Far From Heaven

His gaze wandered over her pink, swollen lips, her closed, fluttering eyelids. He shoved a hand under the shirt she still wore and worked until her bare breast was in his palm. Soft, heavy, the nipple hard as a little pebble for him. He remembered sucking them until she came and almost lost himself.

It wasn’t enough. It never would be. Angry at his impending loss of control, he wrenched her legs up and over his shoulders, turning his head to bite the inside of her calf hard. The position seemed to give him access to new depths in her pliant body, and he groaned as he sank inside her to the hilt. He needed every inch of her.

“Oh,” she gasped. “God, you’re…”

“Tell me,” he said when her words trailed off into a moan. “I’m not hurting you, am I?”

“No, just like that, please, don’t stop, don’t…”

His grin couldn’t have been anything short of feral. Obviously she had him mistaken for someone else if she thought anything could tear him away from her at that moment. He looked down at where they joined, lost his breath at the sight of her stretched around him. Her internal muscles gripped him, quivered, tightened until he could hardly breathe. She had to come or she was going to kill him.

He stroked his thumb across her slick clit, feeling her jerk in reaction. “Yes!” she cried. “Please, please!”

As much as he needed to see her release, feel it milk him of the rest of his control, he wanted to draw it out. It wasn’t to be. A couple more caresses and she was lost, her fingernails digging crescents into his biceps, her h*ps grinding on him. He nearly folded her in half with his need to push as deep as he could into her, absorb every ripple of her p**sy along the entire length of his cock. Her sweet, lilting cries circled in his head, dying away as the last of her contractions faded and she went limp under him.

He gave her no time to recover. Rolling to his back, he pulled her on top of him, still hard and throbbing inside her. She squeaked but didn’t protest, instead dropping her forehead to his shoulder. Ash grabbed her ass with both hands, held her steady and open, and continued driving into her.

Madeleine’s face turned toward him, nuzzling his neck. She gave it a little bite and pushed her fingers into his hair, her panting breath hot against his skin. He groaned and pulled her up for a kiss, her taste flooding his mouth as their tongues teased and dueled. He would never forget how she tasted as long as he prowled the caverns of Hell.

It was that realization and the ensuing agony as much as the feel of her slick p**sy clamped tight around him that drove him over the edge. It was his turn to dig his fingers in, denting the soft globes as he ground her down on him, spilling his seed into the hated barrier between them. He wanted to thrust it so deeply into her that he would be a part of her being forever. That she would belong to him from now to eternity.

He didn’t expect her to come again so quickly, but she did, his pleasure a trigger for her own. She cried out into his mouth and rocked against him as he growled his wordless reply.

Fuck, she was exquisite. He hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t thought it would make a difference one way or the other if he had a taste of her before he struck. But it had made all the difference.

She sighed as she came down from whatever heights he’d taken her to. Her body relaxed, gently draping over him. He slid his hands up her sweat-slick back and hugged her close. “After last night I never thought I’d feel this way again. Never thought I’d see you again.”

“I couldn’t stay away,” he whispered.

Another truth between them.

Chapter Ten

It was hard to brush one’s teeth with someone else’s teeth nibbling at one’s neck. Maddie giggled and slapped at Ash, managing to dislodge a bit of toothpaste foam from her mouth. Despite her squealing efforts to catch it, it dribbled down her black nightshirt.

She dabbed at it with her free hand, pulling her toothbrush from her mouth. “Ah! Look what you did.”

“How tragic,” Ash said, strolling from the room now that the damage was done.

“I’m going to get you for that. Now I’m stained for the night.”

“As if you’re going to be wearing it for very long,” he commented from the bedroom.

She shuddered in anticipation. Nearly a week had passed since the incident on the street, and every night, Ash had come over. Every night, he’d given her the best orgasm of her life. Which meant, frighteningly enough, that it was only getting better.

She didn’t know what was happening, but she wasn’t complaining. How could she? The sex was absolutely astronomical—she found herself floating up there around Jupiter every time he so much as touched her.

It couldn’t be that she’d found the one. Not like this. Not when he still hadn’t said one word about what might happen after he went home. This probably wasn’t good for her; she constantly swung between moments of elation and uncertainty, but hell, when had that ever been any different?

Those moments of uncertainty really only seemed to plague her when he wasn’t here with her, though, and he was now. She wasn’t going to ruin what time they had.

Grinning goofily at her reflection, she stuck her hands under the warm water running from the faucet and leaned over to rinse out her mouth—and came up with a scream caught in her throat.

