Page 205 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Twenty-Nine

Riva

G riffin’s mouth sears against mine, a starker heat than the warmth of the water that surrounds us.

The certainty inside me grows. This is what I’ve needed, what I’ve sensed was missing. The last of my guys, the last of our group of six, with me in every way rather than lingering on the outside of the deeper bonds we’ve formed.

I don’t know why the urgency has come over me so intensely, why I was already craving this connection this early morning when Griffin wasn’t even in sight. But everywhere our skin touches, more need sparks.

The shadows in my veins dance with frantic anticipation.

I kiss him harder, slinging both of my arms around his neck. The water drips from my wrists, but it doesn’t matter if Balthazar hears us now.

It might even be better for him to eavesdrop on our intimate moment, as much as the thought disgusts me. Let him think that our pool interlude was only about physical gratification and not about Griffin boosting my confidence to rebel against our captor.

Griffin makes a rough sound and nudges me up against the wall of the pool. My spine presses into the wet tiles, cold above the waterline and warm below.

The contrast sends a shiver through me that’s far from unpleasant. I lift my legs instinctively, tucking them around his waist and drawing him closer.

We’ve embraced like this before, by the waterfall on the island. We had more clothes between us then, of course.

The slide of wet skin against skin sharpens my desire. That and the feel of the rigid bulge in Griffin’s boxers, lining up against my panties.

I whimper into his mouth, and he exhales raggedly. One hand comes to rest on my thigh while the other delves into my hair, loosening my braid.

He rocks against me, sending pulses of bliss through my core. I can’t restrain myself from grinding my pussy into his erection in return, but I can’t see why I’d want to stop.

The friction of our movements brings a gasp to my lips and earns me a groan from Griffin. His head dips next to mine, his lips branding the crook of my neck.

It isn’t enough. I’m not looking for another hasty release through our clothes.

I want to feel all of him; feel him becoming a part of me and me a part of him.

I need it, right down to the center of my being, with a wrenching longing I can’t explain.

But when I lower one hand and hook my fingers around the waist of his boxers, Griffin tenses. It’s a tiny shift, only noticeable because I’m pressed so tight against his body, but it echoes through his muscles into mine.

I can’t hide my flicker of surprise and disappointment, not from him. Griffin goes still. “I’m sorry. I?—”

“It’s okay,” I say, even though accepting his rejection sets my eyes burning. I close them, willing my emotions to settle so I won’t make him feel guilty. “If you’re not ready?—”

He shakes his head before I can finish that sentence. “I’m ready. I think I’ve been ready for you my whole life, Moonbeam. I just don’t know if I can be what you need now.”

I frown and cup his cheek, startled enough that I can meet his gaze again. “What are you talking about? I love you—you know that. I trust you. I don’t hold anything that happened before against you. None of that matters.”

“It matters to me,” Griffin says softly.

“I’m still not back to normal—I still have the nightmares.

Almost everything I feel comes with a jab of pain, and I don’t know if that’s ever going to completely fade.

I love you so much, but I can’t love you the same way the other guys can, with nothing else getting in the way. ”

“Griffin…” The ache expands up to my heart, with a bittersweet poignancy that has nothing to do with lust.

This man just reminded me in the most vivid possible way of who I am. Rebuilt my foundations of confidence from the ground up like no one else could have.

How can he think he isn’t worthy of me?

The greatest truth he reminded me of had nothing to do with my emotions from the past several weeks and everything to do with our deeper history.

I tamp down on my impatient desires and hold his sky-blue gaze. “You could never not be enough for me. We’re blood. No matter what happens, no matter how buried we get in the shit that’s thrown at us, we’ll find each other. I wouldn’t even know how to ask for more love than that.”

There was one massive truth I’d almost forgotten in the wake of Balthazar’s horrible revelation: I already have a family. The five guys I grew up with are closer to me than genetics, more a part of me than any shared DNA.

We share something Balthazar could never understand, both in the training we endured and the supernatural essence flowing through our veins. Nothing could bind me tighter to anyone.

Not only do I have a family, I have a huge one. These five guys I grew up with, who own my heart, but all the younger shadowbloods too. There’s no impact Balthazar could have on me, aware or unconscious, that could come close to my kinship with them.

The very fact that he doesn’t recognize those ties only proves how little he knows me.

I’m not sure how much of my thoughts Griffin can discern from my emotions. Enough that between whatever he senses and my words, a bright smile crosses his face.

“You should always ask for more,” he says. “And we’ll all give you everything we possibly can.”

I smile back, a strange shyness gripping me. “You could show me you . All that love you have in you already. Then you’ll know for sure that I’m more than satisfied with what you can offer.”

Griffin stares at me for a moment. Has he ever projected his true feelings to someone else, shown them what it’s like inside him the way he can absorb everyone else’s emotions?

