Deleted Scene From
SHADOWFEVER
Sometimes characters just won’t cooperate. Mac and Barrons kept trying to have sex before it was time and screwing up the way the story was supposed to go. I finally wrote a sex scene to keep them occupied so I could write the book the right way in peace. Funny thing was, once I wrote them a sex scene, the novel got back on track and never derailed again. This was the scene I deleted for the current Chapter Thirty-three. It took place right after Mac had killed Fiona (in the wrong version, she did it without Barrons). Mac had been gone for weeks and had just walked back into the bookstore.
Finding out that I was adopted had triggered a slow but relentless erosion of my identity. I tried to roll with the punches, be a good trooper, go with the flow.
When I’d learned that maybe I wasn’t even Alina’s real sister, I’d kept my chin up. When Darroc had proposed that I might be a stone, I’d laughed in his face. When Ryodan had suggested that perhaps I’d never actually been born, I hadn’t let it get me down. When Barrons had accused me of being the Unseelie King’s creation, one of his final castes, I’d doggedly persevered. I’d even been levelheaded and optimistic in the face of discovering I was the ill-fated, star-crossed love of the Unseelie King’s life.
But there was no escaping what Fiona’s death had just proved.
I was the Unseelie King.
I stared around the bookstore.
I loved this place. The bookstore was where I wanted to be. And the woman that I felt like here was who I wanted to be. From my magazine rack to my gas fireplaces, from my cash register to the joy of ordering books and introducing people to new worlds, from earning my keep at the end of the day to knowing my constant jackass was always going to be out back, breathing down my neck, I wanted to be who I was here. And wasn’t that the defining quality of “home”? You liked the person you were inside those walls.
I felt as if most of the living I’d done in my twenty-two years had taken place in BB&B. Definitely the most intense and formative parts. Ashford seemed a million miles away, a lifetime ago. None of my memories of home were as vivid and real as my memories here. I’d accumulated so many defining experiences in such a short time.
I’d learned about OOP-detecting. I’d touched copies of pages of the Sinsar Dubh and felt my latent power. I’d discovered monsters were real. I’d sat on the rooftop, my arm splinted, watching the world’s most improbable nail technician paint my fingernails. He’d taught me to look inside myself without flinching. He’d taught me to kill. I’d fought Shades, invented a MacHalo, danced, and been caught making a complete fool of myself. And although he’d tried not to laugh, it had been one of the few moments I’d ever seen him unguarded—except in bed. In a basement, with me Pri-ya, he’d been raw, open, animal without apology. I’d learned about hard decisions and consequences. I’d let go of the pink and embraced the black.
That day, so long ago, when I’d gotten lost in the Dark Zone, I’d burst through the front doors seeking sanctuary, and the fact of the matter was, I’d found it.
Unconditional sanctuary.
I reached into my pocket for my new iPod and thumbed it on. He’d loaded it with music. The playlists were titled with nifty little acronyms. Jericho Barrons had picked out a pink iPod for me, hooked it up to a computer and downloaded music. I could more easily envision a lion donning a frilly apron and cooking a scrumptious vegetarian dish.
I scanned the playlists. There was HOHW, OTB, WYB, WIFYS&E, WIFYF&H.
I thumbed up HOHW and laughed. Even though he’d had dozens of hits, Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” topped the list of Happy One Hit Wonders. It would always be a painful song to me.
OTB had to be On The Beach, and was full of songs that were perfect for tanning, including my favorite Beach Boys songs. The man had definitely snooped in my old iPod.
WYB was a puzzle at first, until I saw “My Violent Heart” by Nine Inch Nails. “When You Brood,” I said, getting it.
I scrolled down. Lust softened my knees and muscled my spine. These were the songs I remembered from my time in the basement. “I Came For You,” “Awake and Alive,” “Because the Night” and dozens of others. “So what is WIFYS&E?” I liked the game of trying to think like him.
“When I fuck you slow and easy,” Barrons said, tight and hard, at the back of the store.
All the moisture in my body went south, leaving my mouth painfully dry. The next playlist began with “Pussy Liquor.” I pressed the play button. “And WIFYH&F?” I’d already figured it out. I just wanted to hear him say it out loud.
“When I fuck you fast and hard,” he said slow and precise and each word was plucked on tight strings in my groin as if he was purring them with his mouth to my clitoris.
Wanting him is visceral. Undeniable. Doesn’t matter if I was born, who I might have been in any other lifetime, or what I’m headed for.
Barrons lives.
I breathe.
I want. Him. Always.
Fire to my ice. Ice to my fever.
“What do you want, Ms. Lane?”
I opened my mouth with a complete sentence formed and ready to come out but all I managed was an incoherent sound of pain and lust.
“Finally speaking a language I understand.”
I’d never felt so exposed, so vulnerable. I hated everything about it.
