My shadow daddy bites down on the curve of my shoulder.Pain sparks, sharp and bright, mingling with the pleasure spiraling to a breaking point.
“Yours!”I scream, desperate for release.“Yours, damn you!”
A ragged sound tears from him, and his pace becomes frantic, like he’s trying to fuck me with a force that threatens to break the door or break me.
White light explodes behind my eyes.The coil snaps.A second orgasm detonates, and I convulse around him, milking his fiery length.A ragged scream tears loose.
I throw my head back, lost in the dark storm he rages inside me.The world narrows to the slam of our bodies, the wet, rhythmic sound of him annihilating me.
His body locks as he buries himself to the root.A guttural roar tears from him as he pulses inside me, filling me even more with his darkness.
He pulls out, and the fire in his eyes is banked to embers again.His shadows brush a strand of sweat-damp hair from my forehead and trace the fresh bite mark on my shoulder.
“Sera,” he murmurs.
Slowly, sensation returns.A deep, profound ache pulses between my legs, my skin raw and marked.My clothes lay in tatters on the floor.
Outside, muffled by the thick door and the haze of sex, a car horn blares.The real world crashes back, cold and jarring.
My shadow daddy flinches at the sound, his eyes hardening instantly back into shards of obsidian.The fragile moment shatters.He sets me down carefully, and my legs tremble, barely holding me.
He steps back and blends with the house’s shadows.Even his face is obscured.Distance slams down between us, thick with unspoken questions about what got into him and the cloying scent of blood and sex.
“Mind telling me what that was all about?”I demand.
The fury that drove him has bled out, leaving a strange, heavy stillness.
At his silence, I bend to retrieve my ruined clothes.The bite throbs.Inside, I feel scraped hollow and claimed, irrevocably marked.His darkness lingers under my skin, a heavy, possessive stain.
Iamhis.I’m also pissed at him.Two things can be true at once.
The horn blares again, closer and louder this time.A screech of tires and brakes, a door slams, and seconds later, a single, heavy knock echoes through the silent house.
James.And I can practically feel his urgency coming from the other side.
Chapter 3
Sera
Ithrowonwhat’sleft of my clothes and reach for the doorknob.Behind me, my shadow daddy materializes closer, a suffocating presence at my back.His shadows ghost over my hip protectively, like a warning.
Don’t.
The word echoes within my skull, but I twist the knob anyway.
James fills the doorway like a storm front.His smile is gone.What’s left is something carved from granite and fury, all hard edges and white-knuckled fists.
His eyes—those usually bright, unhinged, laughing eyes—are glacial.They rake over me in a single, devastating sweep, taking inventory of the torn shirt barely clinging to my shoulders.The fresh bite mark purpling on my neck.My swollen lips.The smell of sex clinging to my skin like perfume.
His jaw clenches so hard I hear his teeth grind.
“Prayer.”His voice sounds like gravel in his throat.Like he’s swallowing glass to keep from saying something worse.“Christ, hen.”
Cold spills down my spine.My shadow daddy pushes closer behind me, the temperature dropping again, a growl crawling over the baseboards.
“What?”I say.
“I saw something in your car,” James says.
