Oh gods, he thought.
Chloe was merciless. She didn’t hesitate. Her movements were like a terribly seductive dance. Without a word, the other spaghetti strap came next.
She pulled it slowly along the curve of her shoulder, a slash of bright crimson against pale perfection, and Jason held his breath. The strap was released, and it fell….
Now freed of the only thing holding it up, the loosened gown of blood red slid toward the bed, cascading over her left breast before exposing her chest, then her taut, perfect abdomen before pooling in a pile of satin where she straddled him.
Jason was transfixed. He was also in pain. The digging of the ropes into his wrists was nothing compared to the hardness that pressed against his still zipped pants, aching to be released.
Chloe tilted her head and looked innocently down at herself. Jason’s heart skipped, his teeth clenched to near breaking point, and his eyes burned hot in his head as he waited for her to do what he knew she was going to do.
With graceful arms and tender, roaming fingers, Chloe raised her hand to her breast and touched it softly, caressing the curve of it as if curious. Then, as a lover would do, she cupped it and ran her thumb over the taut nipple. Jason saw her stomach tighten and watched her head fall back, her long blonde hair spilling from her shoulders to cascade down her back. The softest sound emitted from between her parted lips.
Jason had never strained so hard against anything in his life. He called on his magic to free him. Again, it didn’t listen. He pulled like mad against the ropes that held him, until he was certain he was ripping every corded muscle in his body.
But he was not in control here. His beautiful, wicked, half-naked blonde minx of a queen was holding all the cards.
Chloe leaned over him then, giving him a dreamer’s view of her curves as she slowly backed off the bed, moving like a cat until she stepped down onto the plush rug and straightened once more, now standing.
The dress shimmered to the floor.
Jason growled low in his chest, the sound involuntary and desperate. Touch me, he begged. Come to me.
Don’t leave me.
It was a thought that floated through him, pulled out from some deepest, darkest depth where he’d shoved it long ago.
But Chloe put the fear to rest at once, shocking him to the core and healing an ancient wound as she came around the bed to stand just beside it near his head. He gazed at her, looking her in the eyes. They were the ocean on a troubled wind, filled with tender and intrepid emotion. “I would never leave you,” she told him as if she could read his thoughts. “Never like this.”
Jason stared at her, lost in everything that she was. She was a goddess, built from the inexplicable, and she had just made him a promise – pulled from the depths of her cosmic soul and offered to him like a sacrifice.
And… she was standing before him naked.
With kindness, or perhaps indelible cruelty, she placed her hands on the edge of the bed and leaned over until her lips were just above his. He closed his eyes, fighting the urge to arch up, fighting the urge to steal a kiss.
“Would you like to touch me?” she asked softly, her words whispering across his mouth.
He lost the battle. With fierce speed, he rose up, captured her lips with his own, and drew from her a kiss that made his head spin. She weakened beside him; he noticed her arms quake and give out for a moment, and she was kissing him harder, giving in to the demand he was placing on her.
She tasted like slightly heated peppermint, sweet and soft and feminine. He opened her up, delving relentlessly and drinking her in.
After a moment, she moaned against his mouth, and he finally felt her hands press against his chest. The growl was back, more demanding than before.
But she pushed hard and broke the kiss, rising breathlessly above him.
“Release me, Chloe,” he warned, in so much needful pain now, madness pressed in around the edges of his thoughts.
Chloe peered deep into his eyes – then down the length of his body. In turn, his own eyes slid down the length of hers. Fuck, he thought. He was flushed with a terrible, agonizing fever. His body was bellowing at him.
“I don’t think so,” she told him, as if she were damning him to the worst sentence. “Not just yet.”
She turned away, offering him a view of her tight, round bottom, the curve of her spine, and the long, lean length of her legs.
“Chloe!”
She peeked at him over her shoulder, tossing back her hair as she smiled. “Nope.”
Then she moved to the foot of the bed once more, climbed up with her knee again, and crawled over him until she was hovering above him as she had before.
His hands were going numb from pulling so hard against his restraints. His eyes were locked on her like a heat seeking missile to the hottest flame in history. She caught his gaze – held it.
Her fingers found the top of his pants zipper.
With absolute brutality, Chloe slowly eased the zipper downward, popping it one single ridge at a time.
Something burst inside of Jason, cracking open and then exploding like a beast breaking through a glass cage. His power poured out of him, a tornado of pent-up emotion once again set free as he finally released himself from his own prison.
Chloe must have noticed the change – it would be hard not to. She stopped and looked up, freezing in place.
Jason felt the ropes giving away, felt his own magic struggle with hers and win, and went from helpless to in control in the white hot flash of a sanity-shattering second.
Chapter Thirty
Chloe knew the exact moment that she had taken him to his breaking point. The atmosphere in the room changed. A faint wind seemed to pick up out of nowhere. The fire in the hearth shifted into a host of black and blue flames that sparkled like magic dust and crackled like mad. She looked up to meet Jason’s gaze.
One heartbeat, one tiny, single pulse was all she had. It told her everything.
