Again, my face reflected back at me from his helmet. The black leather glove tangled in my hair. My brown eyes big and wide. The heat of my breath fogging the black plastic through parted lips.
I couldn’t help but wonder how he looked. What was the face to match the body? Thick lips? Dark eyes? I was having trouble picturing something to adequately match his wild, merciless aura. It was a vibe reserved for books, for dark moors and Heathcliff haunted by Catherine.
“So what, then?” I asked.
I once again fisted the fabric of his shirt. His hand flexed almost imperceptibly in my hair.
Then he stood up and threw something white down. Oh god…was that abone?
A…afemur.
There was no way he wanted me to fuck that. Right?
“You want my cock?” he asked, palming it over his jeans, eyes landing on the bone. “Fucking earn it.”
chapter
two
SHAY
A month before the graveyard.
“Willing to doanything?—”
“Don’t say that!” I said, reaching for my phone.
My sister, Lilith aka Lithie, threw it across the room and out of my reach. A tan, muscular hand with a tattooed, thin-line depiction of the Milky Way’s orbits shot up and pulled it out of the air.
My best friend, colleague, and pain in the ass—Eames Avery.
“Hmm…” Eames settled back into a velvet pink sofa, a look of faux seriousness sparkling in his hazel eyes. “Looking for a shadow daddy with a monster cock.”
A tall woman with silky dark skin and even silkier charcoal curls leaned over his chair. Enter my other best friend, colleague, and pain in the ass—Olivia Kitt.
“No, no,” Olly said, brown eyes glimmering. “That’s not enough. Our girl likes itdark. Think of the book she chose this week.” With her arms slung over the back of Eames’s chair, Olly’s face scrunched in concentration at my phone. It was as if she were trying to decipher residual noise in the cosmicmicrowave background and not setting up my dating profile. “She wants to be chased through a graveyard and have a knife?—”
I stood up and snatched the phone back. “I regret telling you this.”
Every few days, and sometimes sooner, the three of us got together to discuss our favorite book. We made book-themed cocktails and, if one of us was feeling particularly generous, matching food. From cowboys to aliens to fucked-up boys in college to the grade A yearners, our book club was all about smut. And yeah, this month I’d chosen something dark.
Rather, pitch-black.
I’d heard every argument about why dark romance was terrible and the worst thing to happen to feminism since low-rise jeans, but what could I say? I liked the darker stuff.
I loved an obsessive, possessive man with bloody knuckles and bloodier secrets. Maybe because they always seemed the most fearless when it came to the girl. They didn’t give a shit what demons she had or what skeletons were in her closet—they just wantedher.
As someone who’d grown up with her fair share of demons and skeletons, there was something intoxicating about that.
Cosmically, dark has more gravity than light. The light isdrawnto the dark. So, really, I’m just going with the flow of the universe.
Today, however, there was something more interesting to discuss than the newest book boyfriend. Like the fact that I, Shay Adder, monogamy junkie whose entire dating life consisted of one romantic partner, was now making a kink-specific dating profile and seeking a no-strings-attached arrangement.
“You suck,” I said.
Olly gave me a half shrug—sorry not sorry.Olivia “Olly” Kitt and I met in grad school. We’d done the same doctoral program and landed similar positions at the same lab. We started worktogether when our now boss, Jenna Fowler, began conducting the largest spectroscopic survey ever conducted—analyzing light from an unprecedented number of stars and galaxies.
A few months later, we met Eames, a doctoral student studying the age of the universe.
