Page 17 of To Sway a Demon Heart

“I…what?” he asked, looking a bit stunned. “I thought you wanted—”

“Idowant,” I interrupted again, pulling his body close to mine. My heart was pounding in tandem with his, and I could feel exactly what he wanted pressed against my stomach, but he would not get any of it until he admitted it aloud. “I have never hidden that I want you, not after Mithloria.” He flinched, but I stood my ground. “You tell me what you want, or you get nothing. Don’t tell me that you’re tired of fighting it, or that you’re selfish. You own what you want, or you don’t get it.”

“You are a maddening creature,” Tyr said between clenched teeth. “I’m trying to give you what you want, and you’re making demands of me.”

“You made demands of me for months,” I argued, emphasizing the words with a tug on his shirt that drew him even closer to me. “You demanded that I not feel for you, not want you. You—” I broke off, the words suddenly clogging my throat.

Tyr’s face softened, a hand rising to cup my cheek. He swept a thumb across my cheekbone, his eyes sorrowful. “I hurt you,” he supplied. I nodded, the pain of his rejection still sharp despite our closeness. “I was a fucking fool.”

“You still are, if you walk away now,” I choked out, feeling my eyes burn as the weight of his rejection seared me, threatening to overtake me if he changed his mind again.

“I don’t want to walk away,” he murmured, his mouth hovering just over mine, barely a breath away from my lips. “I didn’t want to walk away then either, Brigid. I just couldn’t believe that someone so perfect, so fucking divine, could really want me. I didn’t want to curse you with me.”

“Tell me whatyouwant,” I begged, my breath coming in shallow gasps as he held me tightly to him. I wouldn’t survive this time if he walked away, and I wanted to so desperately heal whatever he thought was broken within him that I ached for him to close the distance between us. The distance he put there with his rejection.

“I want you,” he breathed, his nose barely brushing mine as he exhaled. “I want your love and your kind heart and your friendship. I want you in my mouth and around my cock and coming apart around me. I want you in every way there is to want another, and I’m selfish enough that if you offer it to me now, I will take everything you’ll give me.”

“Then take it,” I said, letting his mouth crash into mine again. This time he met no resistance, the barrier between us finally dispelled with his acceptance that we both wanted this. I felt his brokenness and his doubt in that kiss, and I tried to push all of my firmness and acceptance back at him.

We were a tangle of limbs, messy and uncoordinated, as we stumbled toward the bed, with Tyr pulling at the ties of my gown while I tugged at the buttons of his coat and shirt.

Part of me wanted to savor this. To admire every inch of this male and to force him to admire me. But the needier part of me had waited too long for patience to be an option now, and I scrabbled at him with frantic fingers as we tore at each other.

His coat came off, the shirt with it, but the longing to wrap my arms around him was stopped short by what I saw.

“Goddess above,” I breathed, reaching out a hand to touch the scars that covered his torso. Every inch of his chest and upper arms, every beautiful inch of tan skin, was marred with thick scars that raised and crossed and interlaced. He grabbed my hand before I could touch them, and rage filled me. “Who did this to you?”

I had seen him before without a shirt when he and Carnon and Herne removed them during training. There had been no scars on his perfectly sculpted chest only weeks ago in the capital city.

But these scars weren’t new. They were old, overlapping, and long healed over. Some appeared to have been reopened and healed over again and again. The sight of them turned my stomach, not in revulsion, but in rage.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tyr rumbled, his mouth finding mine again as he held my hands away from his skin. “Not right now.”

“Tyr,” I protested, trying to escape his grasp.

“Leave it, Brigid,” Tyr commanded, his voice firm and face stern as he held me away from him. “I will tell you everything you want to know, but not until after I’ve been inside you.”

His words made something in me go molten, and I nodded as I relaxed my hands, letting him pin me to the bed beneath him. He kissed me again, shifting us so that I was fully under him, his mouth moving to my neck and my collarbone as he pulled the fabric of my dress away. He scraped his sharp fangs over the bud of one peaked nipple, smoothing over the hurt with his tongue as the sensation sent lightning shooting through me. I arched off the bed, and Tyr chuckled darkly, doing it again.

“I want to learn what you like,” he murmured, turning his attention to my other breast and repeating the motion. More lighting rippled through me, and I moaned his name as his lips moved lower. “I want to learn what makes you scream and writhe with pleasure. And then I want to make you scream my name until no one can doubt that you’re mine. I want to devour you.”

“So much for not being able to tell me what you want,” I quipped, gasping as his teeth scraped gently over my stomach toward my lower belly. He chuckled darkly, his hands pinning my wrists on either side of me as he kissed a slow, sensual line down my body.

“You’ve convinced me of my foolishness,” he agreed, lifting himself so he could pull the rest of my dress away, exposing me to him fully.

He bent his head, tearing at the delicate fabric of my undergarments with his teeth. The protest over the destruction of my clothes died in my throat at the first swipe of his tongue, a moan of pleasure building there instead.

“Gods above,” I gasped, weaving the fingers of one hand into his hair as he released my wrists to gain a better grip on my hips. I clutched at the sheets with my other hand as his tongue made another slow pass through my center.

Tyr didn’t reply, his attention focused solely on me as he fulfilled his promise to devour me. Each press of his tongue and scrape of his fangs was a brand, a claiming of its own that marked me as his irrevocably. There would be no returning from this for me, and I felt like I could perhaps die fulfilled with his mouth on me as it was.

“Tyr,” I cried, my hands moving from his hair to knead at my own breasts as release built in me. “Please.”

He knew what I was asking for, perhaps because we were mates or perhaps because he was a skilled lover. Whatever the reason, the finger he slid into me toppled me over the edge as a wave of pleasure shattered through me. All of the tension and the misery and the pain of his rejection seemed to fade with that release, and when he brought his lips back to mine to capture my cries, I welcomed them.

I fumbled at his trousers, eager to learn and discover for myself what brought Tyr pleasure as he had done for me. He stilled me with a hand, his eyes wary.

“There are more scars,” he confessed, holding my hand in place as if I might not wish to look upon them. “There are few parts of my body that are unmarked.”