Page 58 of Demon's Beauty

My stomach falls all the way to my feet.

“I’m so sorry,” I gasp, withdrawing my hand. “Am I hurting you? Goddess, I didn’t mean to—”

Before I can finish, he’s reached back and hooked an arm around my waist. Hauling me into his lap, he holds me tight enough to his chest for me to feel the laughter shaking his whole body.

“You’re not hurting me, sunshine.”

Again with that nickname.

It makes a bright little frisson of pleasure spark through me.

Silly, to be so affected by it.

No one in my entire life has given me a nickname—with the exception of Seren calling me Sol—and I should take myself seriously enough forsunshineto be an absolute horror. Really, I’m the opposite of sunshine, holed up in my workshop until all hours of the night, preferring silence and solitude to crowds and noise.

But on Finn’s lips, it’s not a horror at all.

I want to hear him say it again.

Asking for thatwouldbe a horror, though, so I make myself focus back on the conversation at hand.

“If I wasn’t hurting you, why did you just turn to stone?”

He laughs again, an undignified snort. “‘Turn to stone’ is accurate enough, isn’t it?”

I don’t know what he means. At least until I shift a little against him and feel…

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh.” He rubs the tip of his nose against mine once, playfully. “You’ve never heard about what happens when you touch a demon male’s wings?”

I thought I had reached my quota for blushing today, but apparently I still have a little more in me as his words sink in.

“S-sorry,” I stutter as I try to wriggle off his lap. “I really didn’t mean to—”

“I don’t mind,” he says with a chuckle, keeping me firmly in place. “And I don’t presume it means anything more than a healer diligently doing her work. I just thought you should avoid any other, ah, misunderstandings.”

More color on my cheeks, but I make myself push the embarrassment aside.

“So your wings weren’t hurt, then?”

“Our wings are much more durable than other parts of our bodies,” he explains. “The flames probably did touch me there, but they only would have singed, not burnt. And with your healing, they’re good as new.”

“Durable and sensitive?” I muse, unable to stop my fingers from seeking the curve of his wing, even knowing what it means. MaybebecauseI know what it means and I can’t stop myself from doing it, anyway. “That seems like a contradiction.”

“You’ll have to take it up with the Goddess,” he tells me, eyes lit with molten rubies and a slight shudder moving through his frame when I touch him there again. “She’s the one who made us that way.”

“She really knew what she was doing, I guess,” I murmur, and he shudders again when I move on to the other wing.

“Sunshine,” he says in a low, graveled rasp. “I’m trying really hard to remember you’re a healer and I’m your patient.”

I give him a cheeky grin, feeling entirely unlike myself.

Since when do I flirt?

Since when am I so forward with a man—okay,demon—I barely know?

Since when do I feel this kind of wild attraction and give myself permission to act on it?