In the Arms of the King Read online

  But she still heard him loud and clear when he placed his lips right beside her ear.

  “Hang on tight.”

  Diana’s eyes widened. She wondered just for a second what he could mean by that. She opened her mouth, began to ask “Wha-,” and then Damon’s arm slid around her waist and she was squealing and grasping the edges of his leather jacket to hold on for dear life. The world dropped out from under her feet like a carnival thrill ride. Wind rushed through her hair and everything blurred.

  Her stomach leapt into her throat; fear gripped her. She tried to scream, but once her air reserve was gone, she could no longer draw any more in.

  And then they were landing – and it was over almost before it had begun.

  Diana’s heart continued to pound, but she felt the solidness of stone under her boots and inhaled, drawing in the air she couldn’t get a second ago. After several quick and shaky breaths, she looked up.

  Damon’s vivid, unnatural eyes captured hers and held them as if with chains. His steel band of an arm had not removed itself from around her waist. He had her pulled flush with his body – hard and unyielding. She could feel him breathing against her, almost hear the sound of his heart. Her head began to swim.

  “I thought it best we move fast,” he told her softly. She felt his hand open at her back, his fingers spreading to cover more of her. “Since my kind can interrupt transport spells to get at what they want.”

  Diana couldn’t speak. She knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that the words he was saying made some sort of sense. But she barely heard them and couldn’t care less about them anyway. All she was really aware of was the hardness of his body against hers. The heat of it – like that flame in his eyes that was spreading.

  She nodded mutely.

  Damon’s wickedly scarred mouth curled in a nearly cruel smile. The fire spread, claiming his pupils and turning his irises to rings of flame. His inferno was mesmerizing – and contagious. Because now she was on fire too.

  The heat their contact alighted a blaze in her body. It moved through her on a phantom wind, licking at her nerve endings. Her knees felt like buckling. Her nipples hardened against the material of her bra. Her chest flushed, and moisture pooled delicately between her legs.

  “You seem a little unsteady,” he told her, still grinning wickedly. “Perhaps a bite of something would help?”

  Her legs were jelly and her fingers and toes tingled. Damon turned slightly and gestured to the long, wooden table that was directly beside them in his opulently grand dining room. That’s where they had transported to.

  The table was covered in all manner of foods and drinks. With utmost delicacy and slow, poised grace, the Goblin King reach down and picked up a chocolate covered strawberry from an enormous dessert-covered platter at the table’s edge.

  Diana felt her heart pound in her throat now. It was rising.

  He lifted the strawberry to her mouth, and she caught the sensuous scent of dark chocolate and sweet, ripe fruit.

  “I keep telling you to eat something,” he said through his dark, twisted smile.

  Without thinking, she parted her lips, opening to him. Without taking his eyes from hers, Damon placed the strawberry upon her tongue, and she bit down.

  Juice and chocolate erupted in her mouth, pooling upon her bottom lip.

  Damon Chroi’s fire-burning eyes combusted like a gasoline-fueled blaze – and suddenly, Diana was being spun around. She caught sight of his leather-covered arm as he leaned over the table and, with one clean swipe, knocked every single item of dinnerware off the table.

  They went crashing to the ground, the ceramic and china shattering to millions of pieces – and a memory niggled at Diana. But she ignored it. She could think of nothing with any clarity as Damon set her down on the now clean table’s edge and captured her strawberry-covered lips with his own.

  What few coherent thoughts she had left were shattered to fragments with that kiss. She almost heard the sound, an explosion of crystal and diamond consciousness that battered the walls of her mind.

  The pressure of his lips intoxicated like wine, making her dizzy and weak. They opened her up, allowing him to delve within her, tasting and teasing and taking. She moaned against those lips when she felt his fingers brush under the hem of her t-shirt to brand the skin of her abdomen with their heat.

  Her fingers were back at the lapels of his jacket, clutching hard as his hands moved up, shoving her shirt up with them and lighting a trail of fire across her flesh until he reached the underwire of her bra. There, his fingers curled tight around the material – and she knew what was coming.

