Page 64 of A Summoned Husband

A shudder moved through me as my hands tightened on the cart. I had come here to get space from him. To escape the loudness of my house with him in it and he followed me. Bringing the disorder with him. The havoc I couldn’t find my way through with a map.

My throat tightened, every blink a slow drag that made my eyes feel too heavy.

What was happening to me?

Asmodeus stepped into my back. The hardness of him moulding to me somehow. Framing me with every muscle.

“Asmodeus,” his name was a plea from my lips and it bothered me I didn’t really know just what I was begging for.

Space, Eden! Christ on a cracker, you want space from the demon at your back!

Right. Space.

Why couldn’t I ask for it as my eyes closed and my head rested on his chest?

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Back. The. Fuck. Up… another Eden in an alternate dimension who still had a firm grip on her sanity screamed. But not this Eden. This Eden was a damned fool.

“Do you feel it, Eden?” he whispered against the flesh of my temple, the wiry hair of his beard alighting the senses on my face in a way that I hated I loved. “Desire has a power unlike anything else, wouldn’t you say? Lust can swipe as swiftly as a sword, cutting those twice your size down at the knees. Making them worship at an altar of their own making. How lust has dug far more graves than people realize.”

His lips were hot against my skin. I couldn’t breathe. I swallowed around the tight grip on my throat. A phantom hand I swore held me pressed back against him, forcing me to feel every word he whispered between us.

“Is that what you’re trying to do?” I hated my voice this way. Filled with a need I was trying to deny I had.

“Hmm?”

“Are you trying to dig me a grave?” I asked.

His thumbs brushed over my hands. “Quite the opposite… yet lust is something I would happily bury you in if you’d give me the chance.”

“I—”

“Don’t deny it, Eden. I can smell it on you.” He inhaled me again. “You may not like it but you’re curious about just what I have to offer. How I will make you forget the thing mortals think is pleasure and show you just what it really is.”

Heat coursed through me and between my legs started pulsing.

I came here for ice cream, how had this gotten so out of hand? Well, getting out of hand was kind of my brand lately.

His tongue dragged slowly along my throat, heating my flesh. “I wish to intoxicate you with my sin just as easily as you did with a single drop of you…”

Could your eyes roll back in your head when they were closed, because I felt like mine did as the very pleasure he was trying to tempt me with rushed through me. It couldn’t be as simple as he said, but somehow I felt more vulnerable and broken down standing in a cloud of wicked thoughts and equally wicked intentions than I would have if he held a knife to my throat.

The sound of someone clearing their throat was like a whip cracking in the air. My eyes whipped open, the pressure on my throat decreasing as I looked at a little woman, short with her white hair set in high volume wisps around her head and eyes sharp enough to cut past the tension in the air and let shame creep in.

I wiggled my shoulders, trying to put space between us as I forced a smile at the woman who stared at us with a box of frozen waffles in hand.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

Her lips pursed in disapproval as she slammed the fridge door and stalked back to her cart, muttering to herself.

Christ, Eden. You’re in a grocery store.

“The ice cream is going to melt.” I blinked at the way the words felt in my mouth, the excuse laughable. Shaking my head at my weak attempt to flee this situation, I shoved his hand off the handle and pushed the cart forward, dislodging the other.

“Pfft.” He followed behind me, hands shoved in his pockets. “It’s the ones like that who have the most marks of lust in them. Frisky thing.”

I frowned. “What?” Please tell me he wasn’t about to go on about that little old lady’s sex life.