I plucked at the strings again, restarting the song and finding my
voice. Despite a tongue clumsy from drink, I had no trouble singing
clearly. Call it my superpower; I may not have been able to walk a
straight line, but I could still make flawless music while wasted.
Her
eyelids fluttered closed and some of the tension in her expression
eased. Her spine became less rigid and she seemed to flow across the
room toward me. The way she moved may have been the most graceful thing
I’d ever seen. She was just walking, but it felt like a dance, each step
matching the beat of my song. My pulse raced, my body heated, and I
could hear my heartbeat in my ears, thrumming to the same tempo.
My
mouth had gone dry by the time she climbed up on the bed. She crawled
across the covers, her movements seductive though her eyes were closed
now. She only paused for a second to listen before continuing toward me,
straddling my legs.
I pushed back against the pillows, the notes faltering, then stopped entirely when her breasts grazed my hand.
“Uh, I can’t play if you’re going to climb all over me. You understand that, right?”
“Sing,” she demanded.
I
got the impression her vocabulary must have been limited to singular
syllables in this form, and I doubted the wisdom of allowing her to just
crawl on top of me the way she was doing. I clutched the guitar,
deciding it was probably better to keep some barrier between us,
considering she was looking at me as if she wanted to eat me.
“Why
don’t you just sit next to me here, and I’ll sing you all the songs you
want?” I patted the bed beside me and then started in on a different
song—one I knew all the words to.
Her face twisted with
displeasure. “No!” She tore the guitar from me with surprising strength
and sent it crashing to the floor in a dissonant clatter. She surged up
close, her breath hot against my ear, her full breasts warm through the
thin fabric of my shirt.
“Sing,” she rasped.
I cleared my throat and hummed a bar of the unfinished song, then stopped. “You mean that one?”
“Mmm,” she said, a small smile gracing her lips and her eyelids fluttering closed again.
“All right, but I need you to—ah—move off me.”
I
grasped her by the shoulders and attempted to twist around to position
her beside me. The next thing I knew, I was pinned flat to the bed, her
wild eyes staring down at me as vines snaked down and coiled around my
wrists.
“Sing.”
“Fucking hell,” I muttered, staring at the vines. I tugged hard, but they held tight.
Her
lovely, dark face hovered over me, eyes a maelstrom of need, but a
flicker of deeper awareness made me think Deva was still in there,
perhaps along for the ride while her instincts had control. Up close,
her lips were a deep blue, as was her tongue as it swept across her
lower lip.
Fuck, now she
did look like she was going to eat
me, and I was only more convinced of that when she grasped the sides of
my shirt and wrenched it open, leaving me absently relieved it had
snaps instead of buttons.
She raked her blunt nails down my chest,
the sensation more arousing than painful. My body came alive under her
touch despite the fact that I knew she was off-limits. But holy fuck,
was this hot. If she went any further, all bets were off.
