He gave me a lazy smile back, and I caught a glimpse of fang as his thumb rubbed over my pulse, the touch sending shivers through my blood. ‘And what if I do not wish to accompany you?’
Did I go for straight for Plan B, or take the (definitely interesting) hand he was dealing and see how the cards fell? Choices, choices.
I flattened my palms on his chest, pushing him back again, and this time I left them there, relishing the cool silk of his skin against my own venom-heated flesh. ‘Maybe I could persuade you,’ I said, giving it my best seductive voice.
He traced a finger down my throat. My pulse there started up a rapid tattoo, even with the venom hit my day’s ration of blood-fruit had already given me. ‘What had you in mind, Genevieve?’ he murmured.
I swallowed, my mouth dry, recalling the images he’d dropped in my head not ten minutes ago, and looked past him at the bed. ‘You’re the one with the imagination, you tell me.’
He clasped my wrists and lifted them slowly above my head, as if he expected me to protest, and a spiral of anticipation and need twisted inside me. I lifted my chin in silent offering. After all, he was hungry, and with 3V and the blood-fruit turbo-boosting my blood production, I had plenty to spare. He captured my wrists in one hand and pinned them, amused heat lighting his eyes. ‘My imagination informs me it has a plan.’
I licked my lips, nervous in a good way. ‘And what does this plan involve?’
He traced a tingling line down the lace V of my silk top.
Desire shot through my veins like high-voltage electricity, leaving me quivering.
‘It involves’—his fingers grazed the swell of my left breast—‘staying here.’
My nipples tightened, pushing against the lace of my bra.
‘Where I can’—he cupped my breast through the silk of my top—‘protect you.’ His thumb brushed over the stiff, sensitive peak. I gasped, arching into his palm. ‘Yes, I like this plan better,’ he said, sounding entirely too pleased with himself.
‘Seducing me isn’t protecting me, Malik,’ I breathed, wondering if this was going where I thought, or if he was going to do his usual, and stop before things really got hot—
He stopped—and I almost whimpered in frustration … until he moved to give the same teasing attention to my other breast. Then I couldn’t help but whimper.
‘Ah,’ he said, his eyes deep pools of drowning darkness, ‘but who is seducing whom, Genevieve?’
‘I’m the one with my hands above my head.’ Mentally, I willed my melting legs to hold me.
‘Yet you are not struggling, and see how your body responds to my touch,’ he said softly, continuing his light, barely there caresses. ‘I find it … intriguing, how much you want this. I wonder what other liberties will you allow me in the hope I will accede to your needs?’
Needs? I closed my eyes and tipped my head back against the wall. I needed his mouth on my throat, his hands on my body, and him deep inside me. Were they my thoughts, or his? It didn’t matter. I wanted this, and not just to persuade him to help me. I was tired of always being the kid outside the sweet shop with her nose pressed against the glass, tired of sex being about breaking curses, about commitment, of about anything other than pleasure and fun. Life was too short not to enjoy it—maybe a cliché, but it was true. If it wasn’t for Sylvia and luck, I could be suffering the same fate in the Tower as the poor missing faelings. I wanted this, wanted Malik, just—well, just because. Even if that was selfish, while others might be dying … except until the rest of the plans came together, there wasn’t anything else I could do right now. And he did need persuading.
I looked at him from under my lashes. ‘What other liberties have you in mind?’
Chapter Forty-Two
‘I am uncertain.’ He skimmed his hand down my body, slipping it beneath the hem of my top and resting his cool palm at my waist. ‘You see, Genevieve, there is really nothing you can give me that I cannot already have for the taking, if I so wished. It removes an element of delicious excitement, knowing you will not resist me.’
Bastard. Play hard to get, why don’t you?
‘Is that what you want, Malik? Resistance?’ I twisted my wrists in his grip, pushing up against him, feeling him hard and ready. ‘Do you want me struggling beneath you, screaming for you to stop as you take me by force?’
He continued to gaze at me, his dark, enigmatic eyes giving nothing away.
‘Or is it that you want me willing?’ His fingers trembled against my side and I knew that was it. I pressed my lips to his throat, tasted salt and spice, and nipped under his jaw. ‘Then you can have me, Malik,’ I whispered, ‘I’m willing.’
He released me and stepped back, his expression suddenly grim. ‘Do not lie to me, Genevieve,’ he said, his voice harsh.
Surprise winged through me and the air in my lungs seemed to whoosh out, leaving me shaky and unsteady. My heart jackhammered in my chest, then it settled. We weren’t playing games any more. This was real. And for some reason he was angry. Angry vamps are never good news.
‘I’m sidhe, Malik, we can’t lie.’ I pressed my back against the wall, keeping my eyes on his, wary.
He braced his hands against the wall to either side of my head, and leaned into me. I froze as his anger chilled the air and my breath trailed between us like a malevolent fog. Dread slicked down my spine, and I fought the instinctive urge to curl into a tight ball, to hide. Mesma. Nothing more. Just good old vamp mesma. I lifted my chin and stared into the opaque darkness of his eyes … and was buffeted by a confusing tornado of emotions: intense desire, rabid hunger, unending guilt, and an incandescent rage. All of them tempered and held in check by an implacable will …
‘Why is having my back-up so important to you that you would do this to obtain it, Genevieve?’
… the emotions swirled around me, and then vanished, leaving me alone in the wind-blasted desolation of a vast barren plain.
‘Genevieve?’
I blinked. His feelings had come and gone so quickly that if it weren’t for the icy quiet they’d left in their wake, I’d have thought I’d imagined them. I was suddenly aware that maybe I’d misread him. Or he me. Or the situation. ‘This isn’t just about back-up,’ I said slowly. ‘I thought you wanted me, and I wanted you too.’
He regarded me for a long moment, then his expression smoothed back to its usual enigmatic blankness. A warm breeze sprung from nowhere, carrying with it a soothing scent of spice and liquorice, and something else, some fragile emotion I couldn’t quite catch … yearning?
‘Tell me what is so important, Genevieve.’
I sighed, bereft as the feeling dissipated, and the order slipped into my mind. ‘I told you, finding the killer, saving the missing faelings, and ultimately breaking the curse.’
‘You would sacrifice yourself to me for this?’
I half-laughed, incredulous. ‘Malik, offering you blood and sex doesn’t even come close to being a sacrifice.’ My gaze skimmed over the lean perfection of his chest, followed the dark silky hair there as it arrowed down to disappear enticingly beneath his low-slung leather trousers and I only just managed not to drool. ‘It’s not like I’m being a martyr here or anything.’
‘You have just told me you cannot lie, Genevieve, but I wonder. Last night you did not want me to touch you, today you remind me that you would prefer to kill me rather than succumb to me, and now you expect me to believe that you want me willingly?’