Kinked (Elder Races, #6)

“What’s an hour?” He fingered a strand of her soft hair.

“I want to renegotiate our bargain, to be consummated at some future date when neither one has had the shit kicked out of us.” A thread of humor laced her words. “Unless that happens for purely recreational purposes, of course.”

He paused to listen inwardly to his own reaction. The loudest part was relief and respect. After admitting to how devastated she was, she had not only mustered humor and genuine emotion, but now she had taken the first step to making plans beyond taking revenge on the witch.

Underneath all of those reactions though, ran a bloodred pulse of hunger, coursing in a subterranean river through his arteries and filling him with greed.

An hour was an eyeblink, a mere moment in time. He had squandered more time than that when deciding where he wanted to go for dinner on a boring day. An hour was woefully inadequate considering all the things he wanted to do to her, and with her.

Considering all the things that she would do to him. Somehow he had gone from enduring that thought to wondering.

And wanting.

He said, “No hour. A night, from dusk to dawn. You get one, and I get one. No stopwatches, no alarms going off, no hourglasses.” The wild part of him ran harder, and his voice deepened. “No rules.”

A shudder ran through her, and the feel of it thrilled him. “You would do that, give up total control for that long.”

“I totally would do that, if you would.” He put his mouth over hers to feel her warm, moist breath. “Do you dare?”

She started to laugh almost silently. The uneven puffs of air against his lips were like bubbles of champagne. He breathed them down and felt them enter his bloodstream, coursing with his greed. She told him, “You know asking a harpy if she dares to do something is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

“I had hoped,” he admitted.

Even as he said the last word, she spoke over him. “Yes.”

Triumph roared through him, and with it came an epiphany.

This thing with Aryal wasn’t aberrant. Those things in his nature that she showed him weren’t aberrant. They were a part of him that he didn’t know existed until Aryal brought a light to shine on them. This wasn’t sexual tourism. It was sexual discovery.

He barely heard over his internal realization what she said next. “You know other people—any other people—would think we were crazy.”

He understood exactly what she meant. Hell, they didn’t even do BDSM in any straightforward fashion, and they certainly didn’t follow the norm or any of the suggested guidelines. He didn’t think there were any subculture groups who would approve of the rampant disregard either he or Aryal gave for safety checks.

He didn’t want a safe word, and she didn’t ask for one. They were both dominant, and he knew for a fact he wouldn’t be a switch—someone who switched the dominant role with the submissive role—for anybody else but her. And he was almost certain she wouldn’t either.

She quieted that internal whip that drove him because she became the whip, her soul as sharp as a knife.

He could cut himself on her, wrap her in his arms and be her buffer. Heal her from herself, bruise himself on her.

Let her heal him. Let her be his buffer.

They were so unapologetic, so kinked.

He said, “We’re perfect.”





SEVENTEEN


After he spoke, they fell silent, as if they had gone more than far enough for one conversation. There were implications everywhere in what had just happened, and Aryal didn’t want to consider any of them, nor did she want to decipher any of the unfamiliar emotions that rioted inside of her. That crowd of strangers, yelling in an incomprehensible language, was back in her head.

Except one of those strangers was perfectly understandable, as it held up a giant spongy finger that pointed to a placard that said, “Total fucking win-win.”

She considered sinking back into despair, because at least she understood that emotion, and it hovered around the edges of all the others, ready to bring down the weakest in the herd.

But she was no longer as shaky and hollowed out as she had been before the nap, the food and the cuddle, and she couldn’t manage to give in to it.

Sometimes being too stubborn for her own good turned out to be the best thing for her.

So she broke things down into words of one syllable, since that was apparently what she could handle at the moment.

Fuck it then. Kill the bitch, have some great sex, go home.

She counted backward. Yep, all one-syllable words. That’d do.

While she deconstructed her life, Quentin eased off of her and stretched out on his back again.

Somehow, something had shifted when she hadn’t been paying attention, and the part of him that was feline no longer bothered her. She simply enjoyed his animal grace.