I could live on it, sure.
But my cock was in absolute agony.
If ever a woman wanted to be fucked, it was this woman right here, right now, standing just stumbling distance from the very bed in which I could make all of her hottest, filthiest dreams come true.
And mine, if we were being honest.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one haunting my dreams, and the rest of them served as a harsh reminder of just how dangerous this game could get.
I closed my eyes, focusing entirely on the feel of her hot, velvet mouth, trying to pin it down in my memory. Trying not to kiss her. Trying not to completely lose my shit.
Whatever Gray had going on with Ronan and Darius? Whatever “family” she thought we could all be? I was all in. But unlike the crossroads demon and the vampire and even the shifter, incubuses came with a built-in hard limit—cross it, and she might just end up dead.
I dropped my hand and walked out of my own bedroom without so much as a backward glance, bound for a shower.
A fucking cold one.
Two
GRAY
Was sudden onset attraction to someone who annoyed the hell out of you a symptom of cabin fever, a symptom of magical burnout, or a symptom of one too many blows to the head?
It had to be a symptom ofsomething. I refused to believe there was any other explanation for the rush of heat I felt whenever Asher got too close—a scenario that was getting harder to avoid since we’d been sequestered together at the safe house.
I understood why the guys had left us behind—Ash was still recuperating from the damage of the devil’s trap, and as the group’s resident human and seriously depleted witch, I needed some extra R&R, too.
But it was hard to relax when three of the four men I’d come to care about most in this world were putting in long hours at the house where we’d been ambushed by opportunistic vampires working for the monster who’d killed my best friend and countless others.
And things between Asher and me? Oh, how I wished I could go back to those halcyon days when hating him came as natural to me as breathing. But how could I hate him now?
Whatever we were to each other when this nightmare began—whatever he’d thought of me years ago when he’d helped bring me back from the brink—springing him from the devil’s trap had bonded me to him in ways that went well beyond the kiss we’d shared.
I’d felt his soul. Glimpsed the darkness there.
And in that darkness, some black, cold thing inside me had recognized a kindred spirit.
Maybe that should’ve frightened me.
It doesn’t.
Maybe I was getting used to the darkness.
I am.
Maybe I was starting to like it. To likehim.
I am...
I shivered, the salt of Asher’s skin still lingering on my lips. He’d been in the shower for twenty minutes already, and in that time the only thing I’d managed to accomplish was filling the teakettle.
I hadn’t even turned on the flame.
Scolding myself, I turned on the gas range and grabbed my mug from the cupboard—the chipped one Sophie had painted for me—grateful Ronan had thought to grab it from my kitchen in South Bay. It was a little piece of home—a reminder of my best friend and the safe, normal life we’d once shared—and I clung to it.
Words like safe and normal were no longer part of my vocabulary, but thinking of Sophie always grounded me, even when my current roommate was doing everything in his power to drive me to an early grave.
“Darlin’, your love is my poison,” he sang out from the bathroom down the hall, “and I’m dying for another taste.”
