That’s what it seemed like to him. Like she tried to drown herself in stimulus to order to avoid thinking about whatever was bothering her. That’s what she’d wanted him for the first time, too. Make it all go away for a while. That’s what she’d said to him in the library.

“What’s wrong?” he murmured against her lips.

“Nothing.” She renewed the assault on his lips and grazed his bare back with her fingernails. He shuddered against her, desire flaring in his groin and swamping his mind.

“Isabelle,” he whispered between kisses, “I know something’s bothering you.”

“You’re wrong.” She ground up against him. The delicious heat of her sex rubbed the length of his cock through the fabric of their clothing.

Thomas lost his train of thought.

It took a monumental act of strength to catch her wrists and pin them to the floor on either side of her. She stilled instantly, staring up into his eyes. It wasn’t lust that colored them dark now, but the edge of panic.

Why panic?

“Isabelle, don’t lie.”

The glimmer of panic receded and her expression relaxed. “You worry way too much, Thomas.”

“I can tell there’s something bothering you.”

She sighed. “Maybe. So what if there is?”

He released her wrists and collapsed on his back, breathing heavily. His rapid heart rate had nothing to do with their sparring. Neither did his rock hard cock. The absolute male of him wanted to just take her, curse the reason she was willing to throw herself into gritty, urgent sex here on the floor.

He wanted her, wanted her so much his cock had gone rigid at the first touch of her body against his. The thought of yanking off her clothes and rolling her beneath him now, spreading her thighs and sinking his cock into all that soft, warm, and willing heat was hard to resist.

But his yearning for Isabelle went past the physical.

Isabelle rolled away and sat up, pulling her knees to her chest in one lithe movement. “Maybe something is bothering me, but I’d prefer to keep it to myself if you don’t mind.”

He sat up, his hair trailing over his shoulder. “You want to use sex with me as a way to escape. Fine. But you have to level with me about it first.” His voice came out harsh and cold.

“Thomas, I—”

The ballroom doors burst open and Mira rushed into the room, her face pale and drawn. Jack and Micah followed her.

Thomas leapt to his feet. Coldness curled through his stomach at the expression on their faces and at the psychic hit he got off Mira. It was something really bad. The demon had killed again.

Mira didn’t bother with the preliminaries, probably reading in Thomas’s expression that he already knew. “It’s worse than you’re imagining. I know because I heard it all.”