realm. I had fallen into love, and I couldn’t navigate the surface.
Why had I allowed myself to fall?
“ Advenient nefari .”
Congratulating myself on maintaining clarity of mind, I huffed from the blissful exhaustion of orgasm while chanting the invocation.
Star lay writhing on the sofa before me, her body glistening with perspiration and her lips red and open. She was so beautiful. A streetlight beamed through the window and showered her skin with a thousand jewels of light.
“ Ingredi en mundus !”
We’d done it. She had done it. We’d both done it. We’d…shared something just now. Something beyond business sex. It had been a unique contact between us, filled with unexpected trust.
She trusted me. And she had specifically asked me to do the summoning later.
But she was a familiar. That’s what familiars did—conduct demons. They didn’t have sex for pleasure.
I spoke another line of the spell. Only a few more left. Star’s body relaxed, preparing to open and conduct a demon to this realm.
In my heart, I knew she’d come here tonight for something else, dressed to seduce as she’d been. We’d shared something I shouldn’t label business, for the connection we’d achieved still battered through my veins. And that claiming pulse commanded me to silence.
Her twinkling skin shivered. Her mouth parted and she gasped. Her nipples had softened and her entire body was lax beneath me. So gorgeous. So…mine.
Mine. I’d taken her virginity. I’d perhaps given Star her first taste of pleasure sans business. I’d…
I think I’d fallen in love with Star.
“Do it!” she cried. “Finish the spell. It’s what you want.”
“No.” I knelt on the sofa and drew her into my embrace, her hair spilling over my shoulder as if a silk veil. Our heartbeats collided against one another as skin kissed skin and fingers clasped desperately. “I can’t use you like that, Star. It’s not right.”
“It’s what I am,” she said, sniffling against me. “We had a deal.”
Feeling the energy leave the air and the remnants of my spell dissipate, I did not regret not finishing the spell and summoning the demon.
“We had an unspoken deal,” I said. “When you kissed me, it was made.”
She pulled away and met my gaze with teary green eyes. “You understood that?”
I nodded. “I heard you ask for us to try the summons later. I shouldn’t have even tried it now.”
“But your spell. You wanted to summon the demon for some desperate reason, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of getting me here in the first place. T.J., you need the demon here in this realm. Will you tell me why?”
I sat back, drawing her onto my lap and against my chest, both of us still panting from the delicious exertion. I didn’t want to talk, I wanted to be inside her again because it felt like the only place I belonged. It felt like a place where I could do only good, no evil.
“Thoroughly?”
Her eyes glittered with questions and a startling innocence. She’d been a virgin. Hell. And I’d robbed her of that without knowing. I guess it made sense, in the weirdest way possible. Had she never before had a lover, a boyfriend?
She wanted to know my truths. I wanted to give them to her. I owed her my truth.
“The nefari demon holds the key to Daemonia,” I said, “a place where my brother was lost months ago. Or it’s rumored Navicrux knows where the key is kept.”
“Your brother? Daemonia is a terrible place. Oh, why didn’t you finish the spell?”
I shook my head and hugged her slender, bliss-warmed frame against me. Our pulses thundered for one another. “Couldn’t do that to someone I care about.”
“You wouldn’t have hurt me. It’s what I do.”
“I know, but I don’t think I want our relationship to be that now. Not witch and familiar. Something has happened between us. Did you feel it?”
She nodded. “Your magic changed the air. Did we make that?”
I wasn’t sure.