“Besides the fact that I want to wake up with your ass cradling my cock in the morning? Well, tonight I learned that you do a lot of stupid, reckless shit when no one is watching, so it’s now in my best interest to make sure I have my eye on you at all times.”
If Petra went any redder, she’d match her formal robes perfectly. When she spoke, it was through her teeth. “You can keep an eye on me just fine withoutsleeping next to me.”
“Nah, that’s an essential part of the process.” Silas toed off his boots and reached for the collar of his shirt. Pulling it over his head, he told her, “Besides, I wanna try it. Never slept a night with a woman. I might hate it. Who knows?”
Going by the way Petra made a gurgling noise and spun around, averting her eyes from his naked chest like she hadn’t sucked on his tongue earlier, he waspretty surehe’d like it. He was growing to like just about everything about Petra.
My little puzzle,he thought, grinning at the back of her head as he popped the brass button of his jeans.I’m going to take you apart to see how you work.
Once he’d crushed Vanderpoel’s head under his boot and presented his witch with whatever part of the man she preferred, he’d take great pleasure in unraveling Petra strand by strand, discovering how all the little contradictions of her interconnected.
Power-hungry but self-sacrificing. Loyal but alone. Powerful but powerless. An open book with so many pages missing.
“Put your nightie on, baby. The one that smells like me,” he ordered, just to get a rise out of her.
As he hoped, Petra’s head swiveled around to glare at him just in time to see him sliding his jeans and briefs down his thighs. His cock, pretty much constantly half-hard since he saw her for the first time, gave an enthusiastic twitch when her eyes dropped.
“Goodgods,”she hissed, marching over to her dresser to angrily yank out a different nightgown. “You keep that thing to yourself, Silas, or so help me Glory, I’ll burn it off.”
“Careful, little goddess, that’s not as much of a deterrent as you might think. Ilikeit when you get all hot on me.”
Pulling the loose waistband of his airy sleep pants over his cock was a little bit like torture. He was sure it’d only get worse as he burrowed in her sheets, imprinting his scent not only on her bedding, but her skin as well.
Silas padded over to her and bent to murmur in her ear. “I bet when your cunt is wrapped around me, it’ll feel like you’re burning me alive.”
He dodged the wadded up socks she threw at his head by inches. She stormed around him, nightgown in hand, and verynearly slammed the door to the bathroom before apparently thinking better of it.
The way she flicked the lock into place was awfully cute, though.
Silas’s grin cramped his cheeks as he turned off the glaring overhead light and moved back to the bed to wait for her. It was hardly big enough for him, but he’d slept in worse positions than curled on his side so his feet didn’t hang off the edge. Certainly his accommodations during his little trip hadn’t been half as comfortable as Petra’s bed.
He’d been in a bad mood during his time away from her. It was soured further by the discovery of so very little. The demon part of him, animalistic and hungry, took every unanswered question as a challenge to his claim. The man part of him, on the other hand, was both delighted by her mystery and increasingly vexed by it.
Silas thought he knew Petra. She was a fixed quantity in his mind: a beautiful hypocrite caught in a web of Temple intrigue and an easy mark to exploit. The fact that he wanted to fuck her was just a happy bonus to a mildly entertaining diversion from his usual pursuits.
He’d expected their bargain to be a simple and a relatively tidy affair once he’d gotten what he wanted. With Petra tied to him and the first half of his promise to Tal fulfilled, he could then use her dependence on him to get access to the m-generator.
And then their business would be done. She could have her lofty seat in St. Emaine’s and he wouldn’t think twice about abandoning her, bond or no bond, because there were no real ties between them save magic and lust.
That was before.Silas slid his hand beneath the pillow on his side, checking to make sure his gun was safely tucked out of her reach.
Now he understood that he’d vastly underestimated Petra, and he wouldn’t put it past her to try and shoot him in the night if he pissed her off too much. Silas kind of hoped she’d try it.
Listening to the rustle of fabric and the running faucet in the bathroom, he made himself comfortable under the sheets and immediately stifled a groan of pleasure at the waft of rich scent that enveloped him.
That scent was his new favorite thing.Well,he allowed, imagining he could still taste her on his lips,maybe not the only new favorite.
A deep, sensual craving tightened the muscles of his abdomen. That craving was a solid wall in the face of his previous plans to leave her to her own devices as soon as their business was done.
Silas frowned at the canopy of the bed. Even if he got everything he wanted — a foregone conclusion — he balked at the idea of letting the puzzle of Petra lay half-finished, forgotten.
He needed to know what filled those blank fifteen years before she became an initiate. He needed to know why she’d had a secret phone under a pseudonym and a PO box under another. He needed to know who Maximilian fucking Dooraker really was and why she’d put herself at such risk simply to uncover the truth of something she couldn’t change.
Silas blinked into the darkness.
I need to understand her.
It wasn’t a want. It wasn’t a passing fancy. It wasn’t even a fixation, like the many, many times he’d lost himself in sigilwork or hunched over a sea of wires, soldering gun in hand.
