Sawyer didn’t need to be told twice to have sex. Sawyer was sex. Temptation in perfect form.
He slid to his knees, his mouth, his hands caressing me as he went. His tongue circled my navel; his teeth scraped my hip. He pressed his thumb to the throbbing vein in my thigh, then he lowered his head, and his hair cascaded over my knee as he put his mouth to that vein and suckled.
I thought I might fall, but his palms held me firmly by the backs of my legs, the tips of his index fingers just brushing the swell of my rear, sliding across the sensitive skin below.
I steadied myself with a hand on his shoulder, the other cupping his head, urging him on. Who could have ever imagined that the press of lips, the spike of teeth, the laving of a tongue against the femoral artery could nearly make me come?
He inched upward, but I slid down. I wanted to kiss him again, to make this last. He’d be gone when we were done, and after tomorrow who knew if I’d ever see him again. The last ghost I’d raised had told me what I needed to know then taken the express train to eternity.
I both wanted that for Sawyer and feared it. He deserved peace; despite Jimmy’s words, he deserved heaven. But once Sawyer went, he’d be lost to me. I doubted he’d get a weekend pass for a dream booty call.
We knelt face-to-face, so close in height our bodies aligned perfectly. His erection caressed the darker curls between my thighs. The mountain lion on his chest seemed to purr when my breasts brushed against it. Only a whisper apart, breath mingling, hands at our sides, our eyes stared intently into each other’s.
I licked my lips, and my tongue caught the edge of his. A flame seemed to flare at the center of his eerie gray gaze, and he lifted one hand, clasped my neck, then crushed our mouths together.
My heart gave a single thud then began to race. Sawyer tensed, jerked back. His eyes flared first yellow, then orange, then the pupil at the center widened into the silhouette of a great bird in flight. For just an instant his face flickered—man, bird, man, bird.
Hissing, he yanked his palm away, shaking it as if he’d been burned, though I could see no evidence of it. When he lifted his eyes, they’d returned to their normal light gray.
“The shifting works both ways,” I murmured.
Not only could I touch one of his tattoos and become the animal beneath, it appeared he could touch the phoenix on my neck and become one, too. That would have been an intriguing development if he weren’t dead.
I stared into Sawyer’s face; he stared into mine.
“Whatever,” I said, and kissed him again.
He laughed, the vibration causing a shimmer to slide all the way from my lips to my toes.
We kissed for a long time. He could make me forget the now. Hell, he could make me forget my name. Too bad he couldn’t make me forget the past; too bad he couldn’t scourge it from my brain forever.
His mouth trailed across my neck to my breasts. Sawyer might be part beast, but he was all man. As lovely as kissing was, eventually he moved on.
I cupped his chin, lifted his face, smiled at his confusion. “Lie back.”
A shove in the middle of his chest, a tiny flare of light and a slight shimmy of my form when I touched his mountain lion, then he tumbled onto the floor.
I wanted to walk my lips over his skin, rub my cheek against his flesh and memorize the texture, imprint the scent, though I knew that for the rest of my life when I smelled rain on the trees I’d smell him.
Closing my eyes I traced my mouth across his fluttering eyelids, the fine blade of his nose, the spike of his cheekbones and chin. The curve of his neck tasted like the first blade of grass in spring—sweet and tart, green and earthy. When I kissed his biceps, his wolf howled in my head—agony, ecstasy, freedom and pain.
“Hush,” I murmured against his skin, then licked the tattoo from the tip of the wolf’s tilted snout to the base of his curling tail.
The rumble of Sawyer’s growl drew my lips to his chest. I avoided the lion in the center, concentrating on the flat, brown disks of his nipples. His nipples were softer, darker than the rest, and they tasted softer and darker, too. Like fine Belgian chocolate after a long stretch of generic candy bars.
I teased them until the tips had tightened to pebbled peaks then taunted them with my teeth. His fingers clenched in my hair, cupping my head, showing me that he wanted me to go on and on.
I ran my tongue down the ridge of his ribs, laid my cheek against the plane of his stomach. Felt his breath go in and out, lifting and lowering me, like the rock of the sea or the sway of the wind.