Page 55 of Edge of Stars

“You know, you probably could’ve convinced me to do something about that.”

“No.” I’m strict about it for a reason. “You’re the most magnificently sexy female I’ve ever known, but you’re also a perfect and rare gift. I wanted to wait for you. And I probably should’ve—”

Her own fingers are suddenly smashed against my lips. She pushes hard enough to make me wonder if she’s morphed them into steel chopsticks.

“Probably should’ve what? Invited me over for afternoon tea, instead? Scones and sweet cream and all?”

I huff. “Your scones shouldn’t have even been on my mind, Kara.”

She ropes her hands around my nape, using the purchase to readjust herself beneath me.

“Well, yours were on mine.”

Until her legs are spread and her sarong is bunched around her waist.

“All right, fine.” I groan it out because her intimate heat already permeates the crotch of my briefs. And her wetness. Shit, and even her little tremors. “I wanted your scones too. And your…sweet cream. Badly.”

Not until I cross that final word does she ratchet her hold harder, clearly not negotiating the equally brutal kiss on her mind. And it is…merciless. The polar opposite of teatime manners. A primal, dish-breaking mating call. Her dark animal roaring out to mine.

And mine…slashing back.

Rough. Relentless. Lunging into her with all the untamed need I felt that fateful day. The urges, wild and terrible and beautiful, that made me push her into my apartment wall and screamed at me to do so much more.

I’d growled them all away, taking pride in my nobly drowned urges. Justifying myself as a higher species, able to kill the selfish beast within. Professor Higgins on a self-righteous repeat loop.

Idiot.

I see the ugly truth of it now. Knowing exactly how I’d tried to run from providence. To duck from my destiny. To deny our inevitability.

“Fuck.” I can’t fight the searing blade of it any longer. The slice it makes all the way to the middle of my marrow. “Kara…”

“What?” Her whisper is benevolent but strident. Her hands, spreading under my shirt and along my shoulders, are strong but giving. “Maximus? What is it?”

I drop my forehead to hers. It’s agony to keep the contact—not because of what’s here between us but what’s not. The sparks we first combusted. That shocking but earth-changing heat, so intimidating but irreplaceable… Where is it now? Has Hecate taken that away from us too?

I refuse to accept that.

More than anything else, I refuse to let her take away us.

Maybe the fight does have to start with me. With how much I’m willing to give up, and give in, to get the prize back.

How much I’m willing to expose.

It starts right now.

“That day,” I grate, stroking the sweet space between the base of her neck and the beginning of her collarbone. “Damn it, Kara. I was really stupid. Denying this. Us.”

She flows her hands back in, not stopping until they press together over the hammering din of my heart. “Hey. It was scary. I remember. And I was stupid too.”

I don’t say a word. Right now, I have to believe that my silence speaks better. That she’s using the long, uncomfortable pause to assess the pounding pulse beneath her fingers and the yearning emotion that locks once more into her gaze.

At last, one of us screws up the courage to speak once more.

“Maximus?”

I bore deeper in my spirit, summoning the strength to do the same. “Yeah?”

“Let’s not be stupid anymore.”