d be like nothing, no one I’ve ever—”
He roared, the sound signaling his loss of control, and powered deeper inside her. Aziza screamed his name in answer as her body was stretched and molded around him. For him. Made for this.
She shouted again, struggling for breath when one more thrust sank him fully inside her, his hips flush against her inner thighs. Brandon swore. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes…” she gasped reaching up to pull his head down to hers, “…in the best way possible, so don’t you dare stop.”
“I can’t,” he groaned. “It’s too good. Let the time run out, let them find us. I won’t. Fucking. Stop.”
She could see it in her mind. See everyone watching them. Shev. Ram. Hearing her beg him to fuck her harder. Watching her lift her head to kiss him with all the fire inside her. All the desperate need for him that she couldn’t explain.
The sounds of the table creaking under their weight and two damp bodies pounding against each other again and again filled the room and Aziza felt it. A joyful rush of adrenaline. The same high she got from jumping off that bridge. From racing. Only more. Brandon. His body. His groans of pleasure. His passion throwing her over the edge once more.
Almost flying.
He shouted and pulled away from her, his hand wrapping around his shaft with a pain-filled groan. Her body curled up instinctively, rejecting his absence, though part of her realized he’d saved her from a risk she hadn’t even considered.
She climbed onto her hands and knees, her thighs quivering, her body still rocking with sensation, and took him into her mouth. She wanted him inside her when he came. Needed it.
“Aziza,
no
. It’s too dangerous.” His words sounded strange. An almost indistinguishable collection of rough snarls.
She moaned at the warm, earthy taste of him on her tongue as she opened her eyes to look up into his face. Animal. Golden eyes and…fangs.
Definitely not human.
Shock and pleasure. Too much pleasure. Too much shock. No place for the fire inside her to go but up and out.
“No!”
She ripped her mouth away from him and practically rolled off the table, fearing what would happen next. She pulled her knees up to her chest, holding her hands out in front of her and praying the earring Ram had given her would do its job.
No fire. No fire. Not in front of him. Not now
.
What the hell was he? What was she?
She saw a glint of blue-white flame in her palm, over the nearly empty hourglass, and focused on breathing past her climax. Past her panic. “No.”
“Aziza?” Brandon knelt on the beautiful dining room carpet, heedless of his pants still splayed open to reveal his damp erection. “What’s happening? Is it me? I’m sorry I lost control. Your mouth just—”
“You should tell me now. What you are, I mean.” She refused to look up, focusing on her hands as the aftermath of her orgasm began to fade. She thought about the balloons. The woman floating through the air on a hoop of steel. Fearless. “I saw your fangs, Copper. And I think I need to know.”
Brandon swore. “Enforcers have always been wolves. It’s a natural fit, as we’re immune to the mental manipulation of Shiners and physical tricks of the Jinn. That’s what I am, Aziza. I’m a hunter. An Enforcer. A werewolf. And so is Hillary.”
Dog-men standing guard.
The spark of fire was gone and she covered her face with her hands, laughing hysterically. “I guess the supersniffer makes sense now. Perfect sense. Totally reasonable. Are you
fucking kidding me
, Brandon? How am I supposed to react to that? A dream that turns out to be a fucking Jinn I can’t blink back into a bottle and throw out to sea. A creepy kid who fries Greg’s brain. A serial killer obsessed with scaring me to death. That’s not enough? Now I’m supposed to be blasé about getting freaky with a werewolf?”
She shook her head, knowing she was going crazy because along with feeling the righteous anger rising inside her, she could also hear the faint strains of the song “Werewolves of London” playing in her head. “Aren’t fangs and full-moon issues something you thought I might need to know about yesterday, instead of your lecture on the history of iron smelting? Instead of—” She lifted one hand blindly and gestured around the room.
“I’m telling you now.” His tone was somber but resolute. “We live in secret from most humans, Aziza. It’s the only way we can do our job. I’m trusting you.”
“Convenient, since you’ve already gotten what you wanted. Besides, I’m not really huma—” She looked up at him to continue arguing and gasped instead. For a moment it appeared as if the dining room had fallen away behind him and another scene had taken its place. Another room filled with people watching her with varying degrees of interest. People with eyes the color of gems and hair as dark and lustrous as—”Jinn,” she breathed.
“Where?” Brandon growled and started to turn, and as quickly as that, they all disappeared. Just an empty dining room. Just tall windows along the wall, cloaked in thick, hunter green drapes. Just her and Brandon alone.
Stop thinking.
She leaned her forehead on her knees and started to shake. Brandon’s hands caressed her calves gently, and then he reached for her hand and turned it over to study the markings inside. “Our timeout is almost up,” he sighed, but she wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved.
Aziza tugged away from his touch, needing some distance. “Yes, well, we were done here anyway, right?” She tried for a careless tone, but her throat was too raw. Her emotions too strained. “And it was
exactly
what I needed, so thanks for that. I think I better get dressed now…and we still need to set the table before someone sees us. I don’t think I want to make Penn angry right now.”
