Page 36 of Blood and Magic (RBMC: Helena, MT #2)

She must have felt it because she smiled and rolled onto her back, leaning up to lick across my mouth. I opened for her, capturing her tongue with my teeth, gently holding it in place before sliding down over it, sucking it.

Maeve hummed in approval, and I rolled on top of her, positioning myself in between her legs, sliding my cock in between her sensitive skin. She moaned and wrapped her arms around my neck.

“Is it always like this?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” I moved down her jaw to her neck, alternating between gluttonous nibbles and hot open kisses.

“I want you so badly right now,” she said. “More than I ever have. It’s humiliating.”

I grinned and pulled back to look down at her, raising an eyebrow. Fuck, she was so damned beautiful, even like this, after surviving such an ordeal.

“Do you want me to fuck you, sweetheart?” My muscles ached and my bones were sore, but nothing on this great earth could have stopped me from giving her what she wanted.

“Please,” she said, scratching her nails down the side of my body.

It stung on such fresh skin, but I liked that, too.

Descending her body, I trailed worshipful kisses along her chest, pausing on her breasts to lick and suck her nipples.

She arched into the touch, digging her hands into my hair.

When she yanked and tried to get me to come back up, I grabbed her wrists to pin them at her sides.

“If I don’t taste you, I will lose my Goddamned mind.

” I continued my downward trajectory, hooking one knee over my shoulder before paying the same attention to her inner thigh.

I held the other leg out to the side, opening her glistening sex to me.

Fuck, she was already wet and gleaming, and when I licked a long line up her slit, she made a sound that would replay in my greatest hits for the rest of my life.

She tasted like heaven, like woman and Maeve and female, her pheromones hitting me in the gut to make me even harder.

My knot throbbed, wanting to get inside her, but I wouldn’t let myself have that until she came on my face.

I wanted to roll around in the sweet decadence of her arousal, wear it as a scent to announce I belonged to her and she belonged to me.

At the thought, my own smell strengthened, propelling out of me like a fog to wrap around her.

I wanted her doused in me so every other shifter in the whole world would know who’d come for them if they so much as looked at her the wrong way.

It was an instinct that I didn’t question, but on some fundamental level, I knew was more important than I gave it credit for.

She bucked against my face, rolling her pelvis, fucking me as much as I was tongue-fucking her. When all of her muscles tensed, her implosion imminent, I pulled back and watched her squirm.

“Mill, no,” she whined, pushing up her hips to find me again, glaring down her beautiful body with fury in her eyes. “Please. I need to come.”

“Oh, I know, baby,” I said, slowly rubbing my thumb over her clit the way she liked.

It was cruel to edge her like this so soon after the full moon.

She must have been sensitive. My cock had only barely touched her and I nearly embarrassed myself, but fuck if I didn’t love to see her so unbound and disheveled.

She reached for me, grabbing my shoulders and urging me up her body. I went and covered her in my torso, caging her shoulders and face with the protection of my arms.

“To answer your question, no,” I said, positioning my cock at her entrance and glacially sliding into her soft, warm body. “It’s not always like this. You bring it out in me. We bring it out in each other.”

She mewled and relaxed under me, as if the connection brought her peace.

A moan escaped my lips, the feeling of being sheathed in her, one with her, nearly overpowering all of my other senses.

I rocked into her, pistoning my hips in a leisurely pace like we had all the time in the world.

The sun rose on the horizon, capturing her soft alabaster skin in an otherworldly array of peaches and roses.

She’d never looked so beautiful, heavenly, like my very own angel right here on earth.

After the animalistic nature of our night together, I expected it to be rougher.

But it was sweet. I held her to me, our skin connecting from our chests to our hips and legs.

She hooked her ankles behind my back and captured my lips with hers, rolling against me and taking me as deeply as she could.

It slow and almost romantic until a darker impulse rose in me.

Shivers crept along my spine, up my neck, and over my scalp.

My canines elongated, pulsing with ravenous gluttony, and I eyed her throat.

The marks I’d left on her during her transition were now faded, the magic of the shift healing them.

I, too, had been restored, but still, this newfound hunger rumbled through me like a freight train.

Bite her, my wolf commanded from the depths of my subconscious. Take her. Consume her.

Never in my thirty-eight years had an appetite like this gripped me so thoroughly, and maybe it was the exhaustion from the change or the way her blood still thrummed through my veins, but I couldn’t stop myself.

She tilted her head to the side, giving me more access to her neck, and that should have been my first clue that something was incredibly wrong with me…with this. She wanted me to do it, and that wasn’t normal.

I grabbed her jaw with one hand, held her in place, and struck, sinking my fangs into her throat with a violence that shocked me.

But, oh, when her blood floated over my tongue and down my throat, I knew true ecstasy.

The magic in her veins, my magic, our magic, pulsed in time with my heart, seeming to sync up.

“Yes,” she cooed, gripping me tighter with her inner walls, and as I drank, she fell apart around me, her climax taking control, yanking me down into its abyss.

It shot out of her like a nuclear blast, setting off my own, and I bottomed out inside her, my knot locking us in place, holding me still while I spilled everything I had.

I licked her wound, sealing over the bite marks as we both came to our senses, and then I rolled us so she was on top of me, her legs on either side of my hips.

“Fuck, that was amazing,” she said. “You’re so beautiful when you come.”

I panted, my head woozy from both the exertion and the euphoria in her blood.

And then reality caught up to me.

I drank from her. I drank her blood.

Fuck.

What if Kodiak is right? What if I’m…

My knot shrank as if it, too, was disturbed by this thought. Panicked, I yanked her off me and sat up, examining her neck.

“Are you hurt?” I asked. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” she said, rubbing a hand over it. “It’s fine. It’s okay, Mill.”

No, it wasn’t okay. Shifters didn’t drink blood. They didn’t relish the sensation of coming and feeding at the same time.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

“C’mon.” I stood and yanked her up. “We should get back to the others.”

“Mill?” She furrowed her brows and made a sad attempt to cover herself with her arms, crossing them over her breasts. “What’s wrong?”

I licked my lips, shame coiling deep in my gut when I tasted caramel and metal. I was a danger to her. One of these days, I wouldn’t be able to stop. One of these days, I would drain her dry.

“Fuck, Maeve,” I said. “You should stay away from me.”

“What?” Her features broke, damn near crumbling right in front of me. “Why would you say that?”

“This can’t happen again,” I gestured between us, the anger boiling over, carrying words I didn’t mean. “This is a new level of stupid, even for you.”

She squared her jaw, widening her eyes with intensifying fury dancing behind them. “You’re a fucking prick, you know that?”

Maeve shoved my shoulders and pushed past me, making her way down to where the pack had shifted. Once again, I gave her a head start before I followed from a safe distance, not wanting her to be left alone but knowing I couldn’t get any closer.

I didn’t know what was happening to me, but Maeve deserved better, and always had.