Nevermore Bookstore (Townsend Harbor Book 1)

Seduction

(SĬ-DŬK′SHƏN) THE ACT OF SEDUCING. ALSO. THE ACT OF BEING SEDUCED.

Cady lay on the bed, weak-limbed and pleasure-slack, dumbfounded by the words that had just exited her mouth, waiting for words to exit Fox’s.

The speedball of endorphins, adrenaline, and oxytocin had already begun to be reabsorbed by her busy mind.

Ecstasy’s short half-life.

Soon, there’d be a click. That almost imperceptible shift in sound that preceded the line going dead.

Only, it didn’t come.

His silence broke with a strangled groan. An impossible tangle of pain, anger, pleasure, and surrender.

“Woman, I want your mouth on my cock more than I want air.”

Cady buried her face in the pillow to stifle a squeak born of equal parts triumph and terror. Past the cock/mouth thing, she hadn’t really assembled a plan. Should she guide him as he had her? Tell him what to put where and when?

Right. Because it wasn’t like he already knew how to jerk off or anything.

“You still with me, baby?”

“I’m here. I just… I’ve never done this before, and I know this is super lame, but I don’t even know what to say to…to make you—”

The sound of his hushing was like the summer wind through curtains.

“Baby, after listening to you come, you could talk about re-grouting your shower and I’d still be hard as a diamond.”

“See? You said that like you didn’t even have to think about it. You’re so much better at this than I am. I don’t even know how to pretend touch you in my head.”

“Yes, you do.” His voice held the thick husk of early morning. Of a body that would be warm beneath the covers and hard against her back. “You’ve thought about it before.”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Tell me.”

“I understand what you’re trying to do here, and with any normal human it would probably work,” she said. “But, like, talking my fantasy?”

“So it’s your voice, then.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t like hearing yourself express what you really want. Or you’re afraid you’re doing it wrong.”

“You don’t know me,” she teased.

“I know what you sound like when you come.”

Cady pulled the sheet over her face like a shroud. “Loud?”

“Not loud,” he said “Ecstatic. Like a Valkyrie who’s just arrived in Valhalla to remember that she is Odin. That her voice caused the rocks to rise and the oceans to come together.”

The warmth at her center spread like warm honey. “Mostly I thought I sounded like a car alarm.”

“Did someone tell you that?” His voice darkened with the promise of retribution.

Someone had, in fact, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. She already knew he was a man with a certain set of skills, and she wouldn’t be surprised if disappearing bodies was one of them.

“Something tells me that won’t aid our current conversation,” she said.

“I have an idea,” Fox said. “You know that toy you mentioned earlier?”

“Yes,” Cady said.

“Get it.”

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Cady crawled to the side of the bed and opened her nightstand drawer, where her Vibromax 5000 Jackrabbit with extendable ears and detachable suction cup base waited to be summoned into service. “Gotten.”

“Good. Now close your eyes.”

“Closed.”

“Now, tell me like you would if it were a scene in a book. First-person present.”

Already the images were forming in her mind. Fast and furious, the world assembled itself around her. The steep cliff over a storm-tossed sea. A tiny cottage with ivy growing up one side. A witchy forest, dark and deep, across a meadow strewn with wildflowers.

“What kind of flowers?”

Cady had barely registered that she was already describing what she saw until he asked.

“Lupins,” she said. “I’m out gathering them when the storm clouds break, and I get caught in the downpour. I hadn’t realized I’d wandered so far into the forest. I’m trying to shelter under a tree when I see you.”

“What am I doing?” His voice was coiled tight as a bowstring.

“Riding toward me on a big black mount. I’m afraid at first, but then I see your eyes.”

“What do they look like?”

“Kind,” she said. Not unlike another pair of eyes she had grown especially fond of over the past week. “You ask me if I need help.”

“And?”

“And I tell you that I live in the little cottage on the bluff. You offer to give me a ride and pull me on to the saddle in front of you. I can feel your powerful thighs against the backs of mine.”

“You’re not riding sidesaddle?”