Blood poured from her faucet, red and obscene in the white sink. She yanked her hands back, nearly choking when she saw that it covered them both and dripped from between her fingers to splatter on the countertop. She reeled backward, catching a glimpse in the mirror as she did so of a silently screaming gray face—and her own shriek finally tore free. She threw herself forward again, whirling around and slamming her butt against the counter.

Of course, nothing was behind her. And nothing came from her faucet now except clear water that swirled harmlessly down the drain.

Ash appeared in the door with a frown in place as she stood there trying not to fall down, her eyes wide, her chest heaving.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his gaze raking her from her bare feet to her pale face. She knew it was pale because she always looked like death itself after one of her episodes.

Normally, her answer to that question was “yes” followed by fake composure, or “no” and an absolute breakdown. What came out this time was, “Will I ever get used to it?”

“Get used to what?”

“After all these years…you’d think I’d get used to it. But I don’t. Every time I see something, it’s as bad as the first time.”

He stepped inside the room, taking her trembling hands in his. “What did you see?”

She glanced down into the pristine white sink. “It was running with blood. And…the faces. In the mirror. I saw them again. I saw them the other night at the restaurant too. It’s never happened outside wherever I lived before, Ash. It’s following me now. But what the hell am I talking about—it’s always followed me, no matter where I go—”

Her voice grew higher, tinged with hysteria, and Ash closed what little distance was left between them to pull her into his arms, murmuring that it would be all right.

“Am I losing my mind?” she whispered into the hot flesh of his nak*d shoulder.

“No,” he said. He sounded so certain.

“How can you say that? What is this, then? Seeing things that aren’t there…that’s crazy, right? There’s no other explanation. That’s—”

“Haunted,” he said softly.

She pulled away from him at that, looking up into his dark eyes. They stared back, assured, steady…dispassionate, really. As if he dealt with this sort of thing all the time. “Haunted? You mean like a poltergeist?”

“Or worse.”

Maddie scoffed. “I’ve wished it could be something like that, something there was even the slightest chance I could get rid of. But honestly…I don’t believe in those things.”

“After everything you’ve seen? How can you not? Because you aren’t crazy, Madeleine. You’re absolutely coherent.”

“That doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t feel that way.”

With both hands, he smoothed the hair back from her face. “It looks that way. I think…you’re very strong.”

Strong? No, no one would ever say she was strong. What was the matter with him? “That’s the last word I’d use to describe me.”

“No, that’s the last word you think others would use to describe you…others like your ex. But I want you to forget about all of that. Even if you don’t believe what I say about you being haunted, believe that you are not weak, and you are not crazy.”

“So…just say that you’re right, and this…thing, this entity…is following me, how do I get rid of it? It’s happened ever since I was a little girl, no matter where I live. It’s me it’s after, for whatever reason.”

“But you’re still here,” he said, looking down at her with an assessing gaze she didn’t understand. He said it almost as if he were puzzled, but it was the exact same thing she told herself over and over when she was trying to calm down. Then he blinked and glanced around. “Are you finished in here? Come on to bed.”

She turned off the faucet and allowed him to pull her out of the bathroom, but she couldn’t help casting one last apprehensive glance toward the mirror. All she saw was her own face this time, pale, shadowed…haunted.

“The first time I remember it…really remember it…I was fourteen,” she said. They were lying face-to-face, fingers interlaced. “Things had happened before that, but they were minor. Infrequent. But on my fourteenth birthday, I saw the gray faces for the first time. My grandparents had a party for me—one of the few times they did anything like that. I spent the whole thing curled up in the corner of my bedroom, crying. They couldn’t get me to come out. I guess that’s why I never got another party. I think they had the same problem with me that most people do—they were scared shitless of me.”

He could almost understand. Sometimes he was scared shitless of her too.

“It was really bad for me in the beginning. I tried to hide what was happening from my family and the few friends I had, and I got pretty good at it, even though I don’t think I used a mirror my entire freshman and sophomore years if I could help it. I wore my hair in a ponytail and didn’t bother with makeup. Wasn’t ever a fashion plate—I just didn’t care.”

“You seem to now.”

Her faraway gaze was directed at him, but he knew she didn’t see him. “I finally decided to suck it up. When I was sixteen, this guy I liked started showing some interest, and I was so eager to go out and be normal I tried to pretend none of it was happening, for him and for myself. That didn’t last, of course. Guys came and went and I tried to hide it from most of them. David was the first one I really let in, thinking we were close enough and he cared enough that he could handle it. He couldn’t. But can I really blame him? It’s not his fault.”