Here I am, his dark gaze said. Don’t expect me to make the first move. I’ve been making it since the day you sashayed your manicured, deluded little self in here.
You did not. You treated me like—
A woman I wanted to fuck. You aren’t my type. It pissed me off.
Get over yourself—you aren’t my type, either!
I’m your only type. Admit it.
You admit it.
I wanted to send Fiona home, drag you behind a bookcase and grow your fancy pink ass up in a hurry. Mark you. Fuck you till you figured out you belonged to me.
How shocked pink Mac would have been! How horrified. How turned upside down. How … turned on. All that wasted time. We could have been fighting and having sex and getting inside each other’s skin. Women don’t belong to men.
Bullshit.
Fine. Then you belong to me, Barrons.
There was an unholy light in his eyes. He caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth, fangs gleaming into view, and smiled. You think you could keep something like me happy? I have large appetites.
I don’t think you know the meaning of the word “happy,” Broody, pissy bastard.
You want me, stake your claim.
I’ll stake your fanged ass.
I’d come back from that, too, so don’t get your hopes up.
I lunged for him but he was already halfway there. We would have slammed into each other but at the last minute, I leapt and he caught me by the waist. I wrapped my legs around him, then his tongue was in my mouth, and we were falling back to the floor. I straddled him, riding him to the flawlessly raunchy beat of Rob Zombie, reveling in the raw energy, lust, and life flowing between us.
He wanted a spell of unmaking.
I would never give it to him. I didn’t give a damn if he’d lived so long that now he wanted to die. Barrons was not dying. Not in my lifetime. And it looked like mine was going to be every bit as long as his.
I tore my mouth from his, sat back on my heels and, when he reached for me, shoved him back on the floor. “Hands off. This one is for me. You had your turn when I was Pri-ya.”
You’re not Pri-ya now.
“Point?” I asked dryly. But I knew what it was. It burned him that I’d only had sex with him when I was out of my mind and had no idea who he was. It would have burned me, too, if the tables were turned.
You know who I am. Say my name.
“Jericho.”
You chose this. Tell me.
“I’m choosing this. Right here. Right now. I know who you are, I know who I am. And I want this.”
What am I? His eyes glittered with expectation.
I remembered him saying this, back in a basement when I was Pri-ya. He wanted me to tell him he was my world. “How would I know?” I asked glibly. “You never cooperate.”
I was so aroused, it was painful. I felt violent with emotion. If I couldn’t control my lust, at least I could control him.
We’ll see about that. Mockery glinted in his dark eyes, and something else I was having a hard time defining. A shimmer of disappointment? Had he just muttered something beneath his ocular breath? A pity. Not as ready as I thought you were …
Stay out of my head. I stripped off my shirt and bra and gasped at the coolness of the air on my fevered skin.
When he reached for me, I pushed him back with a boot square in his chest. “I said ‘my turn.’ ”
He laughed and lay back on the floor and folded arms his behind his head. I wasn’t fooled. I could feel the violence in him, too. We were like two great boulders, crashing into each other, chipping away, seeing if the other might crack.
I kicked off my boots, stripped off my jeans and thong, and stood over him, looking down my naked body at his face. His eyes narrowed, his lips tightened. Lust in those ancient eyes makes me feel elated to be alive. He unzipped his pants, made an adjustment, and his dick sprang free.
I finally had Jericho Barrons exactly where I wanted him. Rock hard, ready, and between my thighs.
Inexhaustible didn’t begin to cover it. Insatiable couldn’t describe it.
Bottomless need is what I feel for him. I love it and hate it. Feeling so intensely is a blessing and a curse.
I’ve never known a man as beautiful as Barrons. I’ve never been with anyone as sexual and uninhibited. Sex is Jericho Barrons’ religion. He worships, he defiles. He fucks with the single-minded devotion of a dying man in search of God. He leaves no part of a woman untouched. When he’s inside me, the world ceases to exist. On the floor, on the counter, on the Chesterfield, across a chair, in his study over the desk, it was as if we were the only two people alive. Nothing mattered. The world could have ended and neither of us would have given a damn as long as the bookstore remained standing around us and we could continue fucking.
It was about the obsession we’d both been afflicted with the moment we’d laid eyes on each other. For whatever reason—I no longer even cared—my body demanded I have him—and he’d been poisoned by the same sickness. I took, he fought. He took, I fought. Neither of us gave easy. It’s not our nature. Sex for us was a battlefield, and when we finally exhausted ourselves—at least for a time—the store was worse for the wear. Books spilled across the floor, two of the recently reinstalled bookcases listed at dangerous angles, the new coffee table was shattered, lamps were broken, and my TV had gotten knocked off the counter and cracked.
Wedged into a tight space between the broken coffee table, the sofa, and his body, I felt magnificent.