Page 45 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

Burning alive feels better than it should.

I can feel flame lick over every part of me, curling deep into my legs, igniting me inside and out.

Ariel keeps kissing me, slow and sure. When I try to make it more intense, when I try to go deeper and wilder, he doesn’t let me.

He cups his hands around my face and holds me there, making us both marinate in the way our mouths fuse together and the demands I try to make that he meets, parries, then ignores. He continues to do precisely as he pleases.

And what he pleases is this kiss.

Is it one kiss or is it a thousand? Is it one long, complicated, life-altering kiss—or one after the next, on and on into a raw, hot, dizzying infinity?

I don’t know when I let go of the blanket, but soon enough I’m pressing the whole of my body against his.

Needy. Insistent. Desperate.

My arms wrap around his back and my fingers press deep into his cold muscles as he moves, ripples, stretches. By now I could trace that phoenix tattoo of his from memory, and I do.

He pulls away, looking down at me with his silver eyes gleaming bright.

So bright it makes me shiver.

Or . . . shiver even more.

“A phoenix tattoo for a vampire is practically a cliché,” he says, and I realize that note I don’t recognize in his voice is warmth. Maybe even amusement. “What about you, little seer? How many lives have you lived that you require a phoenix to mark them all?”

My mouth feels bruised, but it’s the kind of ache I want to lean into. I let my hands move down that sculpted back of his and run my palms over the marble flare of his buttocks, his powerful thighs.

“I think I’m on at least my third life,” I tell him, and there’s a teasing note in my voice, though I’m not kidding at all.

I’m matching him. “There is the life I had before my mother and father left. There is the life we all had before the Reveal. And I don’t know what you did to me last night, but I don’t feel the same, so maybe this is a new life too. ”

“I told you what I did.”

His voice sounds almost harsh now, but there’s something about the way he looks at me that makes me think it’s something more than that. That it’s that deep, unfathomable feeling that echoes in me, too. I just ... know it.

I have the strangest certainty that it works in me, too.

As if we feel the same, this immortal vampire and me.

Then again, what we do feels like this .

This wildfire with no beginning and no end. This shattering that only goes on and on and on. Of all the things he’s said to me, all the games he’s played since we met, I take this as truth.

He never expected to feel the things he does when he’s with me.

This makes me feel bold. I step back but grip his wrists as I go and then tug him with me, away from the window and deeper into the room. He lets me do it. He lets me move him across his own floor and then push him back down on his own bed.

Then I stand there before him, stripped naked, bathed by his hands, made new.

I have the strangest thought. That this is a kind of baptism. That there is something holy in his gaze, something sacred in the space between us.

I shouldn’t let this happen. I open my mouth to slap it back, the growing intensity between us, but I don’t.

The words sit there on my tongue, unspoken.

Worse, I let them.

Instead of defusing this, I move toward him.

I put my knee on the mattress and crawl up his body to press my mouth to the place where a pulse would be if he lived, there at the base of his neck.

I suck a little on the spot I find, the place where my own pulse thunders, until he makes a sound like breath.

But it’s only like breath.

He pulls me over him and settles me on his lap. We stay like that for another eternity or two, me sprawled over him so I can rock myself gently against the thick shaft of his cock and drive myself quietly—or maybe not so quietly—over the edge.

Still, I know, with a kind of dawning awareness that feels like a revelation, that we are no longer playing games. That the games we’ve been playing all this time, little as they may have done their job, are over now.

That all of this is new territory.

I’ve dared him to fuck me more times than I can count. He’s responded by making certain that the things we do get us both off, but me significantly more than him.

These have all been power games. I understood this the whole time and still presented myself before him every night.

I was beginning to think that playing such games was no more and no less than what vampires do . That they don’t have it in them to simply have sex .

Now I’m beginning to understand, by the way he holds me, that I’ve been wrong about that, too.

I feel as if I’m hovering on the edge of another understanding. Something glimmering. Something made up of white-hot heat and that stark emotion I don’t want to read all over his face.

It isn’t that this is without power. His stern hands are all over my body. The way he moves me up and down against the thick shaft of his cock—always so close and yet not quite there—is hypnotic. Only hotter.

