Page 99 of Property of Scar

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re thinking it loudly.”

“I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

She uses her still-captive wrists as leverage to push herself upright, which should not work as well as it does, and levels me with a look that aims for severity and lands somewhere considerably closer to wrecked. “Release my wrists.”

I do.

Her hands go straight to my belt. She is focused and practical, like this is just another problem she’s decided to solve. By the time I think about helping, she’s already got it handled, because that’s who she is. Half drowned, breathing hard, still recovering from what just happened, and somehow she’s still the most capable person on this roof.

The woman refuses to fall apart, hand her problems to somebody else, and be anything less than exactly who she is, no matter what the situation throws at her.

And somewhere in the middle of all that stubborn competence, I realize I’m in serious trouble. Because I’ve spent centuries around powerful people, but I’ve never found anything half as attractive as watching Cali be herself.

“These!” she says, meaning my jeans, with flat, practiced authority, like giving orders is second nature.

“Ask nicely.”

She meets my eyes with an expression that says she will absolutely not be doing that, then she hooks both legs around my hips and rolls us in one fluid movement. A heartbeat later she’s straddling me, both palms spread across my chest as though she’s pinned me there by force alone.

I let her.

Not because she’s beaten me. She hasn’t. We both know exactly how this ends if I decide otherwise. But there’s something about watching the hunter forget she’s climbed on top of a centuries-old vampire that keeps me exactly where I am. She wears that certainty like a second skin, completely convinced she’s calling the shots.

I could prove her wrong.

I don’t particularly want to.

“Better?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Infinitely,” I tell her honestly.

Cali reaches down and finishes what she started with my belt, shoving the denim off my hips with the same decisive efficiency she applies to everything. Then there is nothing between us, and the night air is irrelevant because she is straddling my hips, and the heat of her is the only temperature that exists.

She holds herself above me, her hands braced on my chest, and for one suspended second, she looks at me—really looks, the way she looked at me earlier on the parapet, reading the scene before she commits to it, and I look back and let her see everything. No careful management of what my face does, just eons of emptiness, looking up at the one thing that’s made it feel like a problem worth solving.

Something in her expression settles. Then she reaches down, wraps her hand around my cock, angling it up to meet her, and she sinks onto me in one slow, deliberate movement that neither of us rushes.

The sound that leaves her goes straight through me. And I feel it, too, the sharp inhale I don’t need to take but take anyway, involuntary, my head dropping back for just a moment before I find her face again because I am not wasting a single second of this not looking at her.

“Christ,” I breathe the word out, and it comes rough and unplanned.

She exhales slowly above me, her lips parted, her eyes closing briefly before they find mine again, and what’s in them when they do is not composure. It is not the careful, measured look she gives the world. It is something wide open, a little undone, and entirely, devastatingly real.

“Yeah,” she says softly. Just that. Just ‘yeah,’ in a voice that means considerably more than the word.

And the feeling?

I have no reference point for this. All these centuries, and I’ve got nothing that compares.

It’s more than the physical reality of her pressed against me, more than the heat of her skin or the strange pull of her dhampir blood meeting mine. Those things hit hard enough on their own.

This is something else.

Something that feels like finding a part of myself I stopped looking for a long, damn time ago. Like I’ve been carrying around an empty space for centuries without realizing how big it was until now.

The feeling hits deep.