Total pages in book: 16
Estimated words: 13969 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 70(@200wpm)___ 56(@250wpm)___ 47(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 13969 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 70(@200wpm)___ 56(@250wpm)___ 47(@300wpm)
They walked side by side deep into the night, and then she began shivering, and he offered his arm and then his coat, and she spent a perfect couple of hours wrapped in that magical woodsy smell of him, pushing away the knowledge of how devastated she was going to be when he inevitably left her at the door.
They talked about everything on the walk. Her childhood, her studies, the car accident she’d been in two years before. Her favorite foods and films and books. His life, which had stretched hundreds of years; the daily reality of it was hard for her to fathom, the immensity of what he’d seen, what he’d witnessed. His current circumstances seemed to her both wonderful and sad—he could afford any luxury but never cared about any of it, unable to share it with anyone.
But the closer they got to her building and the more she learned about this creature she suspected she’d already fallen deeply in love with, the more she wondered whether she’d been wrong about him, whether when he left her at the door, he might very gently close his hands around her neck, quickly and mercifully snuffing everything into darkness. And somehow, Cat couldn’t find it in her to push away from him, to attempt to run. Something rooted inside her told her he wouldn’t kill her.
That he couldn’t.
Brigan kept breaking his own rules, but none of it seemed to matter.
It wasn’t possible for him to fall in love, he knew that, but scraping back in time, he recollected it might have felt a bit like this. The desire to walk aimlessly through the night until the light of sunrise shimmered at the edge of the East River. The tentative progress in contact: from his jacket around her shoulders to his hand closing around hers, and then his arm, bringing her body close until it was pressed all along his.
And when they reached her place at last—a nondescript East Village building they’d passed at least five times already—she slowed and turned to him.
“I guess I can’t delay it any longer,” she said.
He smiled. “As you wish.”
Catalina tilted her face up to him, exposing the long, pale length of her neck. “Do whatever you plan to do. Just know, this has been the most wonderful night of my life.”
He imagined lifting his hands, wrapping them around the thin, vulnerable column of her throat, and he couldn’t, not in a million years.
So Brigan bent, resting his lips on her pulse, feeling the life thrumming there, coveting it so deeply it made phantom pain slice through his torso.
Catalina lowered her chin, opportunistically capturing his mouth in a kiss, and he couldn’t help himself, he groaned, melting into it, calculating whether the pleasure of one night, one week, one lifetime with her was worth the pain of inevitable loss, and he knew he couldn’t bear it.
She sent her hands up his back, and he bent to taste her, those lips, that soft, teasing tongue, to suck and lick and indulge in this final taste, but as they moved together, the contact deepening into something lush and promising, Brigan became aware of the path of her touch, diverging from the norm. Lovers’ hands always passed hungrily from his backside to his shoulders or the same path in reverse, groping and possessive and entitled, but invariably their fingers would pass, unfeeling, over the site of eruption, the obstacle of powerful muscle and bone and feather extending from his back.
Brigan stilled now as Catalina’s tentative caresses circled the wide base of his left wing where it joined his taut back muscles and traveled up over the broad arc of it, gently, seductively, exploring the enormous wind-roughened curve all the way down to the erotic, sensitive, feather-soft tip.
He gasped, electrified, his entire body gone rigid.
She pulled back to take in his expression, her wonder immediately crashing into remorse. “I’m sorry! I should have asked. I just didn’t know if they were real.”
Thunderstruck, mute, he stared down at her and simply nodded, for all around him the world began to melt into color and vibration and sound; her face, which had been beautiful to him from the moment he saw her, was now something else altogether, still beautiful but now irresistible; dear to him in a way that held her tenderly at the very center of each cell in his body. His life, his love, his soul stood before him.
Beneath his sternum, Brigan’s heart took a gigantic, thrashing lurch.
Heat spiraled down his torso, extending into each limb, pulsing hot into each finger. He sucked a deep breath of icy air into his lungs, reveling in the contrast of warmth inside, cold outside.
“If I’d given you another, what was your final question going to be?” he asked her, his voice hoarse with emotion.