He grimaced, trying to dislodge the thought from his brain. Not about wardrobe, about mating. He wasn’t taking a mate. Why would he do such a ridiculous thing and give up his freedoms? Lonely or not, the mating ritual was irreversible. And if it had seemed like eternity alone, it really would be eternity together. At least now he had an option to end his loneliness. If he took a mate, he wouldn’t have the option to go back. On the surface, he realized such reasoning made him look crazy, but forever was a long time. He’d gotten the tiniest taste of it in his eight thousand years as a demon, and he knew that was only the beginning.
Tam dropped her bags. “Did you have something else in mind?” The tone in her voice made it clear she knew exactly what was on his mind. What was always on his mind.
He backed her against the wall of the cave. “You woke me from a nice dream. Then you had the audacity to stop me because you needed your energy for magic. I was very accommodating for you, I expect you’ll be accommodating for me.”
He smirked when his double entendre, complete with filthy mental pictures, hit their mark. She was lovely when she gasped and flushed like that. Her gaze drifted south and then back up again to his face quickly, as if caught with her hands in the cookie jar.
“Touch me,” Cain said. He gasped when her small hand closed around him, touching him like only a woman with over a thousand years experience could. He’d never understand the male fixation with a virgin. It didn’t matter who else had been there first. Every bit of experience was something you didn’t have to teach her.
Despite how good her hand felt on him, his mind was too distracted. He wondered if the thing about conserving her magical energy to do the séance was true. Maybe the amount of bells and whistles didn’t indicate how much energy one was using. Maybe it took a lot of energy and magical concentration to hold a spirit to this plane long enough for a chat. What did he know about the finer details of magic? He’d spent the better part of his existence avoiding it as much as possible, just as someone highly flammable would avoid fire.
She sagged against him as his mouth found hers. She was so warm and sweet and pliable this way. He needed less and less of the demon thrall to get her to this place. He suspected if he held out, she’d beg him to keep her, no matter what she said to the contrary. Her body told truths that her mind could only begin to imagine. And what would he do then? Laugh and kill her like he’d said?
He growled angrily against her mouth. If this game went on much longer, he’d lose because he’d keep her. And if he went down that road, how much farther before he lost his mind entirely and became so attached that what Luc had done with Anna started to look good?
He’d already had the urge to mix their blood to protect her, but from what? It only worked against demons, and no one in his dimension would dare defy him on this. No, it was simply a need to possess, and now that his immediate fears over her hexing him were gone, that need made itself known more loudly.
“Oww!” Tam said.
A second later he was on the ground across the cave, smarting from an energy ball burn. He rubbed his shoulder. They didn’t usually do the fighting thing after the foreplay thing had started. No matter what she said, she liked screwing him too much to interrupt their momentum.
“What the fuck did you bite me for?” She wiped the blood off her lip with the back of her hand, looking equal parts hurt and angry, like for a moment she had trusted him. At least within certain perimeters.
His eyes widened. No. His fangs had come out while he’d been focused elsewhere, but biting her wasn’t the thing that had him panicked. Somehow, he’d drawn his own blood as well. He felt the tiny sting of throbbing pain in his tongue. Had their blood mixed? It wasn’t the traditional ritual. Not like Luc had done.
Luc had taken a knife to Anna’s hand, then cut his and mixed them together good and proper. He hadn’t hesitated to protect her. Whether his brother had known it would initiate the first stages of the mating ritual, who could say? Surely what Cain had just done wasn’t enough for that level of psychic connection. Yes, he still had free will in all of this, and more or less, so did Tam even if it had worked, but it wasn’t something to cheer about. It was dangerous.
After all the trouble he’d gone through to protect himself from her, his instincts wanted the opposite. He stood and wiped the sand off him.
“If you think you can start hurting me, just because I can’t hex you...”
“It’s not like that, Tam. It was an accident.”
She must have seen the honesty in his eyes, because her anger deflated.
“I think I just marked you, though. As mine.”
Though he knew she wanted him, he expected a momentary flutter of revulsion to cross her face, but all he saw was peace. Then all at once it was gone, replaced by suspicion and a fear that seemed strange and incongruous on her face with regards to him.
“Is this your idea of a joke?”
“Am I laughing?” He came closer and licked the last bit of blood off her lip. Her blood was already inside him, and his in her, so there was no sense in leaving a mess behind. What was done was done, assuming it counted as a true mark.
“I’m not even sure I marked you. I just think it’s possible,” he clarified.
“How can you not be sure?”
“The ritual is specific. We don’t do it enough to have experimented with it. You were there with Anna; you know how it goes. But blood was mixed. It might mean something. It might mean nothing.” Why he was being so forthright, he couldn’t say. Maybe he needed someone to reassure him that nothing had happened and things were still the same.
But something had already shifted, maybe before he’d bitten her, maybe after, but the thing he wanted to do right now wasn’t bend her over a rock and fuck her—oh, they’d do that again, and many other things if he had his way—but right now what he wanted was to make love to her. Even those words make love had him inwardly cringing.
He shook his hand as if his ring had shorted out, but he knew the truth. It had nothing to do with the ring beyond being able to think a moment without fear of her magic bringing him harm. Now that he held the upper hand and all she had were energy balls, he was looking at her differently.
But hadn’t that been true from the beginning? He remembered the first time he’d met her. She’d showed up with the cavalry at Anna’s house like a rampaging pixie. He’d wanted to hurt her to get to the woman standing between him and his brother, but she hadn’t come to him when he’d ordered her. No amount of demon thrall could penetrate the walls she had up. Even Anna’s resistance hadn’t impressed him so much. Then Tam had done one better, sending him across the floor with one of her fancy energy balls. From that moment he’d wanted to screw her brains out, possess her, make her cry out his name. She was the first real challenge he’d met in more centuries than he could remember.
And now here she was, and what had started out as a grudge fuck had become something more.