I’d never had sex with Barrons while I was amped up on Unseelie but I’d enormously wanted to. The small taste I’d gotten in Mallucé’s grotto had infiltrated my dreams, tantalized me, goaded me to indulge again. Pri-ya was horrific. It made you mindlessly insatiable, little better than a puppet.

But an Unseelie-flesh high was fully aware unquenchable lust—with an unbreakable body. If we fucked too hard, so what? My skin would heal even as we were doing it, letting me have more and more. We could do that thing I loved to do so much, that drove Barrons absolutely bugfuck crazy, with no repercussions.

I shivered with lust, suddenly understanding the See-you-in-Faery girls more than I wanted to.

Our eyes locked and I jerked.

Fucking river of blood in my House.

I actually saw the capital H in his eyes and knew Barrons’s House was whatever he’d claimed as his own, and nobody, but nobody, shit in it. There would be hell to pay, and I wasn’t certain I wouldn’t steer him in Brody’s direction before the night was through. I’ve learned a thing or two during my time in Dublin: when you let the bad guy walk, he comes back. Until you don’t let him walk.

Paint, I corrected. But his primal senses had told him that before he’d even walked in the front door. The man could smell if I was having my period. Or even just close to starting it.

Barrons snarled, black fangs flashing, and I realized walking through the bookstore in its current condition must have awakened a memory from another time when he’d stalked a battlefield of blood, wondering what he would find. Most likely discovering everyone he knew—with the exception of his immortal companions—dead. I wondered how long he’d had to live before he quit letting himself have one ounce of interest in a human. How it must have felt to lose everyone around him like I’d lost Alina. Oh, yes, easier not to care. To ultimately let oneself revile.

Barrons’s beast is always close to the surface. I sometimes wonder if one day he won’t simply change, lope away, and never walk as a man again. Go be pure in the form that makes the most sense to him, on some other world, in a skin that’s much harder to kill and, for him, much easier to live in.

His dark eyes flashed. Fuck. Didn’t know what I’d find. There are still some things that can kill you. Hate that.

Ah, so he’d considered the possibility Dani had come after me with my own spear. Fuck. Didn’t know if you’d come back. To me, I was quick to chew off. Hate that.

He smiled but it vanished quickly. His lips tightened, his mouth reshaped in a way I knew well. He was thinking about what he’d like to be doing to me with it. And it wasn’t talking. Barrons doesn’t waste time on the mundane. Another man might have said, “Gee, how are you visible again?” Or, “What the hell happened to my bookstore?” Or, “Who did this and are you okay?”

Not him. He scanned me, made sure I was in one piece, and got down to what really mattered.

Me. Naked.

He stripped.

Muscles rippled in his shoulders as he yanked off his shirt. When he kicked off his boots, jerked his belt from his pants and let them fall, I swallowed hard. Barrons is a commando man. I love his dick. I love what he does to me with it. I adore his balls. They’re smooth and silky and there’s this seam down the center that I love to lick before I close my mouth over his dick, and just when I know he’s lost in the sleek warmth of my tongue moving slow and easy, swirling, sucking him in with thinking it’s going to be sweet, I lock my mouth down hard, cup his balls in my hand and jerk harder than I should, and it undoes him every damn time. I’m obsessed with his body and the way it responds to my touch. He’s my mountain of man I get to play on, experiment with, and see how high I can make him fly.

Not a single tattoo marred his recently reborn skin. He was dark, muscled, sleek perfection. I was halfway to orgasm just from watching him strip. Well, that, my hand between my legs, and his intense gaze fixed on the movement. Pri-ya, I’d done this a lot, and while I’d sprawled on the bed, he’d sat in a chair next to it, watching me with heavy-lidded lust and fascination and often a flicker of something that looked a lot like jealousy. Then he’d knock my hand away, stretch himself over me, and drive home hard. You need me for this his eyes would say. If for nothing else, at least this.

He was right. There was masturbation.

There was sex with Barrons.

And there was abso-frigging-lutely no comparison between the two.

I pushed up from the floor, bullets dropping forgotten from the cradle of my hip. My spine fluid, my body strong, I pulsed with desire that rode the razor edge of violence. I don’t understand why that happens to me with him. It never happened before with any other guy. With Barrons, I get turned on and I get hostile. I want to have violent sex, I want to smash and break things. I want to push him, I want to force myself into his head. I want to see how much he can take. I want to see how much I can get.

Got something you want to say, Rainbow Girl?

I knew what he wanted. What he always wants from me: to know that I’m aware and I’m choosing and I’m one hundred percent committed, to him, to life, to myself, to the moment, which doesn’t sound like so much but it’s a damn tall order. And he wants his name in that sentence somewhere.

I tossed my head and shot him a savage look. Fuck me, Jericho Barrons. You’re my world, I didn’t add. At least I hope I didn’t. I let my lids flutter at the end, half closed, shielding my heart.

Then he was on me and I was crushed back against the wall, my bare feet dangling above the floor and he was sliding me up it, big hands splayed on my hips. His physical strength is surreal, an indisputable bonus when it comes to sex.

When he buried his face in my thighs, I wrapped my legs around his head, arched my back to push against his mouth, and fisted my hands in his thick, dark hair. When a fang grazed my clitoris, I pulled his hair—hard—and he laughed because, like me, when we’re having sex, drugged or not, there’s no such thing as pain. We did everything possible when I was Pri-ya. I became conditioned to him in that state. It’s all sensation. And it’s all good.

I let my head fall back against the wall, lost myself in the bliss of his hot mouth on me, his tongue moving inside me.

I arched my neck and roared when I came. Damn the man, he touches me and I explode and just keep moving in a red-hot haze of lust from one orgasm to the next until at last he stops touching me. He knows exactly how to work my body. It’s incredible. It’s frightening.

In desire, in lust, Barrons and I are perfect together. In everyday life, we’re porcupines who must navigate the circumference of each other’s existence carefully because one poke and either of us might bare our teeth and scuttle off. Not because the needles hurt but because we’re both…volatile. Temperamental. Proud. Obtuse as hell. It makes for difficult days and incredible nights. I can’t change. He won’t. It is what it is.

Here, now, in lust, we unite, bond in a way that makes the days work fine. I realize as I explode again and hear him make that low, raw sound in the back of his throat that makes me crazy, vibrates into my pelvic core, spreads in a rumbling purr through my body, enhancing my orgasm to exquisite proportions, that this is essential to us, to our ability to stay together.

I don’t dare not fuck this man frequently because this is the glue that holds us, the tie that binds, the only tether, collar, leash either of us can permit, the place where everything else falls away and we become something more than we are alone. I get now why he fucks with the single-minded devotion of a dying man hunting God. Sex with him is the closest thing to holy I’ve ever known. Barrons is my church. Every caress, each kiss, a hallelujah.