He was treating my wounds? Dear God, would he never stop deviating from the expectations I’d built up around him? I couldn’t read him, predict his actions, or figure out a way to circumvent him. He was an anomaly.

Releasing his grip on my hip, he surrounded my backside with his hands, kneading my aching flesh, rubbing the salve into the burn, and coursing relief and sudden desolation through my limbs.

How long had it been since I’d been cared for this way? Since I felt the attention of a lover’s caress upon my body?

I tried not to think about Priest as Ashley worked me into a thrumming, molten puddle of bliss. Talented fingers roved along my hips, waist, and thighs, learning my shape before returning to my bottom.

The friction of skin, even the barest touch, sizzled honeyed pleasure up my legs and into my core. When his thumb hovered over the hidden hole at my aft, rich shivers invaded the muscles there, clenching deep inside.

It was his gentleness that seduced me, his teasing fingers, the tenderness in every diabolical touch as though he trickled thick, hot syrup along my spine and dribbled it down my crack and into the needy gap between my legs.

It wasn’t nearly enough. I lifted my hips, urging him to keep stroking, blindsided by the madness of my need. I wanted more than the delirium of his expert petting. I ached to feel his lips mate with mine.

My whimpers found voice as he caressed the arch of my back. His hand tangled in my hair and turned my head. Eyes, so commanding that Satan himself would do his bidding, sucked me in like dark whirlwinds, threatening to swallow me whole.

“Siren.” The word came forth like gravel from his mouth, a beautifully shaped mouth befitting the devil, which I stared at quite fixedly.

His features seemed too relaxed to be affected by lust. But I knew better than to trust that handsome face.

I gasped as his weight came down atop my back. He was hard as stone in his breeches, the swollen heat of him intoxicating my blood as if I’d imbibed a cask of rum. I couldn’t breathe.

With hair as black as night and eyes bluer than the sea, he smelled like a midnight storm, the kind that infused the air with woodsy loam and turned everything it touched inside out. My mouth watered. My heart shivered.

He gripped the side of my face and tilted my chin up to meet his. Our lips hovered an inch away.

Did he find me pretty? Desirable? Worthy enough to kiss?