Something else, then. How she managed to teleport, perhaps.
Come over afterward and we’ll run some tests.
Every fiber of her body urged her on. Yes, go see him.Yes, yes, yes.
She jumped to her feet and walked—ran—back home.
No.
She lookedup from her carefully arranged brewing ingredients to find him standing at the threshold, grasping the doorway with both hands as if to hold himself back.
“Are you really here?” he said, an urgency to the question that she could feel in every inch of her body. “Are we awake?”
She considered this as best she could with her heartbeat pulsing insistently in her ears, neck, thighs. “I—I don’t remember walking here.”
He closed the distance between them in three strides and caught her in a bruising kiss. She could feel nothing but him, his jaw warm under her fingers, hips flush against hers. Could smell nothing but the hint of cinnamon and rum in his aftershave. Could taste on his tongue what he’d last eaten, something both bitter and sweet.
He pulled back the barest amount, just enough to choke out, “I want you.” A desperate laugh escaped his throat. “No, that doesn’tbeginto cover it. I’m consumed by thoughts of you, Beatrix Harper—I’m being burned alive from the inside out. Please tell me you feel halfso much for me.”
She attacked the buttons on his shirt. “Every bit as much. This time, don’t stop.”
They made it up the stairs somehow, her lips on his neck, his hands pulling the pins from her hair. His room was hardly anything but a bed, and as he lifted her onto it, her coat, dress, corset, shift and shoes disappeared without a trace. She tried visualizing him withouthisclothes and got the same effect—better than magic.
He’d left her stockings and underwear. But before she could imagine them blissfully gone, too, he put his lips to her ear, murmuring, “Wait.” It wasn’t at all the sort ofwaithe’d meant the night before. This was a promise. A beguilement.
He kneeled at her feet, unhooked her garters and rolled the stockings down one at a time. Slow, deliberate. Agonizing.
“Omnimancer,please?—”
“Peter. Say it.”
“Peter,” she gasped as he kissed her just above the ankle, skin against skin.
“Again.”
“Peter.” It felt like a spell, powerful and momentous.“Peter.”
He kissed her calf, her knee and up her inner thigh until she was nearly crying in frustration. When he pressed his lips to the sole bit of fabric still covering her, her hips jerked of their own volition. Then he vanished the underwear and?—
Oh God!
The sensation, the utter shock of his tongue on her, sent her careening over the edge with a scream.
He turned her so she was fully on the bed, her head on his pillow, her chest heaving, and angled himself over her.Yes, more, now. But he hesitated.
Was he afraid of hurting her? “I’m not a virgin” tumbled from her mouth before she could stop it. The words hung in the air, horribly.
“Good,” he said. “But I am.”
She could hardly believe it. The man was continually surprising her. “Well—here, allow me.”
She pressed herself onto him, carefully, for it had been a very long time. Wrapping her arms around him, she set a rhythm.
He grasped her hips. “Slowly—slowly, or it’ll be over.”
She hooked her legs behind him to push him in farther. He sucked in a breath. “Just that much faster we can do it again,” she murmured, increasing the pace.
He didn’t protest a second time. Afterward, flushed and breathless, he rolled them both over so her head rested on his arm.