Especially when, with the rain outside and a different storm within, he lifts me higher than before. And then lowers me, shifting the angle so he can notch the thick head of his cock in the entrance to my pussy at last.

I must make a noise, because he freezes. Or maybe time simply slows like that.

There’s nothing between us now. There’s nothing holding us apart. It’s like he’s daring me to understand what’s happening, on all the levels it’s happening. As if he’s daring me to acknowledge what this is.

What I think to myself is that I will never be the same.

Yet right at this moment, arched up above him with his hands tight around my hips, I don’t want to be the same.

I want this.

I want him , no matter how dangerous this is.

I want this new thing we’re becoming more than I want any of the things I’ve lost. Even though I suspect that later, I will find that shameful.

Right now, I understand that I’m poised on the verge of yet another brand-new life.

And he’s a vampire, through and through. He’s cold, immortal, and he will wait forever for me to beg him. To invite him .

To sign myself up for my own ice-cold immolation.

“Please, Ariel,” I whisper. “Please. You told me I would beg, and this is me. Begging. Please. ”

He mutters something in a language that sounds old and foreign, or possibly the words to a spell, and then he smiles.

It’s like its own explosion inside me, that smile. It’s a marvel. It’s terrible. It’s like nothing I’ve seen on his face before. It fills me up inside until I am full to bursting—

And then he simply slams me down on his cock.

I shatter completely.

The person I wanted to be, the person I remember being once, is gone that easily. That fast.

I feel the orgasm in my fingertips and my toes. There’s nothing sweet or soft about it, no lovely uncurling or breaking waves.

It’s as close to violence as an orgasm can get.

And I love it.

He keeps moving my hips, kissing me as he shifts me against him. He uses me like some kind of fuck toy on his own cock, and I reward him by screaming.

Whether for mercy or more I can’t tell.

I’m limp in his grasp, his cock so deep and so wide, a near unbearable intensity inside of me. He is holding me up and his grip feels like iron, so what I do is arch back. I let my arms go wide, my head falling back while my breasts graze the hard sculpture of his chest.

His cock is enormous. I’ve had it in my mouth, and halfway down my throat. I’ve ridden it from all sides. I’ve had his thick cock head butt up against my clit over and over, and all of that pales into insignificance next to this.

I can’t believe how deep he goes, how much he fills me. Every thrust is like the first. Every time, it seems as if I’m too small, too tight, too shallow—

But he makes room.

If it were anyone else with a cock like that, there would be no possible way. It would take forever for him to work his way inside.

Luckily, even thinking about Ariel makes me wet.

Near him, I’m hovering on the verge of an orgasm all the time. I woke up halfway there, even though I nearly died last night.

My body wants him. Constantly. This must be why it works like this. There’s no pain, only an intensity of sensation. It feels so good that I want to believe this has to be some kind of magic. Some vampire trick.

If it is, I don’t care. I want him to trick me forever.

His hands move from my hips to grip my ass, then he’s rolling us with a speed that is itself a kind of spellbinding. I hold my breath, and then he’s moving over me in the bed, his cock deep inside my body.

Then he sits back, kneeling up and shifting my legs so that they hang around his neck.

“Acrobatic,” I manage to pant out.

“The trouble is that I dreamed about this for far too long,” he tells me, his voice rough and his gaze bright. “In a thousand different positions.”

He pulls out and then thrusts in hard and I come again—a long, hard ripple of delirious greed and heat.

He does this again and again, and when I’m incapable of more than a few wild sounds, he flips me over. Face down on the bed, I can feel him crawl down the length of me.

Leaving a trail of bite marks as he goes.

My breasts are pressed into the bed, so when he slides his hand beneath my belly to lift up my hips so he can slam into me from behind, the abrasion against my nipples skyrockets me right back up into that quivering almost —

He stays behind me like that for a while. He’s so big and so hard . His perfect body is all over mine, one hand between me and the bed. And he plays with my clit until I’m screaming once again.

But he still won’t let himself come.

“Why are you holding back?” I manage to ask him, though it feels like work to speak. To form words and let them out.

“Because I want everything,” he tells me, his voice so intense that a bolt of something moves through me, cold and hot at once.