Page 46 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

Once again, being with this man is an education. Things I didn’t know my body could do. Things I would have said couldn’t possibly feel good. It can and they do, and he never has the slightest doubt.

I think to myself what a marvel it is to be with someone who knows bodies this well . Who knows exactly where to stroke and when to press. When to be slow and when to go hard and fast. Someone who has done everything, and well, and at a volume so high it’s dizzying to contemplate.

Even if, at a conservative estimate, he had one lover a year. Or even every ten years.

Thinking of all the bodies he must have touched and tasted, tempted and torn apart, sends me off into another orgasm so hard and so long that I almost think it might kill me.

That maybe it does.

The rain is beating against the windowpanes. Inside, the room stays shadowy and cool, but I am the inferno he’s made me. Every time he does something new, I let off enough heat to ward off the coming winter.

I don’t know how many lifetimes come and go before I find him rolling me over once more. I can still feel the pulse of that last orgasm throbbing in my earlobes. The tip of my tongue. My eyelids.

Ariel gathers me to him and pulls me over his lap once more, my back to his chest. He settles me, and I feel the press of his cock against my back, hot now because he’s been inside me.

Then he lifts me high and lowers me to thrust in deep once more.

I let out a groan. My head falls back of its own accord. He has one arm around my abdomen, holding me in place, and once again I think that if this was anyone else or any other scenario, this would be nothing but awkward.

With him, however, I am boneless. It’s the easiest thing in the world to simply tip myself back into his arms and shift to get as much of his cock inside me as possible.

Because the moment he moves, it doesn’t matter what position I’m in.

All there is here, in this room and across our ruined little world, is our own wildfire. The one we keep fueling and building until it blazes up to the sky.

This time, he moves differently. I feel his mouth on my neck.

“You need my blood?” I ask. I don’t even know where the question comes from. My voice doesn’t sound like mine, it’s so hoarse and rough. “You can have it.”

“I accept your invitation,” he says, and it’s that formal language that shivers through me, a key into a lock.

I whisper his name, not certain if it’s a curse or a prayer.

“I do not need your blood, little seer.” His voice is a low murmur against the skin of my neck. He’s on the other side from last night, and when I raise a boneless hand to feel my scar, it’s gone. “But I will take it. And I will give you some of mine in return.”

“Do I need it?” I ask. Not that it matters, because I want it.

I can already taste it, rich on my tongue.

“Oracles are meant to interpret signs the deities put out, not to speak with them directly. Oracles are mostly human. Very breakable, in other words.”

Ariel licks my neck, his cock still so enormous and hard inside of me. I can feel another orgasm lurking, curling toward me, and when the hand on my abdomen moves lower and presses there, just at the top of my pussy, it takes everything I have to hold it off.

I don’t even know why I try.

“I don’t want to be a vampire,” I tell him.

“I don’t want you to be a vampire,” he replies, as if what I said is amusing. “But I need you a little less breakable, Winter. I healed you. Now I want you tougher.”

“So I can tell you things I see in visions.”

I’m just saying stuff. It’s hard to really think beyond his fingers playing with my clit, that hard and heavy cock like marble so deep inside of me, and his mouth on my neck.

He grips my chin with his free hand and swivels my face until I’m looking straight at him.

“So that you live , Winter,” he says forbiddingly. “Through whatever comes.”

Like he’s affronted I don’t get that.

It makes a new kind of sensation wind its way through me, until I wonder if I’m ever going to breathe right again.

“Ariel . . .” I whisper.

“It is the only thing I must insist upon.” His voice is dark even though his eyes glow. “You must live.”

Then, hiding nothing, he tips his head back and I watch as his fangs elongate. They are sharp and long. Terrifying.

Yet I want to lick them.

He is a monster, and he’s making sure I see his true face. Not just his marble beauty but this, the reality of him.

I should scream.

And I do, but only because another orgasm slams into me, like a punch.

Even as I’m shaking my way into it, I watch him lower his head. I assume he’s going to slam those fangs deep into my neck.

And there must be something wrong with me, because I want him to.

I want to feel those fangs deep in my body, so he’s penetrating me in as many ways as he can.

But he doesn’t bite me. He bites himself, ripping open the inside of his own wrist.

“This time when you come, I will come too,” he tells me with a stern certainty that has my clit throbbing. “And this time, you will not pass out the way you did again and again last night.”

“Did we have sex last night?” I’m outraged at the idea, fighting to get my breath back so I can truly be furious about this unbelievably intense and stunning thing happening and me somehow missing it—

“Don’t be ridiculous.” His voice is so dark. His gaze is so hot .

He doesn’t say, You would know.

I would know.

“Ariel,” I say again, but my gaze is on the place where his blood wells in the cut he’s made on the inside of his wrist. “Ariel, please. Please— ”

His silver eyes flash like a thunderstorm.

I feel it inside me, that high wind and the sudden shock of cold.

His cock seems to swell as he presses his wrist to my lips.

I taste flesh and copper, and I have the split-second urge to recoil, but then the flavor hits me.

Rich and textured. Coppery, yes, but layered with complicated notes of spice and wonder, something like rosemary, and him.

All him.

Ariel’s cock seems larger still, pressing against the walls of my pussy to make the already astonishing sensation that much more . That much wilder, that much more impossible, that much more astonishingly good , like my body was made entirely for him to play with as he pleases—

I can’t say please, so I suck on his wrist even harder, circling my hips to work his cock even deeper into me.

He lowers his head and opens his mouth wide against my neck. Then he bites down, sinking those fangs deep into my skin the same way he slammed his cock into my body.

So hard and so deep it ought to split me in half.