[Moning, Karen Marie] [Mackayla Lane] Dreamfever - Tome 4 : Scène supprimé (en vo)

“You’re not the only fucking one that got branded!” Barrons slammed his fist into the wall behind my head. Bits of plaster dusted my shoulders.

Oh, really? I wasn’t the only one walking around with a mark on me I didn’t want? Our gazes locked and I jerked. Was he letting me see this, or had intimacy given me a window into his soul. As if he had one. He deserved no less. He hadn’t done it to save me. He’d had sex with me because it was the only way he could continue using me. He’d had sex with me to steal my services back from his enemies at Camp Pri-ya.

And for the first time since the morning he’d gotten up and walked out, leaving me painfully, horrifically aware of both who I was and where I was—in Jericho Barron’s lust-drenched bed on the verge of begging him not to leave me while in full possession of my senses--I could see that it hadn’t left him nearly as untouched as I’d thought. As he’d led me to think.

I searched his face. Beneath his left eye, a tiny muscle contracted, smoothed, contracted again. That minute betrayal was Barron’s equivalent of a normal person having a full-blown hissy fit. Oh, no, far from untouched. Had he stood outside my door as I’d stood outside his, fists at his sides, lips drawn back? Did it have him as bad as it had me? Was it eating at him, gnawing at him with the same sharp vicious little teeth that wouldn’t let me sleep?

Yes, it was. I could see the rage of insatiable, uninvited lust in every line of that dark, stoic face that had once been too subtly etched for me to read. I wasn’t the only one lying awake at night, fevered with memories, tossing, turning, soaking my sheets, burning up--not for Fae sex, but him, damn it all to hell, him.

Remembering being too naked in body and soul, trembling with need. Backing to him, a wild animal. Later, straddling him, holding him down and demanding more and more because Jericho Barrons couldn‘t be depleted. Of anything. Whatever he was. He was without limit.

He hadn’t erased the Fae Princes’ marks--he’d burned his own into them until I could no longer discern the shape of the marks they‘d left. He‘d scarred their scars out of me with a bigger scar. The bastard. And if I’d managed to carve up some part of him in return—

“Good,” I said, hard and low. “Welcome to my world, Barrons. I hope it hurts like hell.”

His hand was on my throat and my back was to the wall. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t need to. He was touching me. Two enormous magnets, repelling and attracting; a manifest of nature, not a matter of will at all. The air between us crackled with energy. Did I smell flesh burning?

“Good?” he said softly, and staring into those black eyes was like staring down the shadowy, demon-littered corridor of the Unseelie mirror in his study. “You think it’s good to have something like me obsessed with you? My dear, dear, bloody idiotic, suicidal Ms. Lane, you have no fucking idea what’s gotten the scent of you in its nostrils, what has the taste of you in its blood, or you’d run. You’d run for what little remains of what you think of as your life.”

He whirled, long black coat fluttering, was out the door, and gone.

I stared into the deepening twilight into which he’d disappeared. Nightfall was painting the stone walkway one of those new Fae shades that hadn’t existed before the walls had come crashing down around our ears; a dreamy silvery-violet, spider-webbed with moonbeams that was eerily beautiful. I shivered. I hated the new colors. They were….somehow just…wrong.

I shook it off.

Obsessed, Barrons had said.

I smiled. Good.