The next moment, she felt his essence, expanding around her, taking up the air she so sorely needed.
“Are you all right?” he asked softly. His dark, low accent was back, and it didn’t sound like he was coming through the speakers. Still, it didn’t sound like he was quite in the room, either.
Even so, his obvious concern threw her off balance. “Nice, Jonah. Was that your take on the female version of blue balls? Because I don’t like that game so much.”
“I am sorry, Dawn. I…I didn’t mean to get so out of hand.”
Her lust was evening out to a slow rhythm, no less stimulating but definitely less frenzied.
She slid down the wall, resting on the floor before her legs gave out. “What happened?”
“I lost control. This time.”
Her brain finally grasped all his foreign allure again; his tone brushed over her with the same rough strokes that always escalated her desire.
Back in familiar territory, she relaxed, allowing her head to rest against the wall, her neck exposed. She ran a hand over her throat, her beating jugular. Tempting him, she played dirty so he would consider telling her more.
Again, she thought back to that one sexual battle they’d had after she’d found out that The Voice had used Frank as bait. She’d been enraged, tearing around the house to find him. Then he’d come to her, offering scant answers but somehow managing to get her back on his side—as much as possible anyway.
Inevitably, they’d fallen into their usual pattern, raw and starved pseudo-sex, leading up to the moment she’d given him permission to enter her. And she never failed to give it: he supplied her with such a high that she didn’t mind when he used her lust to avoid answering her questions.
Maybe that’s why he kept doing it.
“I went too long without sustenance.” Why did he sound so different…sad? “That must be what got to me.”
Sustenance, she thought. What kept him going? Sex?
When he hushed around her, his presence fluttering the strands of her wig, Dawn realized that sustenance was just a double entendre for what he really wanted right now.
Her.
She started to quiver, shaken by her need for him. “You looking for permission?”
In answer, a caress of air skimmed her earlobe, as if marking where her earring—a sign of the old Dawn—used to be. The pressure of his essence was a disarming sigh telling her how much he needed her, too.
“Why is it always me?” she asked. “Why not Breisi? Or—”
“I need you more than anything.”
His admission made her heart clench just as ferociously as the rest of her body. She didn’t like how that made her feel: vulnerable, open to attack.
“Why?” she asked, being difficult, defensive.
His essence stroked and memorized her face, making her feel beautiful. She closed her eyes, taking it in, holding on to it before she had to get back to reality.
“When I’m in you, I’m fortified,” he said. “You surround me in comfort and strength.” He brushed down her body then back up in one, long, endlessly lulling drag. It was almost as if there was something else going on with him though—something so uncharacteristically emotional she couldn’t possibly get a bead on it. “You are the only true safety I’ve known in…years.”
An anchor, she thought. Just like Breisi and Frank.
“In other words,” she said, unwilling to roam into this new territory without at least some armor, “you’re using me.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I use you, too.”
It was true, she realized. She’d gone from one-night stands to an even more dangerous form of supposed intimacy with The Voice, an entity she couldn’t even see. But maybe that’s how she wanted the bedroom lies to go: invisible, easy, and addictive. He was so intoxicating because he always made her believe she was one of a kind, more spellbinding than Eva. The fact that he had to ask permission to enter gave her a power unlike any other. She controlled her intake.
He was combing over her wig now, pace melancholy. “This gives you the appearance of a Russian Cold War spy. And these clothes…” He tugged at the long white blouse and Gypsy skirt. “A brilliant disguise.”
“Not as brilliant as yours.”
“Yes.” He seemed to sigh. “You’re right.”
She’d slid farther down to the ground, unbuttoning her blouse, bending and parting her legs and allowing her skirt to rustle down to her hips. He skimmed her inner thighs and she reached down to touch herself, to assuage the buzz of his presence.
“Why don’t you come on and make yourself feel better,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you today, but—”
“There it is again. The ‘using’ reference.”