Total pages in book: 401
Estimated words: 390373 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1952(@200wpm)___ 1561(@250wpm)___ 1301(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 390373 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1952(@200wpm)___ 1561(@250wpm)___ 1301(@300wpm)
Letting go of her leg, I pulled her hand from between her thighs and brought her glistening finger to my mouth, sucking the sweetness from her skin as she continued to come.
“Honeydew,” I groaned, pinning her hand to the bed as I rolled her beneath me.
I drove into her, the force of my thrusts pushing her deeper into the mattress. The realm fell away. All I was focused on, all I could feel or think about, was her. The hand I held to the mattress curled, her fingers digging into the sheet as my release powered down my spine. Shadows tinged in crimson rolled through the skin stretched taut across my knuckles as I spilled myself deep inside her.
My hips were still rocking, my cock still spasming as I dropped my head to the pillow beside hers. The release felt endless, and by the time my hips finally stilled, and my breathing slowed, my awareness of our surroundings returned.
The air in the Solar had shifted. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was. It was almost like a whisper of…awareness against my skin.
Poppy stiffened beneath me.
Then, all at once, a jolt of undeniable awareness ran up my spine.
Someone was in the chamber, and I had been too damn distracted to notice. Both of us had been. But I knew what happened when I got distracted.
The memory sent a rush of icy rage through me, stroking a deep, primitive instinct. A hum filled my ears and hit my skin, my blood, and then my bones. It was the same ancient, powerful instinct I’d felt when I saw that Revenant touching her. A veil of shadowy crimson fell over my eyes.
I was moving before I even thought about it, letting the Primal essence take hold.
CHAPTER 33
POPPY
The sudden bang of the door crashing was like a clap of thunder as Casteel’s upper body whipped around.
He shifted to the side, shielding as much of me as possible. Well, he was doing the best he could since my leg was still curled around his waist, above his ass—his bare ass.
Primal essence poured out of him, drenching the air and stirring the eather inside me as his flesh rapidly cooled. And it was every part of him, including his thick length, that was still very much inside me. The contrast of heat and coolness sent a very inappropriate dart of pleasure through me.
“Put the fangs away,” came Reaver’s familiar dry, gravelly voice. My eyes went even wider.
A wholly different kind of heat infused my skin then. While he’d been nude in my presence more times than I cared to recount, I wasn’t just naked. We were naked. And Casteel’s cock was now prodding my thigh, still—
Okay, I didn’t need to think about that. Instead, I should have been wondering if it was possible to will myself into the bed.
Casteel let out a low, guttural snarl of warning that raised the tiny hairs on my arms. The sound snapped me from my haze of desire. I’d only heard him make a noise like that twice before. Once when he was on the verge of bloodlust and then again when he was lost to the madness of hunger.
But this sound?
It was different.
The deep growl continued, rumbling from Casteel as his fury gathered, cold and acidic, in the back of my throat. It conjured up images of smoke and ice. I’d heard that in my voice a few times—the ancient, unfettered power—but I’d never heard it in his before.
I swallowed, my throat dry. “Reaver? You need to leave.”
“Can’t do that.”
Casteel’s flesh hardened under my palm, feeling like cold granite as deep-gray shadows appeared, gliding along the flesh of his back and over his shoulder, widening as some of them disappeared under my hand. Shadows streaked with faint strands of crimson began to swell with the eather in me, stoking my primal instinct. It warned of a very real threat to one’s life.
Namely, Reaver’s.
Crimson-streaked black shadows continued to spread, and I felt the eather gathering in Casteel. The shadows slipped into the air around him—no, not shadows. Primal mist seeped from him, churning and thickening as it rolled across the rumpled blankets. My heart lurched as my wide gaze swung to his profile. Seeds of panic started to take root in my chest as those swirling tendrils of midnight crested the hard line of his jaw.
Instinct screamed that he no longer saw the draken as a friend or even a reluctant ally who’d once helped free him—just like when we’d been in New Haven, and he’d reacted this way to Kieran. He saw him as a threat.
To me.
And while Casteel normally wouldn’t respond all that well to being interrupted during such an intimate embrace, this wasn’t a normal reaction for him. It was the eather—the darker, deadlier energy I sensed when he drank from me.