Except it changed the shape of the air.
Stamped something on my soul I knew no one else could touch. Dylan saw the ugly, sharp twisted pieces of me and still called me beautiful. He saw the monster in me that night and saved me anyway. Dylan was risking his neck, his patch to give me this moment and I knew it meant everything to me.
He pulled back immediately, his forehead almost touching mine.
“I just had to once,” he muttered. “No one’s here but ghosts watching.”
My breath caught. “Then at least do it properly.” Before he could register my words—I pulled his head back down, on tiptoes—I crushed my mouth to his. Taking what I wanted. What I needed… in that respect Mandy’s hot blood and mine were the same.
He growled my name before the wind carried it away across the night sky and up into the stars. I prayed they would grant me this wish—a love like the way Tarak and Edge loved my mother once—I wanted a man to love me in that terrifying beautiful crazy way.
He groaned, kissing me back with all the pent up passion he’d been hiding. He pilled me closer. Hands on my hips… something hot and urgent took hold and his mouth slid to my neck, my ear while he rasped against my skin, “crazy beautiful... I’d die to have you just once…” then his tongue swept back into m mouth for the final curtain call. Once last passionate match on the fire before he pulled back, breathing hard. “We can’t ever…”
“I know. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you or this.” My hand came up to rest against his heavily beating heart.
“We need to go. It’ll. be midnight soon. Cal will check he does every night.”
The horse ride back was torture. Dylan couldn’t keep his hands or lips off me. Stealing the last seconds we could before midnight and sunrise. I hissed as his finger crept under m shirt over my bruised rib,to cup an aching breast. “Anyone ever touch you here?”
I groaned. “Edge would kill them.”
He rolled a nipple between two fingers. I answered by scooting my behind back on his lap. This time he was the one to hiss. “Careful, Beautiful.”
“I’m sick of being careful, didn’t you get that memo?”
He stopped the horse earlier than necessary dismounted then reached for me. Against an old tree trunk I found my self kissed, worshipped shirt up, his head bent down to suckle each nipple under moonlight. The horse nickered in approval as my head fell back.
Everything felt too good.
It was the first time a man touched me.
His hands on my skin were fireworks nothing like when I had touched myself on so many lonely desert nights.
“Dylan, please.”
“Please, what Beautiful?”
“I need…”
“I know what you need. A good spanking and some time and space to grow up. But damn it if I can wait and let some other guy be the first when it’ll be me in the end anyway.”
“My mother would have approved of you,” I whispered, angry and burning for something I knew we’d never finish. Not here. Not tonight.
His eyes opened as he backed away from my chest. My shirt falling, the fabric falling across my swollen breasts. Something moved through them so fast I almost missed it.
Hunger.
Grief.
Fear.
Then he gave me that crooked, beautiful, doomed little smile.
“Then she had amazing taste.”
I should have stepped back.
I didn’t.
