The Goblin King (21 page)

He leaned in close – so close. There was that scent of rain again, wrapping around her
, making her think of long nights and warm blankets and her legs entwined with someone else’s.

The roar of blood in her ears became deafening,
pushed faster and faster through the walls of her veins by the furious pounding of her heart.

B
ut she still heard him loud and clear when he placed his lips right beside her ear.

“Hang on tight.”

Diana’s eyes widened. She wondered, just for a second, what he could mean by that. She opened her mouth, began to ask “Wha-,” and then Damon’s arm slid around her waist and she was squealing and grasping the edges of his leather jacket to hold on for dear life. The world dropped out from under her feet like a carnival thrill ride. Wind rushed through her hair and everything blurred.

He
r stomach leapt into her throat; fear gripped her. She tried to scream, but once her air reserve was gone, she could no longer draw any more in.

And then they were landing – and it was over almost before it had begun.

Diana’s heart continued to pound, but she felt the solidness of stone under her boots and inhaled, drawing in the air she couldn’t get a second ago. After several quick and shaky breaths, she looked up.

Damon’s vivid
, unnatural eyes captured hers and held them as if with chains. His steel band of an arm had not removed itself from around her waist. He had her pulled flush with his body – hard and unyielding. She could feel him breathing against her, almost hear the sound of his heart. Her head began to swim.

“I thought it best
we move fast,” he told her softly. She felt his hand open at her back, his fingers spreading to cover more of her. “Since my kind can interrupt transport spells to get at what they want.”

Diana couldn’
t speak. She knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that the words he was saying made some sort of sense. But she barely heard them and couldn’t care less about them anyway. All she was really aware of was the hardness of his body against hers. The heat of it – like that flame in his eyes that was spreading.

She nodded mutely.

Damon’s wickedly scarred mouth curled in a nearly cruel smile. The fire spread, claiming his pupils and turning his irises to rings of flame. His inferno was mesmerizing – and contagious. Because now she was on fire too.

The heat their contact
alighted a blaze in her body. It moved through her on a phantom wind, licking at her nerve endings. Her knees felt like buckling. Her nipples hardened against the material of her bra. Her chest flushed, and moisture pooled delicately between her legs.

“You seem a little unsteady,” he told her, still grinning wickedly. “Perhaps
a bite of something would help?”

Her legs were jelly and h
er fingers and toes tingled. Damon turned slightly and gestured to the long, wooden table that was directly beside them in his opulently grand dining room. That’s where they had transported to.

The
table was covered in all manner of foods and drinks. With utmost delicacy and slow, poised grace, the Goblin King reach down and picked up a chocolate covered strawberry from an enormous dessert-covered platter at the table’s edge.

Diana felt her heart pound in her throat now. It was rising.

He lifted the strawberry to her mouth, and she caught the sensuous scent of dark chocolate and sweet, ripe fruit.

“I keep telling you to eat something,” he said through his dark, twisted smile.

Without thinking, she parted her lips, opening to him. Without taking his eyes from hers, Damon placed the strawberry upon her tongue, and she bit down.

Juice and chocolate erupted
in her mouth, pooling upon her bottom lip.

Damon C
hroi’s fire-burning eyes combusted like a gasoline-fueled blaze – and suddenly, Diana was being spun around. She caught sight of his leather-covered arm as he leaned over the table and, with one clean swipe, knocked every single item of dinnerware off the table.

They went crashing to the ground, the ceramic and china shattering to millions of pieces – and a memory niggled at Diana. But she ignored it. She could think of nothing with any clarity as Damon set her down on the now clean table’s edge and captured her strawberry-covered lips with his own.

What few coherent thoughts she had left were shattered to fragments with that kiss. She almost heard the sound, an explosion of crystal and diamond consciousness that battered the walls of her mind.

The pressure of his lips intoxicated like wine, making her dizzy and weak. They opened her up, allowing him delve within her, tasting and teasing and taking. She moaned against those lips when she felt his fingers
brush under the hem of her t-shirt to brand the skin of her abdomen with their heat.

Her fingers
were back at the lapels of his jacket, clutching hard as his hands moved up, shoving her shirt up with them and lighting a trail of fire across her flesh until he reached the underwire of her bra. There, his fingers curled tight around the material – and she knew what was coming.

The world had become a fevered race, her dawning, yearning, craving pleasure
the starting gun. Her mind went white with heated anticipation.

H
e ripped the bra apart, tearing it between the two tight grips of his hands.

Her sensitive peaks were
at once exposed to the cool air of his castle. Her back arched as her nipples drew so taught it was slightly painful. But Damon’s hot-burning body eased the cold away, his searing hands moving across her abdomen and chest to gently cup the globes of her breasts. At the same time, his kiss deepened, taking her breath away.

She felt
delirious when his fingers deftly tweaked the nipple of one breast, his thumb brushing over the sensitive bud, sending fireworks in a trail down her body, where they alighted between her legs and caused her to buck against him.

He broke their kiss, pulling away gradually and taking her bottom lip between his teeth for a moment before he released her and was moving downward.
Diana’s eyes opened long enough to catch the nearby hearth fire reflected in the raven-esque shimmer of his black locks, and then her fingers were delving into that silken mane and her eyes were shutting tight once more as his lips closed over her tortured nipple and sucked hard.

She made an incoherent sound, drawing in air with a hiss and releasing it with helplessness.

