“Yet your little display tonight would have been an eventuality with or without my influence,” he continued in a gruff tone. “However, unlike tonight, you wouldn’t have had anyone to ground you.” He flexed his thigh in a way that sparked pleasure inside me, my sensitive flesh pulsating with a need he expertly awoke.
“Shade...”
“You wouldn’t have possessed any knowledge of what was happening to you, Aflora,” he whispered. “Or how to stop it.”
I swallowed, his comments all true, his touch evoking a volcano-like reaction to boil in my lower belly, threatening to consume me completely.
“Without my interference in your life, you would have ended up hurting people you loved.” He nibbled my lower lip at the same time his thigh pressed into my weeping heat.
This entire conversation should not be turning me on.
He shouldn’t be making me this hot.
I threaded my fingers through his thick, dark hair, clinging to him despite my mind telling me to order him to stop.
Resisting him proved to be impossible.
“You make me feel so...” I trailed off, unable to explain it. My body was on fire in a manner similar to before, but oh-so different.
Kols had ignited me with power and sensation.
Shade somehow caressed my soul with icy flames, an impossible element that seemed to only exist between us.
“Come for me, gorgeous,” he whispered against my ear. “I can take it.”
I wanted to scream for him to release me, to beg him to take me over the cliff, and to kill him all at the same time. The intensity between us boiled over, my world cascading into a glimmer of oblivion so overwhelming that I nearly forgot how to breathe.
And then I was screaming his name as both a curse and a blessing as energy erupted all around us.
He absorbed it all, allowing me to float in a state of rapture that shook every inch of my being, letting me leave my body and return.
“Shade!” The room glowed, my heart beating a chaotic rhythm that refused to slow, until his mouth brought me back to the reality of our moment.
His tongue stroked mine, his hands gliding up and down my sides once more and his warmth heating up my cool, damp skin.
I shuddered, lost to him utterly and completely, while despising him all over again, yet kissing him as if I required his existence to survive.
“You’re beautiful,” he praised, nuzzling me in a gesture almost too sweet for our volatile bond. “Sleep, Aflora. We’ll discuss more in the morning.”
I opened my mouth to argue but found it falling slack from whatever spell he’d woven over me. My eyes narrowed in annoyance, wishing he would stop messing with my dreams and my sleep states.
But he disappeared in a cloud of his intoxicating smoke before I could convey the message.
And my world went black.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Shade
I sensed Kols’s presence in my suite about a minute before Aflora detonated. He’d somehow convinced Sir Black to grant him entry, something no one else had ever been able to do. I suspected our shared mate-bond had helped.
Although, that didn’t explain how the Elite Blood had managed to enter the Death Blood residential quarters.
“Did you issue an edict to allow your entry?” I mused, materializing behind him in my living area. He’d paused in the center of the room, likely because he’d overheard Aflora’s cries of pleasure. I’d stop to listen, too, if I were him. She truly was a beautiful creature. Exquisitely unique, and absolutely mine.
A flicker of gold flame brightened his gaze as he outwardly relaxed. “She screams louder for me.”
“Does she?” I considered what I knew of their tenuous relationship and smiled. “I’ll see if I agree come morning.”