Neon Blue by E Frost (best big ereader .TXT) 📕

me, stroking my shoulders and throat. With his other hand, he finishes undressing me. Baring my skin to the cool night air, to the heat rising from his skin. He sets fire to my nerve-endings. Makes me shiver with pleasure and a need so deep it goes beyond sex into something I can’t name.

Finally, he closes those big hands on my butt, lifts me onto his hips and, with his mouth still locked to mine, carries me into the bedroom. The door slams behind him; I feel the wards rise like a wall of fire. I don’t have any time to wonder why he’s raised my wards, or how, because he’s pushing me down on the bed and climbing on top of me without giving me any time to recover. His pulls me under him, positions my hips and guides himself into me, looking down into my face, watching me, eyes glowing like neon suns while he takes me.

I gasp out, “oh, no” without really knowing why. We’re beyond denial. And my body’s way beyond any rejection, arcing to him, taking him in, my legs wrapping around his hips. He works himself into me. He’s not holding back, entering me thick and full. Almost more than I can take. My body burns for a moment, stretching, then he strokes back out and the pleasure’s so intense I cry out.

Easy, sweetness. This ain’t supposed to hurt.

I bury my face in his shoulder, clutch at his broad back as he begins to thrust. His weight on me, his heat within and around me, the pulse of power between us, gulps me down. I’m lost and insensate to everything except the pounding of his body into mine.

Until he takes one of my wrists and stretches it up to the headboard.

I shudder, yanked out of the hot envelope of sex and back into the real world, where I feel cool strands of cord loop around my wrist. “Jou—”

“Shh. It’s okay.” He pauses just long enough to kiss me. Submerge me back into the vortex of sex and pleasure, before his fingers begin working at my wrists in earnest.

He keeps fucking me, his hips working in a slow, steady rhythm, while he binds me. Encasing my wrists in a complicated web of knots. Three knots for each loop of cord. Three loops of each color. Twenty-seven knots for each wrist. He counts them out into my mind. Punctuates the sealing of each knot with a driving thrust that has me panting and writhing under him. All the while he murmurs low and harsh into my mind, around his count, words that I only catch fragments of—

Red to gray to black . . .

Blood to bone to flesh . . .

Gray to black to red . . .

Spirit to soul to heart . . .

Black to red to gray . . .

Death to life to eternity . . .

—words that build the magical energy, stoking it with touch and breath and will, until it glows on and under and between our skins. Finally, he ties the last knot, seals it with the burning brush of his tongue. He slides up onto his forearms, reaches above me and takes a grip on the headboard. Looking down at me from the shadows of his dreadlocks, he whispers roughly, “Now you’re mine.”

I panic. Thrashing under him. But it’s too late. Power binds me. His hips pin me to the bed. He takes me, hard and fast. Running himself into me over and over. Filling me with his demanding flesh. His equally demanding will fills my head, my heart. A huge fist of power that hammers into me, pushing inside my soul, striking again and again against that hard core of self. I feel myself fracture. I scream with pleasure and fear and scrabble for one last second to contain it, to hold onto what I’ve tried so hard to keep safe inside myself. He pistons into me, holding me down and giving me what I need to take me to that place where pleasure turns into hot white light. My body bows, orgasm rippling through me, and he breaks me. I pour out everything I’ve kept caged. Wave upon wave of emotion: joy and despair, contentment and fear. It fills him. Glowing under his skin. Bright as molten gold. He arches above me, driving himself deep, and groans with the flood of power. I feel him flex within me. A deep, burning surge at my core.

He collapses across me, burying his face in my hair. His body moves on mine. In mine. As though he’s still coming, or can’t get enough. He touches my face, strokes my cheek and neck, while our bodies and breathing slow. He’s making a low, grumbling sound in his chest on each exhalation, a sound very much like the salamanders’ purr. I move tentatively under him, beginning to feel the stinging soreness that’s going to have me running for a healing potion in the morning. Or, at least, limping.

Finally, he withdraws from me, rolls onto his side and does something to the cords binding my wrists so I have more slack. The burning in my arms subsides to a bearable and then a gentle ache. I scoot away from him, exhausted and more than a little frightened by what just happened now that the insane excitement of it has passed, but he doesn’t let me escape, not even by a few inches. He pulls me close, tucks me into his chest, wraps his legs around mine. He sighs heavily, his warm breath ruffling my hair.

When he doesn’t seem inclined to do anything else to me, I relax into him. Close my eyes.

He keeps cuddling me, touching me, stroking and soothing me, but also keeping me awake with his small movements when all I want is sleep. Deep, dreamless, oblivious sleep.

“You are as soft as a snowflake,” he whispers.

That’s so unlike him that I say, “What?”

He shifts, lifting his head and nodding at something over my head. “Says you’re soft as a snowflake. Whoever wrote that’s right.”

I strain my head back, but I