Teeth came next, clamping down on the taut instrument of his attentions. Diana’s fingers curled into fists in his hair and Damon’s free hands slid lower on her body to find the waistband of her jeans.

With his teeth on her nipple, she dare not move as his hands c
urled around the band. For a half-second, she thought he might rip them open, and she couldn’t have cared less. But as she held her breath and swam in the sweet misery of sensation his mouth was unleashing on her, his deft fingers worked the jeans button loose and unzipped the pants to expose the small edge of lace that bordered her white panties.

He rel
eased her tender nipple which pulsed with every beat of her heart and sent wave after wave of fire to her core – and kissed his way to her other breast. Now painfully impatient, Diana un-fisted her hands from his hair and gripped his strong shoulders. Her nails dug into his jacket, carving half-moons into the leather.

His mouth closed over her breast, his teeth brutally gentle, his tongue like a whip, her skin crying out at the demise of every last one of her nerve endings. She arched again, playing into his cruelty with surrender – and Damon accepted her surrender with the victorious actions of an absolute ruler.

He shoved the jeans roughly over her hips, pulling her slim body up as he did so to ease his progress. With firm and ruthless impatience, he rose off her, leaving her breast throbbing and her chest heaving. He then swept his arm across the center of the table, sending more platters and glassware flying. They slammed into surfaces somewhere else and shattered into careless pieces.

Damon slid Diana
further up on the table until she was resting fully on the polished wood. With a wave of his hand, her boots and socks were gone. The cool air caressed her naked thighs as his hands rid her with dizzying speed of her jeans. He tossed them carelessly to the side.

Suddenly,
Diana froze under his stark and burning scrutiny. She was almost thoroughly bared and utterly defenseless, laid out in nothing but her little panties on an altar for him to devour. He was a black-clad tower of a man gazing down at her with a hunger unequalled – and something else. It was akin to ownership.

He looked at her as though he was about to ruin her for any other man.

She felt more vulnerable than she ever could have imagined. She also felt hotter and more wanton as she propped herself up on her elbows and her round breasts jutted out – teasing.

Damon hastily
shrugged off his leather jacket, exposing the taut, bulging muscles of his arms and chest where they pressed against the thin material of his black shirt. Then, as Diana held her breath and her mouth watered like mad, he curled his fingers under the hem of that shirt and lifted it over his head, exposing the perfect, rock-hard anatomy of his chest and abdomen.

A number of curse words, intermingled with incoherent nonsense, rushed through Diana’s head as she gazed openly and longingly at every ridge and ripple of the Goblin King’s perfect physique. But her courage faltered just a little when he went for the buttons of his jeans next.

As if he could see the sudden fear in her eyes, Damon popped the top button on his jeans with one hand, and braced his other on the table – between her long legs. His knee came next. With the grace of a very large and very deadly cat, he crawled onto the table and over her, easing her thighs apart as he did so. She fell back, her gaze locked in his as he moved up her body.

His hand wrapped
around the top of her panties a millisecond before she heard the sound of them ripping and she felt them bite briefly into her flesh. And then there was absolutely nothing between them but his victorious, twisted smile and the inferno of his singular eyes.

Diana parted her lips and drew in a breat
h, preparing to say something,
anything
, that would help her to release even a small bit of the sexual tension he’d filled her with, but Damon’s mouth crashed down on hers before she could mutter a sound. She cried out against his lips when his hands were back, this time on the insides of her thighs.

Oh gods!
she thought, feeling crazed. She’d lost all control – given it freely to the man who now took her over like a conquering soldier.

She bucked, tried to move away
, tried to move
toward
him, as his hands continued in their caressing and massaging until finally,
finally
, his fingers brushed against the tender folds of her opening and she cried out a second time only to have her pleasure swallowed by Damon’s brutally demanding kiss.

She started to fight the
n; it was an instinct inside her, forcing her body to go wild, to push, to pull, to curl her fingernails into claws and rake them across the perfect skin of his back. She drew blood, she knew. She was strong and trained.

But he was stronger.
Though she pulled at him, begging him with her body to just take her and stop teasing, Damon maintained absolute control. He slowly broke the kiss and moved to her neck, suckling her throat and no doubt marking her as his own. 

Diana’s overheated, sweat-covered body responded
to his manipulations all on its own, rising to meet the maddeningly gentle touch of his fingers between her legs, pleading with him to penetrate.

To go deep.

But she could not control the fae king.

Please
!
her burning mind begged. Then she said it out loud, breathlessly, hopelessly. “
Please
….”

Damon’s hot, talented fingers slid smoothly into the slickened canal of her wanton core, eliciting a moan from so deep within her, it was animalistic.
He pressed deep, filling her tightness. One finger… two….

Diana screamed in frustration and ple
asure and everything in-between. Her head dropped back, her throat working, a sigh escaping her lips. Her arms slid free of his shoulders and back, and her fingers once more curled into the soft thickness of his hair. She wanted more of him. She wanted
all
of him. “Damon,
please
.”

Damon Chroi stilled above her – for only a moment.

Then his fingers slowly pulled free, leaving her writhing beneath him. He rose on his elbow, allowing his body to lower against hers, and cupped her face in his hands. She opened her eyes. Lust blurred the edges of her vision as she found herself once more caught in the inescapable pull of his gaze.

He held her there, watching her, staring into her eyes, as he moved over her – and Diana felt the hard and hot evidence of his desire touch against her slick opening.