“Wanna show me how much?”
She knows just how to ask. She doesn’t even have to try.
He suppressed a chuckle, his smoky eyes glinting at her as he nodded and shifted, cradling her underneath him this time. “I’d love to.”
Chapter Four
Penny’s eyes fluttered shut as she felt him slipping on top of her. Not inside, not yet, but soon. “You want this, lover?” His voice was a distraction in the blissful break from the heat.
“Mmm,” her voice was a moan, her hips insistently moving with his.
“Look at me?” Brax knew he was ruining the moment. All the moments were already tainted by the past, he just wanted to make something good, something new—and he couldn’t let go.
Green eyes looked up at him, not shy, not seductive, simply steady. “You’re hard to miss. You’re all I want to look at. I could look at you for days...” Penny ran her hands possessively over the body on top of hers. Long, lean, white muscles, twists of spine, angles and planes of shoulders and jaw, tight legs, tight arms, holding himself above her.
I thought I was above him, the normal human beside a demon in human form. He was something that shouldn’t exist, ought to be exterminated. Now he’s above me. I looked down on him. And now... oops.
He’s the one helping me. Saving me from being wiped out. He won’t die, just suffer. I’m the one who could—
Double oops. He was talking to her, looking at her with such concern, stroking back her damp hair and kissing her flushed forehead gently, peering into her eyes.
“Huh?”
“I said, ‘I know all the things we said, but this is the last exit, baby.’ You do this, and you’re not going back. Do you wanna get off this ride? Go back?”
Back to a place where I hate him, and he looks at me, and I catch him sometimes, and I see...something. And that makes me hate him more, because I know what it is. And I’m not supposed to want it. Not supposed to let monsters in.
“Back to where I hate you?” Penny whispered.
“Maybe. Yeah, I guess. That’s better than both of us hating both of us, which is what’s likely to happen, cute truces and signed papers or not.”
“No. I wanna go forward. New place. Away from all the bad and the fire and the monsters. Take me someplace new. Vacation time.”
“I think the witch with the twitch upstairs had that in mind, and you see how that went.”
Penny pouted at him.
“I like the tropics,” he admitted. “Moonlight in the heat, the waves... But I don’t need it if I have you, Pen. The sun is in your smile, the heat you give me...”
“Well... I wouldn’t mind going someplace cooler. I like the climate up here—just not everyone thinking I’m nuts because they can’t see what I see.”
“We can see things together now,” he whispered, his larger body over top of hers. “I’m new in this part of the world. You can show me around. I can take you down South—anywhere but New Orleans, that is, and show you the sights.”
“By moonlight. And I could show you places by moonlight, I guess. Maybe... Maybe with your own personal monster, the other monsters behave?”