“I wasn’t raised as a lady,” she explained. “Stop interrupting so I can get to the good part.”

“Apologies, my non-lady.”

“The rain is lashing our face as your horse speeds through the forest and across the meadow. Our hips begin to move together as we settle into the horse’s gait. I can feel you starting to get hard against the small of my back.”

“What does it feel like?” Fox’s voice was breathy.

Cady rolled her hips against the mattress, mimicking her mind’s movement inside her own body. “Powerful. I love knowing that I make you hard.”

“You do, Cady,” he ground out.

She whimpered as heat rippled through her core.

“What are you going to do about it?” he rasped.

“I reach behind me to the lacing of your breeches and move the wet leather to wrap my hand around your—” Cady swallowed hard “…cock.”

Fox emitted a low unh that landed directly in Cady’s already tensing abdominal muscles.

“You’re so hard,” she breathed. “So smooth. So hot.” Cady’s hand began to drift upward, lightly squeezing the hardened pearl of a nipple. “You’re whispering the filthiest things into my ear as I work you up and down, up and down in time with the hoofbeats on the rain-soaked earth.”

“What kind of things?”

Cady’s fingers drifted downward over the round softness of her belly toward her inner thigh and the still-electrified flesh there.

“You tell me you want to be inside me. That you can tell how wet I’m going to be for you. That when we get back to the cottage, you’re going to fuck me within an inch of my life.”

She was rewarded with a groan.

“We don’t say a word when we get there. You dismount and lift me off, carry me across the threshold, and kick the door closed. We tear away each other’s wet clothes before the fire, and I drop to my knees beside the hearth.”

“Are you touching yourself, Cady?”

“Yes,” she admitted. She wasn’t certain when it had begun, only that somewhere in the world she’d built for them in her head, her words and her body had become one.

“You’re so much more beautiful than I had even imagined,” Cady said. “Like a god cast in glowing copper. I can’t live another second without tasting you.”

Fox’s guttural grunt detonated a wave of gooseflesh that tightened her nipples.

“I trace every inch of your cock with my tongue.” She could feel the flames dancing on their skin, hear the crackling against his ragged exhales. “I wrap my lips around you and take you in my mouth. I just hold you there at first. I can taste your heartbeat when you nudge the back of my throat. You start to move your hips. Curling your spine to fuck my mouth.

“Just when you’re about to lose yourself, you tell me to kneel. You guide me down on all fours, and I can feel you there behind me.” Her hand resumed its former rhythm, sliding through silken folds his words had inflamed. “You bury yourself inside me so deep, I can feel you in my soul.”

“Cady.” Until now, no one had ever made a plea of her name. Certainly never one filled with such fire and demand. “Fuck yourself for me.”

Eyes fastened shut, she reached for his proxy and coated it with her moisture before easing it inside. Behind the screens of her eyelids, that delicious fullness could be him. Stretching her, plumbing the parts of her nearest the source of her pain. Planting pleasure in its place.

The strangeness of using her left hand made the sensations harder to anticipate, teasing her to an awkward, exquisite agony.

“Make yourself come, baby,” Fox ordered her. “I’m almost—”

Cady cried out as the world of her mind and her body fused at the orgasm that ripped through both at once. “Fox.”

“Oh fuck, Cady. Fuck.” His answer was heedless. Barely human. A roar that reset the world.

Only the sounds of their breathing filled the open channel between them.

“Cady?”

“I’m here,” she said, lifting her face from the downy pillow.

“I wish,” he rasped.

With those words, the idea clicked into place. She wasn’t there, but she could be. In her mind, and in his.

“Tell me what you see,” she said.

Another extended stretch of silence unfurled between them.

“I see the stars.”

Cady rolled herself onto her side to face the windows. “I see them too.”

A long beat passed.

“Fox?”

“Mmm?”

“I’m laying my head on your chest now. I can feel your heartbeat against my—” The rest of her sentence was hijacked by yawn.

“Your cheek,” he finished. “Sleep, Cady.”

With her imaginary head against the imaginary wall of his torso, she did.