She straightened, sitting up just before the knotted ropes around his wrists slithered open and dropped to the floor. Chloe’s eyes widened as the ropes around his ankles did the same. With the slow, measured movements of a predator, Jason lowered his arms, braced them against the bed, and rose.
Chloe was frozen. She couldn’t move as he drew nearer. She couldn’t back away. Her breathing hitched, her skin prickled with hot flushed desire, and her nipples were so tight and hard, they ached. She so badly wanted him to take her, she had no words to express the desire.
But the look in Jason’s eyes was unrelenting. Unforgiving. He branded her with that gaze. It was a covenant.
A small, defiant part of her wanted to retreat, but she couldn’t.
She couldn’t because the Warlock King’s dark, hot magic was swirling around her, brushing against her skin, teasing her nerve endings – and holding her in place like the very ropes she had used on him.
“I warned you, Chloe,” he told her softly, intimately.
She held her breath as he came to his knees before her, the expanse of his broad chest tempting, the scent of his aftershave and soap making her mouth water, and the green fury in his eyes causing all strength to flee from her body.
“You like playing with fire, Stardust?” he asked, leaning in to whisper his own taunt against her lips as she had his.
She could hear her breath quivering, feel her body trembling.
She jumped when she felt his hand against her breast. She tried to pull back, but not only did he have her trapped with his magic, Jason’s other arm shot around her, his fingers delving into the hair at the back of her head to grasp it in a tight grip.
He pulled her against him, her naked flesh pressed to his half-clothed body. Then he gently but firmly tilted her head back, exposing the column of her throat and forcing her back to arch.
Her upper body became exposed to him again even as her hips pressed against his. The length of his incredible hardness teased through the material of his pants, nudgi
ng her flesh, promising both unimaginable pleasure and inescapable pain.
She let out a wanton sound, unable to stop herself. All she wanted was to feel him inside of her. She was open to him, her knees spread upon the mattress because she’d been straddling him when his magic held her in place. That magic brushed against her there, flooding her with lustful moisture and wringing her senses out until she could barely think straight.
He chuckled softly, a dangerous and delicious sound.
“Fire burns.”
He lowered his lips to her throat, kissing her with confusing tenderness. At the same time, he took her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing just hard enough to force a gasp from between her lips. As if that had been the signal, Jason’s deviant, wicked magic pressed against her mound, trickling up inside of her to tingle along her most sensitive areas, ripping a series of helpless sounds from her throat.
The magic wreaking havoc inside of her grew warmer and warmer, until it nearly burned.
Fire burns, she thought.
She wanted to writhe at the sensation; she wanted to demand that he satisfy her mounting, agonizing need. She’d already craved him – had already been nearly crazy with need for him long before he’d finally broken free from his bonds.
Now she was standing on the verge of some insanity precipice, and if he didn’t pull her back soon, she was going to jump.
“What do you want, Chloe?” he asked her, his lips breathing the question right beside her ear.
She tried to turn away, to defy him, but his grip on her hair prevented the slightest movement – and as punishment, he squeezed her nipple harder, twisting slightly to send a sharp arc of pain across her chest and down between her legs.
She cried out and bucked in his grip.
“Tell me what you want,” he demanded.
“You,” she admitted, inching ever closer to the edge.
“Beg me,” he commanded next.
Chloe thought of the ropes she’d bound him with, thought of the way she had so cruelly teased him, and realized she deserved this. But she denied him nonetheless and remained quiet.
The fingers abusing her tender nipple slid way, his hand grazing down her side, across her stomach, and lingering on her hip. She knew where it was going. She knew what he was going to do.
Oh gods, do it, she thought. Touch me. Take me!
“Beg me,” he commanded again. “Say it out loud, Chloe. Let me hear you speak my name and beg me to take you.”
“They were right,” she hissed as his fingers moved further down. “You really are evil in bed.”
He chuckled again, the sound so delicious it made her delirious. His fingers curved over the soft curls of her mound. Chloe gritted her teeth.
When he stopped just above her clitoris and pressed ever so slightly, she cried out in frustration.
“You have no idea,” he told her.
“Fine!” she finally exclaimed. “Take me!”
“Not good enough,” he said, laughing again, rubbing in her helplessness with a merciless vengeance. “Say my name, Chloe. Beg your king to make your need go away.”
Chloe swallowed hard, quaking in his grasp. She took a deep, shaky breath. “Jason… my king,” she said, meaning it with all her heart despite his cruelty. “Please take me. Please… make this need go away.”
Jason stilled for a moment above her, his finger lingering at her opening, his grip tight in her hair. And then he bent, placed a second gentle kiss upon her throat, and said, “That’s all I needed to hear.”
With dizzying speed, he released her hair, sliding his arm around her waist to turn with her on the bed. His other hand, he used to rip the remaining zipper open on his pants, freeing the erection that had both frightened and turned her on like a wanton harlot.
Chloe hit the mattress, her wrists immediately caught up in two strong grips. She opened her eyes to gaze up into that endless Oz that captivated her time and again and felt the searing heat of him at long last press against her plump, moist opening.
It burned.
Just as he’d warned it would.
She gasped, arching against him, at once wanting him inside of her and terrified of the same. He met her half way, pressing down upon her body and claiming her mouth with his own in a kiss that made her head spin.