Then the sensations reach me. A potent, joyful warmth rises up through my chest, tentative at first but unfurling until it’s flooded every cell.

A few sharp pricks of resistance that I know aren’t really him, only his lingering conditioning, tarnish the happiness. But there’s so much more as well—hope and gratitude and determination, and twined through it all a longing so heady my heart starts thumping faster.

I tug him toward me, and he comes, his mouth crashing into mine. We kiss roughly, like we’re running out of time.

Which maybe we are.

As my body strains toward his, Griffin keeps casting wave after wave of emotion into me. The tang of our matching desire twines together like our tongues.

His love fills me with so much light I can’t separate his devotion from my own. It’s all merged together into a blissful tsunami.

The clamoring of my shadows peals through everything else. The same urgency quivers through the feelings I’m absorbing from Griffin.

This time when I yank at his boxers, he helps me shove them down his hips. Beneath the water, he peels off my soaked panties in turn.

I curl my fingers around his hardened cock, and his groan reverberates through me with an internal keening of need. An answering whimper spills from my lips.

The first time I’ve slept with each of my guys, there’s been a magnetic power to it, a point when it’s hard to imagine we could possibly resist the compulsion driving our bodies toward each other.

This—this sensation is even more potent than that. The marks on my collarbone sing, my blood thrums through my veins alongside the drumming of my pulse in my ears, and I’d swear the entire world is propelling us together, waiting to witness the power of our joining.

Griffin was my first kiss. He’ll be my last lover.

Somehow this moment between us encircles everything I’ve found and formed with all five of my men.

His fingers dig into my ass with a jolt of pain that only heightens the pleasure racing through my limbs. Then he’s thrusting into me, and the rest of the world might as well not exist at all.

This act has been so long coming and so long wanted. My shadows cry for more, and I buck with Griffin, barely feeling the splash of the water across my shoulders.

There’s only the bliss expanding in forceful pulses inside me and the heat of his body encompassing me, as if we really will meld together beyond the possibility of separation.

We will, though, won’t we? I can never truly be torn away from any of my men while the connection of our marks shines between us as clearly as a homing beacon.

I run my hands over his scarred chest and then grip the back of his neck. My body sways frantically, crashing into his.

Griffin’s breath fractures. He pushes deeper, faster.

His heady delight swells through me, resonating through my nerves and sending my own bliss spiking higher. I’m whirling toward the edge, careening beyond self-control.

My head tips back with the rush of my coming release. I can’t rein it in.

My climax sweeps through me so scorchingly bright it whites out my vision and tingles across every inch of my skin. As I cry out with the burst of pleasure, the sizzling shadows seem to explode right out of me.

A vision crackles through my skull of the dark power beaming from my chest as if I’m a shadowblood sun, blazing rays streaking from me not just to Griffin but my other four men as well.

Jacob told me once that I’m the sun they all orbit around. I’ve never felt it so solidly before.

Like everything we are radiates between the six of us through me at the center.

Griffin lets out a choked sound as he follows me over the edge. I splay my fingers so the claws that’ve shot from the tips don’t cut into his skin.

Another surge of his emotion washes over me to mingle with my own. Joy and pleasure and the deepest sense of fulfillment I can imagine.

His thrusts slow, his chest heaving. He lowers his head to claim another, sweeter kiss.

A faint prickle quivers from the spot right in the middle of my chest, between my collarbones, where his mark has formed. It finishes the necklace of splotches dappled across my skin.

But unlike with the other guys, the sense of our merged shadows doesn’t fade away.

The intensity of it ebbs, falling into more of a whisper than a blaze, but I can’t shake the impression that we’re still totally intertwined from the inside out.

That I could tug and draw something of Griffin back into me if I tried.

So I do. I grasp hold and pull instinctively, absorbing the shadows humming between us?—

Griffin’s head jerks up. I feel his flash of panic—but not because he’s projected it into me.

No, I can feel so much more. I can taste the restless frustration emanating from a presence I recognize as Jacob, off within the villa. The uneasy boredom Dominic and Andreas are trying to fend off with a card game. The worries Zian has hovering over him like a cloud.

And more. Glimmers and twinges from elsewhere in the villa, from more distant sources that graze my senses like tendrils of mist.

There’s so much of it—it swells inside me, overwhelming my thoughts?—

I heave the essence I grabbed hold of back toward Griffin. All the broadened awareness rushes out of me, and he inhales with a hitch of relief.

I come back to myself, clinging to him amid the rippling water of the pool, staring at him like he’s gaping at me.

“What did you do?” he murmurs.

“I—I don’t know.”

That’s not totally true. An inkling of an idea is tickling up from the back of my mind.

If what I just experienced means what I think it does… our connection is so much more than even Clancy ever suspected.

So much more than Balthazar can possibly be prepared for.

I pull Griffin to me for one last kiss and then hook my elbow over the side of the pool. “We need to get the other guys.”