  The world had become a fevered race, her dawning, yearning, craving pleasure the starting gun. Her mind went white with heated anticipation.

  He ripped the bra apart, tearing it between the two tight grips of his hands.

  Her sensitive peaks were at once exposed to the cool air of his castle. Her back arched as her nipples drew so taught it was slightly painful. But Damon’s hot-burning body eased the cold away, his searing hands moving across her abdomen and chest to gently cup the globes of her breasts. At the same time, his kiss deepened, taking her breath away.

  She felt delirious when his fingers deftly tweaked the nipple of one breast, his thumb brushing over the sensitive bud, sending fireworks in a trail down her body, where they alighted between her legs and caused her to buck against him.

  He broke their kiss, pulling away gradually and taking her bottom lip between his teeth for a moment before he released her and was moving downward. Diana’s eyes opened long enough to catch the nearby hearth fire reflected in the raven-esque shimmer of his black locks, and then her fingers were delving into that silken mane and her eyes were shutting tight once more as his lips closed over her tortured nipple and sucked hard.

  She made an incoherent sound, drawing in air with a hiss and releasing it with helplessness.

  Teeth came next, clamping down on the taut instrument of his attentions. Diana’s fingers curled into fists in his hair and Damon’s free hands slid lower on her body to find the waistband of her jeans.

  With his teeth on her nipple, she dare not move as his hands curled around the band. For a half-second, she thought he might rip them open, and she couldn’t have cared less. But as she held her breath and swam in the sweet misery of sensation his mouth was unleashing on her, his deft fingers worked the jeans button loose and unzipped the pants to expose the small edge of lace that bordered her white panties.

  He released her tender nipple which pulsed with every beat of her heart and sent wave after wave of fire to her core – and kissed his way to her other breast. Now painfully impatient, Diana un-fisted her hands from his hair and gripped his strong shoulders. Her nails dug into his jacket, carving half-moons into the leather.

  His mouth closed over her breast, his teeth brutally gentle, his tongue like a whip, her skin crying out at the demise of every last one of her nerve endings. She arched again, playing into his cruelty with surrender – and Damon accepted her surrender with the victorious actions of an absolute ruler.

  He shoved the jeans roughly over her hips, pulling her slim body up as he did so to ease his progress. With firm and ruthless impatience, he rose off her, leaving her breast throbbing and her chest heaving. He then swept his arm across the center of the table, sending more platters and glassware flying. They slammed into surfaces somewhere else and shattered into careless pieces.

  Damon slid Diana further up on the table until she was resting fully on the polished wood. With a wave of his hand, her boots and socks were gone. The cool air caressed her naked thighs as his hands rid her with dizzying speed of her jeans. He tossed them carelessly to the side.

  Suddenly, Diana froze under his stark and burning scrutiny. She was almost thoroughly bared and utterly defenseless, laid out in nothing but her little panties on an altar for him to devour. He was a black-clad tower of a man gazing down at her with a hunger unequalled – and something else. It
was akin to ownership.

  He looked at her as though he was about to ruin her for any other man.

  She felt more vulnerable than she ever could have imagined. She also felt hotter and more wanton as she propped herself up on her elbows and her round breasts jutted out – teasing.

  Damon hastily shrugged off his leather jacket, exposing the taut, bulging muscles of his arms and chest where they pressed against the thin material of his black shirt. Then, as Diana held her breath and her mouth watered like mad, he curled his fingers under the hem of that shirt and lifted it over his head, exposing the perfect, rock-hard anatomy of his chest and abdomen.

  A number of curse words, intermingled with incoherent nonsense, rushed through Diana’s head as she gazed openly and longingly at every ridge and ripple of the Goblin King’s perfect physique. But her courage faltered just a little when he went for the buttons of his jeans next.

