Chapter 42

Tactile contact must be forbidden except for practical purposes such as medical assistance and the maintenance of children.

Sexual contact needs to be verboten. It creates too much sensation—and we have agreed that any sensation is a gateway to emotion.

—Early discussion on the possible structure of Silence (Mercury compound, circa 1947)

YAKOV WANTED NOTHING more than to shove up her dress, rip off her panties, then drop to his knees in front of her, thrust her knees apart, put his hands on her ass, and go to town on the slick heat of her pussy. He could taste her arousal on his tongue, knew she’d come explosively for him.

But regardless of all Theo had said, he was very conscious that the balance here was skewed. She’d been in Silence most of her life, had no idea what to do with the attraction that buffeted them both. He was the experienced one, knew they couldn’t go from zero to a hundred in a matter of minutes.

Especially when Theo already had a manic look about her.

She was riding overload.

Yet he knew she might just stab him for real if he tried to act the protector. He’d have to walk a very fine line.

Lightly squeezing the side of her throat, he then rubbed his thumb over the flushed cream of her skin. Her eyes were all black again, and now she shivered.

“A kiss,” he said, leaning in until their breaths mingled.

Theo closed the distance between them without warning.

Lips on lips, her breasts crushed to his chest.

Groaning, he’d shoved her even harder against the wall before he could stop himself, the ridge of his erection thrusting against her stomach. Fuck, she felt good. All soft and warm and Bozhe but he wanted her with a raw desperation that would have her pinned up against the wall in ten seconds flat if he didn’t get a grip on it.

It took everything he had to pull back, keep it slow.

He initiated the second kiss, this one a little wetter, but with both their mouths yet closed. When her hand landed on his chest, and she fisted his T-shirt between her fingers, his chest rumbled with the bear’s approval.

Yakov had thought he knew all about kissing—hadn’t he stolen his first kiss when he was a juvenile of barely thirteen? But this kiss, it was a bullet straight to the heart, visceral and hard. The intensity of it hit him with such fury that he had no hope in hell of resisting it.

Perhaps in some deep corner of his brain, he’d convinced himself that it would be a letdown, that his dreams had been nothing but a confused bit of foresight that had come through the genes left by his great-grandfather. That he’d misunderstood the meaning of it, and that all he’d been foreseeing was that Theo would one day come into his life.

Well, he’d been wrong.

This kiss was better than anything in the dream. It was all breath and heat and her and it took hold of his changeling heart and squeezed. Until he had no air and the lack didn’t matter if he could keep on kissing her.

But when she tore at his T-shirt, he cupped her cheek and took a single step back. Just enough to look into her eyes, shake his head. “We are not rushing this.” Not their first time.

Not her first time.

A hiss of air from in between her lips, her eyes flashing to blue flame.

Oh yeah, his Theo was going to drive him to distraction. But tonight, he had to hold steady, had to be the anchor.

Before she could snap at him that she’d already told him she knew what she wanted, he tugged off the hand she’d clenched in his T-shirt, lifted it to his mouth, and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “Let me love you slow and with great attention to detail, pchelka moya.”

Her pupils swallowed up her irises, her chest rising and falling in a ragged drumbeat. “I don’t want to lose this chance.” An edge of desperation. “I don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”

Yakov’s jaw tightened. He trusted her more than she trusted herself, but he knew that nothing he said would change her mind until they had proof. So he kept it to the here and the now. “We have all night. Hours and hours.” Leaning close, he nuzzled her throat, licked her up. “Endless minutes.”

This time, he tasted her shiver before he pulled back and took another kiss that was a drug to his senses. They were both breathing harder, faster when he broke the kiss to say, “Do you want me to take off the T-shirt?”

THEO didn’t have to think of her answer to Yakov’s question. “Yes. I want to touch you.” She didn’t know how to be anything less than blunt when want was a crushing weight on her skin, a turbulent spiral in her veins.

A gleam in the amber before Yakov pulled off his T-shirt and threw it so it landed on the back of a chair. The groan that came from her throat was unbidden, feral in its lack of control.

She had her hands on him a moment later, but despite the desperation riding her, she didn’t claw and scrabble. No. She spread her fingers on the silken ridges and planes of him, and she soaked him in, this man of beauty and power and warmth. So much warmth. Inside and out, Yakov Stepyrev was created of warmth.

It was stark need that had her pressing her lips to his skin. She wanted to absorb him into her, keep him forever in a place where no one could steal him from her. He tasted of the wild, salt, and heat, and the scent that was his. She might not be changeling, but she knew she would never mistake his scent for any other man’s.

