Dom traced the ridges where her wings connected to her shoulders with a possessive touch. “Are you singing for me, glowbug?”
Her pupils were huge. Her lips were a ripe, berry red. Her nipples were stiff under the thin material of her sleep shirt. Charlotte looked thoroughly loved and ready for more. He thought she was beautiful before, but Dom knew that this Charlotte was the one who would take his breath away for centuries to come.
Her voice was husky when she answered, “Yes.”
Dom flicked his tongue out to taste the sweet, slightly salty flavor of her skin. “Am I the only one?”
He didn’t know why he asked. Dom vividly remembered her saying that fey weren’t generally monogamous. But he had a gut feeling, and he wanted to know. It didn’t really matter if she sang for others, but if he happened to be the only one? Dom sure as shit wanted to know about it.
Charlotte’s pink cheeks flushed hotter. She licked her lips before answering, “You’re the only one.”
His fingers dug into the notches between her ribs. “And you can’t lie.”
“I can’t.”
Dom pressed a hard kiss to the bow of her hipbone. “Gods help me, glowbug, I won’t ever get enough of you.”
She shuddered. In a small voice, she asked, “How do you know that? We only just met.”
Rising slowly to his feet, Dom circled his arms around her middle to bring her in close. “Because,” he told her gruffly, “I’ve waited my whole damn life for you.”
* * *
Charlotte leaned her cheek against her kneecaps and let out a long, shuddering sigh.
They sat against the flimsy headboard of the motel bed. Dom was behind her, his big, surprisingly deft fingers skating over her bare back. At regular intervals, he would slip his hands around to brush her sensitive nipples, to trace the dip of her belly button, as if he sought to memorize every soft slope. His muscled thighs hemmed her in, but she didn’t mind the feeling of being trapped when it was her demon doing the trapping.
My demon, she thought, drowsy in the post-orgasm, post-burgers and french fry dinner haze.
He was hers. She didn’t need him to wreck her whole world, sexually speaking, and then follow it up by ordering her an extra large milkshake for her to know Dom was a demon she wanted to keep around. She'd known it from the moment Millie reached for the bolt gun, and she knew it even when she asked him what would happen if she didn't choose him, just to know that if she needed him to let her go, he would.
He killed for me.
Maybe that thought should have horrified her, but Charlotte couldn’t muster the moral fortitude for it. Death was a fact of the world they lived in — a certain necessary brutality that could only be hidden beneath the thinnest of veneers. A human might have balked at a mate killing someone right before their eyes, but Charlotte wasn’t human.
She was fey, and even her kind respected a certain amount of targeted ruthlessness. Besides, what could she say? It wasn’t like she was guiltless.
Charlotte closed her eyes and tried to banish the memory of Millie’s grotesquely mottled face from her mind.
I did that, she thought. I did that.
Knowing that she took a life wasn’t easy. Knowing that she didn’t care that she took Millie’s life was… troubling.
In the grand scheme of things, did Millie’s actions in life balance out against the sin of Charlotte murdering her without remorse? The answer to that question was too big for her, but Charlotte was adult enough to understand that some things just were. There was no going back, anyway.
Dom’s fingertips danced along the dips and swells of her bare back. They moved from freckle to freckle, skimmed the hard ridges that connected her wings to her shoulder blades, and traced the bumps of her spine.
They didn’t bother turning the feed screen on. They didn’t need extra noise, or the buffer of an entertainment feed. They were content, just the two of them, in the quiet of the motel room.
“I can’t go back to the EVP,” she confessed into that soft quiet.
Dom pressed a kiss to her shoulder. She felt the velvety texture of his antlers brush her temple when he asked, “Why not?”
“Because of the contract.” Charlotte turned her head to peer at him from under the fringe of her lashes. “My adoption stipulated that I was to be turned over to the covey if I showed any significant magical ability. If I go back, I’ll have to go to the covey or my parents will be found in breach of contract.”
And no one wanted to end up on the wrong side of a contract with a pissed off covey. No one.
Dom planted his big palms on either side of her waist and drew Charlotte back against his chest. Uncoiling her arms from around her legs, she let him wrap her up in his warmth. With his arms banded tightly around her chest, he rumbled, “I thought most Changeling contracts ran out at sixteen.”