Slowly, so slowly that she half moaned, half growled against his lips as he kissed her, Jason pressed into her opening, filling her up to the point of pain and branding her as if she were his belonging.
You are, he told her, speaking firmly into her mind. You are my queen.
She could not respond. She could barely think a conscious thought. Her body was a casing of nerve endings, each alive, each on fire, each yearning and stretching and pushing to some final culmination, like a phoenix being reborn.
Further and further, he invaded, deeper and deeper – and Chloe knew what it meant to be taken by a king when he settled in all the way, opening her up like she had never been opened before.
Mine, he told her again, deepening the kiss. He held her firmly down and pulled against her, easing out of her hot, tight, and wet warmth with wanton intent.
Chloe cried out, the sound swallowed up by Jason’s forceful kiss as he drove back into her, slightly harder than before. His grip on her wrists tightened and he broke the kiss to nip at her neck as he did it again, pitilessly withdrawing and driving back into her with increased force.
Chloe’s pleasured scream filled the master’s chamber. The fire in the hearth roared in tandem with their passion.
Jason rose above her, looked her in the eyes, and spread her arms wide, bracing himself. The look said it all. He established an undeniable dominance in that moment. And he delivered a warning.
She was about to get burned.
He’d been gentle with her before now. He’d been just firm enough to remind her of what he was capable. But she knew. She’d known all along. There was a reason she was as attracted to him as she always had been.
It was not the gentleman in Jason that she wanted right now.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, Jason’s eyes flashed. He smiled – just enough.
Then he pulled almost completely out of her before ramming his entire length back into her tightness with everything he had. His dark magic gripped her, pressing in on her clitoris to rip a kind of pain-filled bliss from her with exacting brutality.
Stars exploded in Chloe’s vision. Her scream echoed off the walls. An instant of orgasm whipped through her, barbed and hard and aching and magnificent.
But he gave her no time to recover from it or draw it out, instead pulling out of her and shoving back in with the same relentless strength and driving need as before. Another explosion dotted her vision, drawing a second scream from her throat.
My new favorite sound, his deep telepathic voice taunted as he withdrew a third time and drove in with untamed ferocity. New pain rippled through her, coupled with new, impossible pleasure. She was drifting on a cloud above some Machiavellian, Elysian plane.
Jason took her harder – he took her faster. He placed both of her wrists in one strong grip and she felt him torturing her tender breast, squeezing hard enough to hurt, brushing just softly enough to tease, pinching enough to make her bite her lip.
His mouth crashed down upon hers again, once more demanding that she open to him another way, his tongue delving deep, his magic coaxing her to the point of oblivion.
Again and again, he thrust into her deepest depths…
And then there it was, that moment when her feet were no longer on the precipice. She’d been shoved over and was falling. Wave after wave of cataclysmic climax fluxed through her system, setting off fireworks in her blood. The orgasm acted like a catalyst, and Chloe screamed at the tops of her lungs as her magic rose, rippled out of her, and poured out over her lover just as she came around him physically.
Jason threw back his head, his deep voice joining hers as it reverberated off the walls. His black magic melded wi
th hers, swirling around it, dancing with it like a lover, rising with it toward the ceiling in a column of perfect bonding.
The obsidian statue burst into a display of shimmering fragments that spanned outward, froze in place, and re-coalesced into a statue once more. The fire in the hearth exploded outward, roaring like a mighty beast, and then curled in on itself in a rainbow of colors and light. Lightning shattered the sky outside, splitting it open in rivulets of sizzling electricity.
Chloe’s body pulsed. Her spirit soared.
The different magics of the Warlock King and Queen embraced one another – and then slowly retreated, sinking back into their respective bodies, filling them once more with the powers of night and starlight.
Chloe opened her eyes. Jason lowered his head. Their gazes held.
They said nothing to each other. There was no need.
Without a word, Jason released Chloe’s wrists and lay down beside her, pulling her heated, glowing body against his.
With a tenderness no one would have thought possible of him, the king placed a single, loving kiss to her forehead and wrapped his arms around her.
Chapter Thirty-One
“They are called ‘ka,’” said Lalura.
She was breaking a shared silence in which she and Roman had been contemplating everything that had happened that night. Roman didn’t say anything, knowing she would elaborate.
“The copies,” she went on, “are the ‘ka.’ The ka is the darker part of the soul, you might say. The opposite of a conscience.”
“The doppelgangers you mean, then.”
Lalura nodded. “This is a bigger mess than we thought it was,” she admitted, lowering her teacup and wincing slightly. The wounds she’d sustained from her copy – or ka’s – spell casting still stung a little. They were healed, but Lalura was both old and powerful, which meant that the spells she’d cast on herself had been of the worst kind and also that her own ancient body would heal the least quickly.
Roman was worried about her. He was worried about them all. He released a slow, deep breath. “I know. It might behoove us to enlist young Katherine Dare’s help in training our kings and queens in a more military form of combat,” he suggested. They’d done well all in all, mainly due to the queens’ assistance, and had even managed to destroy two of the ka. But every extra tool utilized to sharpen whatever edge they had would help.