  As if he could see the sudden fear in her eyes, Damon popped the top button on his jeans with one hand, and braced his other on the table – between her long legs. His knee came next. With the grace of a very large and very deadly cat, he crawled onto the table and over her, easing her thighs apart as he did so. She fell back, her gaze locked in his as he moved up her body.

  His hand wrapped around the top of her panties a millisecond before she heard the sound of them ripping and she felt them bite briefly into her flesh. And then there was absolutely nothing between them but his victorious, twisted smile and the inferno of his singular eyes.

  Diana parted her lips and drew in a breath, preparing to say something, anything, that would help her to release even a small bit of the sexual tension he’d filled her with, but Damon’s mouth crashed down on hers before she could mutter a sound. She cried out against his lips when his hands were back, this time on the insides of her thighs.

  Oh gods! she thought, feeling crazed. She’d lost all control – given it freely to the man who now took her over like a conquering soldier.

  She bucked, tried to move away, tried to move toward him, as his hands continued in their caressing and massaging until finally, finally, his fingers brushed against the tender folds of her opening and she cried out a second time only to have her pleasure swallowed by Damon’s brutally demanding kiss.

  She started to fight then; it was an instinct inside her, forcing her body to go wild, to push, to pull, to curl her fingernails into claws and rake them across the perfect skin of his back. She drew blood, she knew. She was strong and trained.

  But he was stronger. Though she pulled at him, begging him with her body to just take her and stop teasing, Damon maintained absolute control. He slowly broke the kiss and moved to her neck, suckling her throat and no doubt marking her as his own.

  Diana’s overheated, sweat-covered body responded to his manipulations all on its own, rising to meet the maddeningly gentle touch of his fingers between her legs, pleading with him to penetrate.

  To go deep.

  But she could not control the fae king.

  Please! her burning mind begged. Then she said it out loud, breathlessly, hopelessly. “Please….”

  Damon’s hot, talented fingers slid smoothly into the slickened canal of her wanton core, eliciting a moan from so deep within her, it was animalistic. He pressed deep, filling her tightness. One finger… two….

  Diana screamed in frustration and pleasure and everything in-between. Her head dropped back, her throat working, a sigh escaping her lips. Her arms slid free of his shoulders and back, and her fingers once more curled into the soft thickness of his hair. She wanted more of him. She wanted all of him. “Damon, please.”

  Damon Chroi stilled above her – for only a moment.

  Then his fingers slowly pulled free, leaving her writhing beneath him. He rose on his elbow, allowing his body to lower against hers, and cupped her face in his hands. She opened her eyes. Lust blurred the edges of her vision as she found herself once more caught in the inescapable pull of his gaze.

  He held her there, watching her, staring into her eyes, as he moved over her – and Diana felt the hard and hot evidence of his desire touch against her slick opening.

  She braced herself, her hands gripping his wrists, her lips parted, as he pressed forward.

  Pain comingled with the throbbing, heated sensations swirling through her. He was so hot, he almost burned, and the size of him stretched the walls of her womanhood with a merciless, building pressure.

  Her fingernails dug in once more, her breathing ragged and gasping, and yet he continued his tender, relentless assault, all the while not allowing her to look away. Deeper and deeper he sank, filling her with a pulsing, solid fire that scorched her from the inside and branded her for life.

  She had lost sense of time and was aching, throbbing all around him with tight, pulsing pleasure-pain when he finally stopped, embedded deeply within her. For half a second, she thought he was finished, that she’d somehow managed to take all of him.

  But then he lowered his lips gently across hers, kissing her with a tenderness like a butterfly’s wings… as he pulled back just enough – before shoving brutally into her, sinking the remainder of the way into her body and forcing a cry of painful surprise from her throat.

  There he finally waited.

  The world receded. The only thing Diana knew was their joining, that pulsing, throbbing, overfilled space where Damon had penetrated and claimed her as his own. It hurt. It hurt like the most wonderful, blissful, undeniable pain the universe had ever created. She wanted more. She knew it would kill her, but she was addicted now… to this pain. To this perfect, Damon Chroi kind of pain.

