Shadow Kissed 03 - Shadowman

subtle ripple of Shadow in the room. Mage. Right. Problem? Too late now . . .
    His hands took hers, fingers lacing, and braced them above her head on the mattress. His shoulders flexed as he balanced his weight on either side of her for total possession. A riot of sensation consumed her mind, body, heart, as he claimed her again. She arched to rub her breasts against his chest.
    He drove deep once more. “Layla . . .”
    Breeched all barriers, stole her breath, and silenced the world until it was reduced to the pounding in her head. The darkness in the room became a sea of reckoning Shadow. Relentlessly he moved, wave upon wave, quickening his tempo. It was primitive, dark, magic and flesh, a cataclysm, volcanic, creating as much as it destroyed. She’d never be the same, but it didn’t matter anyway. When his forehead dropped to touch hers, she sobbed and clenched him tight. An extended shout was ripped from his throat, and she met him with her own lift and fierce cry.
    They clung like that, together in the dark, a pocket of the universe that didn’t wholly belong to any world. She almost would have begged him to make a little universe of their own, if not for the trouble they’d leave behind.
    He let his big body collapse on top of her, oblivious to the fact that she required oxygen to breathe. When she gasped for air, he rolled to the side and took her with him. But he wouldn’t let her go. One arm held her fast at the small of her back. His other tangled in her hair at her nape. She trembled, gripping him just as hard, as if a hurricane might blow through the room at any moment and tear them apart, when really they both intended to walk into disaster freely come morning.

    Layla woke to the light snore of the mage known as Shadowman. She’d fallen into the crook of his arm sometime in the night, his muscle her pillow. That’s how they would sleep if they could have a future. With him breathing deeply beside her, she’d bet her nightmares would be a thing of the past. Nuzzling, she kissed his chest. He was as warm as the tint of his skin, and very little could have compelled her to leave him, but she had work to do, and only a few hours to do it.
    First, a difficult responsibility, sure to frustrate her newfound family. She ducked out to the car to get a laptop she’d borrowed from Adam, then settled into the hotel room’s sofa. She titled her article “Wraiths, Shrouded in Secrecy” and spotlighted Segue, the place she considered home. With the emergence of the wights and the reorganization of the wraiths, the public needed to know what the world was up against. She corrected the dates for the firstknown cases, referencing murders found in Segue’s case files over twenty-three years ago. She vouched personally for wraiths’ near-immortality and stated that The Segue Institute had discovered a means to kill them, but she didn’t divulge more, to protect Talia and The Order. She described in detail the signs of a wraith kill, and then, after a hard internal debate, revealed what the wraiths fed upon for sustenance: human souls. Denied nourishment, the wraiths became wights, specters of such little substance that not even gravity could hold them. The wights troubled her most now. She went on to state that Segue was also in the process of developing capture and control techniques, called Barrow-tech. And last of all, for fun, she referred questions to Adam Thorne.
    As the sky grayed outside her hotel window, she e-mailed the article to her editor, and blind cc’d Adam, so he’d be prepared for the phone calls. Not that the public would believe her claims, but at least she’d done what she’d come to do. People were dying. A new age of magic was upon the world. The Order might strive to reverse it, and Segue might try to control it, but really there was no going back.
    Having done her worst, she sought pen and paper (more personal) to write a note to Talia, but after addressing the sheet in her best penmanship (never good), she couldn’t figure out what to say, and heart aching, she abandoned the project altogether.
    She turned when Shadowman shifted to sit up, his physique glorious in the dappled morning light. “Morning, sunshine.”
    The black got deeper in his eyes.
    All right then, a kiss. Which rapidly turned into more. And even though they had several hours of driving ahead of them, they ended up in the shower