Someone had already seen, hadn’t they? More of them than she’d had time to count. She just wasn’t sure how. The only thing she knew was that this was something Brandon never had to know. Something she would try to erase from her thoughts whenever she remembered this. And she would remember it. The sex had been too incredible to forget, though she could have done without his ill-timed reveal and the few peeping Jinn at the end.
She buttoned her jeans and noticed Brandon standing still beside her, tension in every muscle as he watched her dress. “What? Don’t tell me
you
didn’t like it. I may not know much lately, but I can usually tell when a man is enjoying himself.”
His gaze, darker gold now than it had been when he’d been inside her, narrowed. “Going for shock again, Aziza? Are you going to pretend this was nothing? That what we did—”
She ran her hands through her hair and groaned to drown out his words. She couldn’t take this right now. She needed space. Needed to stop thinking about how he felt inside her. How he smelled. How she still wanted him to hold her, now that she knew.
“It was magical, okay? What is it you want to hear? The best I’ve ever had. Once you go wolfy you never go back—isn’t that what all the girls say? Or is it just me? Am I your first time? Are we
married
now?”
He stiffened beside her. She’d struck a nerve. “No,” he muttered. “We’re definitely not married.”
She raised her eyebrows. There was an undercurrent in his words she wasn’t sure she wanted to understand. “Okay then.”
“Fine.”
“Whatever.”
Great. She’d just had what had truly been the best sex of her life, with someone she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about since the first moment she saw him. Of course it would end this way. Awkward and angry, with an unwanted dash of magical reveal for spice.
She was glad Greg was still frozen, because whatever he was drinking, she wanted to steal it. And then she’d probably need six more of the same.
Penn. Aziza’s heart ached. Penn would need more than that when she found out. Aziza had
just had
sex
with a werewolf. She couldn’t even imagine how hard it would be if she’d spent years living with one. Loving one the way Penn loved Hillary.
Yeah. It was a good thing she wasn’t falling in love with Brandon. A great thing.
But you aren’t sure.
Chapter Nine
“You don’t think it’s very funny either, do you? Do you,
you cute little horsey-faced horsey
?”
“Have we added baby-talking innocent horses while drunk to the bucket list?” Greg’s voice was laced with a mixture of amusement and sympathy.
Aziza looked up from the tall, ebony-maned stallion she was conversing with and lifted her half-empty wine bottle in salute. “Gregory Prophet. Just the best-friend-who-had-his-brain-cooked-by-a-Niyr that I wanted to see. Join me for a drink.”
He walked farther inside the lit stable, past the horses who watched like silent sentinels. “I think you should be done for the night. Penn could use the company and you could definitely use some coffee.”
She shook her head vigorously. “She doesn’t need me. She needs you. You are probably the only other fully normal human in England. Now’s your chance.” She made a shooing motion with her hands, laughing when she stumbled and a splash of wine spilled on the back of her hand. “Whoops. Now’s your
best
chance to get the girl. You can do it. She’ll be off women for a while since her last girlfriend turned out to be a…a… You know what she turned out to be. Let’s not think about it. Let’s drink.”
But no amount of wine was going to wash it away. She knew several things now that she didn’t know when she arrived.
First of all, she knew she would never be able to forget what it felt like to have Brandon inside her. That was an incredibly distracting and depressing thought. One she kept coming back to as she sat out here alone, going through her third bottle of wine.
Secondly, Ram apparently knew what he was doing when he used sex to jump-start her powers, because she’d just added to her repertoire a new ability that she desperately wished she didn’t have—seeing what was apparently always around her. The Jinn.
When Brandon said they “came through” he hadn’t meant from somewhere else exactly. They were here. But not. She’d cornered Shev to explain what she’d seen, and she had to give the woman credit for trying.
“Imagine you’re in a shop with tinted windows looking out,” she’d offered, pointing to the window in the front room where Aziza had dragged her. “There you are, trying on a stunning red dress that’s just a little too short for polite company, when you spot a man looking directly at you. Now you think he’s admiring you in your new, sexy outfit, so you wave him in.” She shrugged. “Only instead of acknowledging your invitation, he bares his teeth to make sure he doesn’t have food stuck between them. It’s just like that.”
Aziza had felt relief. “So it just looked like they were watching me?”
Shev’s laugh was a tinkling musical sound that grated on her nerves. “Don’t be ridiculous, Fireborne, of course they were watching you. Weren’t you listening? The Jinn are the ones trying on the dress. Humans are the idiots picking their teeth. They can’t see us, and usually we don’t notice them. But if we look? If we notice? We see. We’ve always seen. Since you’ve walked upright and we began to realize that there was something beyond Qaf—people that were like us, but nothing like us—we’ve been watching. Visiting. You were just too tempting for us to resist. Do you understand?”