  As he placed those tender butterfly kisses across her mouth, Diana’s breathing slowed, her body relaxed, and the heat that had coiled relentlessly in her middle began to take over once more.

  She returned his kisses, and as she’d wanted to do since she’d first met him, she placed one atop the scar running through his upper lip.

  He rose just enough to look down at her – and something unfamiliar but truly wonderful reflected in the fire that danced in his eyes.

  She felt him retreat below, pulling at her with that blissful pain, before slowly – so slowly – pressing back in. She bit her lip, and no longer able to keep her eyes open, she squeezed them shut as she felt him do it again. Each time, the warmth in her belly became hotter and pulsed harder. Her breathing quickened as he pulled further away, and thrust deeper.

  There was a familiar rising need blossoming inside her. She’d brought herself to orgasm enough times to recognize it, but never had it been this strong. Never had she almost actually feared climaxing. As if it might… destroy her somehow. As if it was so good, it was dangerous. Deadly.

  Damon’s teeth nibbled at her collarbone. He pulled out – pressed in. Diana’s hands fisted his hair, pulling with need. His hand cupped a breast, fondling the nipple, first gently and then hard enough to force Diana to rise to meet him. She cried out as he twisted it just enough and then thrust into her again, this time sparking a light on the edge of something that felt like an ending…. It was the thing she almost feared.

  It was drawing nearer.

  He became cruel then, as if he knew she was close – as if he was too. His caresses became more insistent. His fingers dug into her flesh, his teeth bit down deeper, and his thrusts quickened and invaded.

  Diana held on tight and let him ride her. He laid waste to her senses one after another, until she felt that spark he’d ignited catch on and burn, branding her. Damon slammed his hands onto the table and rose, his teeth bared, his eyes like two maelstroms of hell.

  Diana was caught in the conflagration; she threw back her head, and her voice broke free as the magma-like tidal wave of euphoria washed over her, ringing spasms from inside her, one painful flux after another. Her scream hit the ceiling and walls, and was joined by Damon’s animalistic cry as he emptied himself into her.

  He incinerated her.

  Diana felt as though she’d combuste
d and had been turned to ash only to be reborn as something more beautiful. Something forever changed.

  It took a short forever for the spasms of her orgasm to cease racking her slim body, for her heart to slow from its racing, and for her breathing to return to semi-normal. She opened her eyes to find Damon gazing steadily down at her, his strong arms still braced firmly on either side of her on the table.

  The expression on his handsome face was a mixture of what appeared to be hope and awe… and there was that something else there again as well.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Diana didn’t know how to answer that. She was more than all right. She was different. She was alive.

  So all she did was nod. Then she saw the blood she’d drawn in the raked marks on his shoulders and across his back, and she felt suddenly ashamed. “Are you?”

  But Damon only laughed. His smile was the most genuinely happy smile she had probably ever seen a man wear. He nodded. “Oh yes,” he said. “And if I’m not, you can just heal me.”

  The Seelie King

  The Kings, Book Five

  Be strong! Selene told herself fiercely. Don’t lose focus now! You haven’t done a single worthwhile thing yet with your powers!

  It was strange for her to suddenly think this – to see it as if someone had wiped a cleansing cloth across a filthy mirror. She felt at once ashamed. And extremely anxious to remedy that shame. This is what really matters!

  “I want to put an end once and for all to the torture of women as an act of war,” she said softly – but firmly. “I want to end genocide and crimes against humanity.” She shrugged, the images of women being demolished in the Congo flashing before her eyes and forcing her to look down at the multi-colored carpet. “Those kinds of things.”

  “And yet,” he said softly, drawing her attention back to him. He closed the distance between them one slow, determined step after another. “Even as you say this, you know it isn’t possible. Don’t you, raven one?”

  Selene just watched him come closer. She felt like a deer in headlights. Each word that rolled off his tongue was a mini magic spell.