I only cared about Silas’s hands on my bare skin.
He set me down only so he could use those big hands to tug at the tie on my shirt, unravel it, yank it off over my head. My shirt hit the floor, followed by his…then my hands were on him, my breasts pressed to his chest, nipples grazing his dark chest hair. I could make out the shape of him in the dim light through the window, the lines of muscle, and the way his eyes roamed over me…
“God, June,” he murmured, like it physically hurt him to say my name. “You’re…”
He didn’t finish.
His lips found my collarbone, then moved lower—his mouth closing over my nipple while one of his hands palmed my other breast. I was already writhing, helplessly thrusting my hips when he laid me down on the bed, moving to my jeans. It was like he wanted to taste every inch of me, feel me, touch me?—
My head snapped to the side at the sound of something…wrong.
“What the hell was that?” I whispered.
Silas froze. “You okay?”
I sat up, looking around. “Can you turn on the light? I just…it sounds like there’s something in here.”
I couldn’t describe it; it was like…a whisper against the sheets. Damn it—we’d probably stirred up some mice or something. What a mood killer.
Silas pushed off the bed, bare feet hitting the creaky floorboards, and moved toward the wall. He flicked on the lamp by the dresser with a low click—and in that breath of a second, everything changed.
Because there, coiled at the foot of the bed where I’d just been lying, was a rattlesnake.
The world narrowed.
I didn’t scream.
Didn’t move.
Couldn’t.
My breath locked in my chest, not out of fear…no, not entirely. It was more like some sacred, awful recognition.
A serpent in the bed. A woman naked beneath it. A moment of want turned straight into a warning.
The snake was watching me, its head lifted, its tongue flicking. And for one insane heartbeat, I thought:God sent it.
“June,” Silas said, his voice sharp and full of fear. “Don’t move. Please don’t move, I’m gonna?—”
I didn’t hear what he had planned—because the snake struck.
Pain bloomed like fire on my left wrist, biting right above where I normally wore a wooden rosary. My body jerked, a violent shudder seizing my limbs as I cried out. My hand flew to the wound. Blood pulsed hot through my fingers.
Silas lunged. He hit the snake with something—maybe the lamp, maybe one of the heavy books on the nightstand. I couldn’t tell—I was too busy trying to breathe, trying to stay upright.
Trying to comprehend that I was both burning alive and beingsanctified.
Silas shouted my name.
Somewhere in the blur of sound and heat and vertigo, Ifelt his hands on me—strong and shaking, one at the small of my back, the other trying to get a look at the wound. I think I said his name, too. Maybe more than once. Maybe it was the only thing I could remember.
“Oh fuck—fuck,baby, it got you?—”
His voice was hoarse, disjointed in a way I didn’t know he could be. He’d never called me baby before. It was strange, new…
…a sign of panic.
I couldn’t answer him. I could barely see. My skin was hot, my blood thundering in my ears. My wrist burned like it had been branded. My chest ached from the effort of trying to draw in breath that wouldn’t come.
