Page 44 of Demon's Bane

Carefully, like he’s not sure if I’m going to slap his hand away, Rhett cups my cheek in his palm. The tenderness of the touch and the name he just called me send a warm, trembling energy coursing through my veins.

“Because I can,” he murmurs, stroking the pad of his thumb over my bottom lip. “Since the moment I saw you, I’ve been able to feel it.”

Unable to help myself, I close my eyes and lean into his touch.

Can I feel it?

And what evenisit? What is it supposed to feel like to have a mate, for Goddess’s sake?

“Do you?” Rhett asks again.

Even with my eyes closed, I know he’s moved closer when the heat of him breaks against my skin.

I imagine him in his unglamoured form. Tall and broad, with all those tattoos I still need to ask him about, tail shifting restlessly behind him and wings flared wide.

A crackle of magick pulses between us.

Where his thumb rests against my lip. Where his exquisite warmth wraps around me. Where my heart beats fast in the base of my throat.

“Joan.”

My breath catches at the low rasp in Rhett’s voice. The need, the hunger. My eyes sting with the overwhelm of it all, and I can’t find any words to answer him.

“I… I…”

He settles his other hand on the small of my back, drawing me to him. “Perhaps I need to show you.”

Rhett’s lips press to mine a heartbeat later. Warm and soft and… wrong.

The kiss is wrong, even if the shock of contact and the wave of magick in the touch of his skin on mine ricochets all the way through me, stirring up a clawing need in the bottom of my belly.

I pull away, open my eyes, and raise my fingers to my lips like I could touch the magick still lingering there.

“No,” I whisper. “Not like this.”

13

Rhett

“Not… not while you’re wearing your glamour.”

Joan takes one step away, then another, until every inch of distance between us stretches taut, all the way to a breaking point.

She turns her back to me and runs a hand through her unbound hair. The breath that breaks from her chest is shaky and shattered, edged with the overwhelmed tears I spotted gathering in the corners of her eyes.

I follow her across the shop, footsteps echoing on the floorboards.

Joan spins around to face me. “What are you—”

My mate does not get to finish her sentence before I’ve taken the damned ring off and discarded it on one of the shop’s tables. She can’t utter one word further before I reach her and sling an arm around her back, tugging her to me.

I curl my tail around the backs of her thighs and draw my wings forward around us. With a hand buried in her hair, I tip her head back to expose the pale column of her throat.

“Someone will see,” she gasps as I drag my fangs over her soft skin. “The front windows—”

“Let them see,” I growl, pressing the tips of them into her with just enough restraint to keep from breaking that skin.

Joan lets out a soft, pleasure-laced gasp, and I nearly snap, sink into her, draw deep, but I hold on to the last scraps of my sanity.