It aroused her, comforted her, made her want to cry with the loss to come.

When he put his hands on her hips, she was expecting—was ready for—a demand. But he nuzzled her throat, then nipped, and nuzzled again. Her eyes grew hot, burned. Squeezing them shut, she swallowed hard as she ran her hands over his chest. “Dimples,” she managed to say when she could speak again.

A chuckle before he bent his head so she could fulfill her first fantasy: to kiss first one wicked dent in his cheek, then the other.

He groaned, nuzzled her once more.

Suckling kisses on her throat, his big body a heavy blanket.

When he began to walk backward, tugging her along with him, she went without hesitation.

Stopping at the sofa, he sat down . . . and pulled her down into his lap.

Her dress rode up, exposing nearly all of her. She didn’t care. Not when she could feel the heavy muscle of him beneath her, around her. Not when his eyes were wild and he made no effort to hide the vivid evidence of his arousal.

Her skin stretched, a hot power arcing through her veins even as she felt herself losing the last vestiges of control. As if he’d felt the frenetic pulse of her energy, Yakov stroked her thigh. His touch was tiny prickles all across her body, a violent awareness that led to a clenching between her thighs, and suddenly the air was too thin, too hard to swallow.

She clutched at him, struggling to hold on as the entire world spun.

Yakov’s expression altered, softened in a way she didn’t understand. “Come here, Theo mine. Right here.”

Her mind chaos, she couldn’t process the meaning of his words, but he was nudging her head toward his shoulder, his arms warm bands around her. She wanted to resist, panicked all over again that this was it, her one and only chance, but the weight of his hand on the back of her neck, the idea of being held against his skin as if she mattered . . . she couldn’t resist that.

One hand flexing against his pectoral muscle, she tucked her face against his neck and gave in to the desire to get drunk on his scent, on his warmth, on his very being.

“There you go.” The rumble of his chest was a vibration against her breasts, his breath kissing her neck as she nuzzled deeper into him. “Yes, Thela. Take what you need.”

He began to stroke her back.

Her dress had shifted during their embrace and she knew the instant he felt the first ripple of raised skin on her back. The slightest pause . . . before he continued on in his caresses. Exhaling, she buried her face against him and just . . . let go.

For the first time in her life, she let go without fear.

As she did so, a heavy warmth spread over her skin, through her limbs, and into her blood. The storm quieted into a sensation she’d never before felt. Was this what it felt like to be safe?

Her eyelids began to droop.

Theo wanted to fight it. She might be new at intimate sensation, but she knew sleep didn’t come into it. But when she stirred, Yakov murmured to her that it was all right, and he kept on stroking her with those strong, careful hands, and she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. She surrendered and fell into a sleep as soft and dark as the velvet she’d once surreptitiously touched as a child.

YAKOV stroked his hands over his sleeping dream woman. What would the other unmated males in the den say if they saw him now? Probably razz him forever about the fact that his date had fallen asleep rather than exchange skin privileges with him.

He should’ve been annoyed, insulted.

All he felt, however, was a wave of tenderness stark and primal.

He wanted desperately to move her hair aside and look at the scars he’d touched on her back, but despite her tacit permission, he didn’t. Whatever that was, it wasn’t good. He’d felt it in the tension in her body, the stiffness in the line of her spine. Given her history, he had a fucking good idea of who’d done that to her—and if she never wanted to talk about it? He’d handle it. He wasn’t going to push her back into the abyss.

Leaning down, he pressed his lips to her hair. “You’re safe, serdtse moyo.” His heart had never had a chance when it came to Theo. “Sleep.”

He didn’t know how long he’d held her when she whimpered. He immediately murmured comforting words to her, stroking his hands down her back . . . but she jolted out of sleep, staring at him with eyes that had gone an eerily flat black. Her face was sleep creased on one side, her hair mussed.

She jerked her head this way and that with wild desperation.

“Hey,” he murmured, keeping his voice a low rumble. “It’s Yasha. You’re in a StoneWater apartment. Safe.”

But when he would’ve raised his hand to push strands of hair off her face, she scrambled back and away so fast that she almost tumbled onto the floor as she got her trembling legs under her. “I—” A harsh gasp of air, those dark eyes staring at him as if he’d appeared out of nowhere.

Theo screamed without warning, the sound not of fear but of rage, and suddenly, Yakov went flying straight into a wall.