Born Into Fire (6 page)

Was she sick? If she was, Eric was the cure. She shivered and burned. No, this wasn’t like anything she’d ever experienced. This was almost supernatural.

Eric slathered kisses down her neck. She shuddered at the icy sensation of his mouth. Like hot ice. Kenna threaded her fingers through his hair. Everywhere, she felt him everywhere. She pressed against him, seeking the cool release from the blazing inferno roaring through her body.

“I want to touch you.” She slipped her hands under his shirt and brushed fingertips against pebbled nipples.

Kenna shoved the shirt up and came face-to-face with the broad expanse of tanned chest. She kissed a breastbone, a pec, then a nipple.

With a growl, he yanked his shirt over his head. In a jerky motion, he tugged open the buttons on her jeans then shoved them down past her hips. Kenna kicked off her sandals, then threw her arms around his neck as he lifted her onto the table in one fluid motion. Heat from her pussy burned her inner thighs.

Eric pulled the jeans the rest of the way off her body and whispered, “Spread your legs.”

Kenna froze. Those words. Her dream. Her throat constricted. He pressed his lips to hers, and she breathed easier. He straightened.

She stared up at him. “Who are you?”

Gently, he kissed her, sipping at her lips as he eased between her thighs, then whispered, “I didn’t want to be, but I’m exactly who you need.”

She glanced down at his jeans, tight around his cock, then looked back at his face. “And that is…”

“Erion.”

“Erion? But you said—”

“I know,” he soothed. “But, here, now, I’m Erion for you.”

The name washed over with the hint of a winter rain on the horizon. “I’m hot.” She reached between her legs and slipped her finger between her inflamed folds. “I need you here. Touch me, Er-Erion.”

He pulled back, his gaze piercing clear to her soul. A chill raced up her spine. Not from fear. She wanted him with a ferocity she’d never before experienced. Kenna grabbed the front of his jeans and tugged open the snap. The rasp of the zipper lowering caused her pulse to jump. A thin dark dusting of hair trailed from his navel into his briefs. She slipped a shaky hand inside, fingertips grazing the silken softness.

“Ah fuck.” His head fell back, and his eyes closed.

She fondled the length of his hard, thick shaft.

“Your hands are hot.” He pushed his jeans past his hips, and his cock thrust forward from a thatch of black springy hair. The heated scent of musk and male strengthened.

His cock was huge, long, and smooth. Dark veins threaded the length and pulsed beneath her fingers. She stroked him from base to tip, but rather than turning hotter with her touch, he cooled in her firm grip. Clear liquid seeped from the slit in the engorged darkened mushroom.

Liquid fire flowed from her pussy. She needed his cold steel inside her fiery depths. “Erion, I need you.
Now
.”

He shucked his jeans. But instead of plunging his cock where she desperately needed and dousing the inferno raging in her core, he dropped to his knees on the concrete floor. Wrapping his hands around her ankles, he lifted her legs over his shoulders. Closer, his mouth inched, his gaze locked with hers. Feral hunger glinted in his eyes as his breath fluttered her curls.

She inhaled sharply. Last night she’d dreamed of him. “I know you.”

“Yes. As I know you.” He waited, and she did as she’d done in her dream and spread her pussy lips for him.

Wet licks of his tongue coaxed her clit from behind its hood. She moaned. He growled and opened his mouth wider. His tongue swirled around the clit, then flicked lower to lap the hot cream from her tunnel.

One arm on the table, she braced her body and pinched a nipple with the other. A string tightened from nipple to clit. Euphoria clouded her mind. Erion continued to lick her folds, stab his tongue into her hot center, and suck her aching clit. Pleasure rippled through her. Her body vibrated, and sweat sizzled on her skin. Rocking her hips, she thrust her mound against his mouth.

“I’m coming,” she gasped as orgasmic release jolted through her. “Oh God,
yes
.” Her trembling thighs locked to the sides of his head. “Right
there
.”

Erion slid his hands under her ass, buried his mouth in her curls, and sucked as she rode her orgasm.

Whoever he was, she needed him—right where he was—between her legs. Kenna’s mind shattered into a million white-hot sparks.

Chapter Six

Erion paused in trailing a finger from nipple to pussy. Color glowed brighter where he touched. Fire danced through her hair, and an amber glow radiated just beneath the surface of her skin. She was magnificent, and she was his…for this moment. He leaned forward and brushed her lips with his. She opened her mouth. Fire sparked behind her eyelids. Tongues tangled, and he closed his eyes in wonderment of the heat radiating from her.

Awe turned to savage hunger. Erion devoured her skin with his mouth—her lips, chin, neck, breasts. He rolled his tongue against one nipple, then the other, and finally sucked the first into his greedy mouth. Tiny sparks stung, then snapped. Kenna arched her pelvis.

She needed him.

“Airiana.”

The whispered name startled him. He faltered.

“Erion?” Kenna questioned.

He sucked in a breath. She lay before him on the cusp. He had sworn to keep Aiden from interfering with her emerging element. Yet Erion himself now posed the greater danger. And all because she was his mate. Anguish tightened his chest. What sort of sick cosmic joke was this? Most Elements went lifetimes, even eons, before encountering their mates. Yet he’d found his barely into his life as an Element, and she not yet born into fire. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

“Please,” she pleaded.

His cock throbbed. Pre-cum dripped from the slit in the crown. He needed to pound into her channel with all the power of his body
and
his element. Already, her fire drew on his air with an intensity that said she was near emergence. If she transformed while their bodies were joined, would he be able to keep his element from emerging?

“I need you.” She reached down, fingered her slit, and parted her folds.

Moisture clung to her curls and glistened on her flushed pussy. Heat radiated out and upward. His cock jerked. He had to be inside her. She was safe as long as he stayed in human form.

Kenna grabbed his arm, pulled him close, then wrapped her legs around his waist and rubbed her juices on his belly. “Don’t stop.”

Heat like thick, molten lava scorched a trail across his cool skin. Erion grasped her legs and opened them wider. He wrapped his fingers around the base of his rigid shaft, fit the head to her opening, and plunged into her. A torrent of need built like a churning whirlpool leading to his center. Faster. Harder. Her hot sheath sucked him deep, gripped him, and scorched his length. Friction increased.

Flames leaped to life in the glory hole furnace. Wind rattled the rafters. Erion stamped down his element. A mental cry of agony rang through his head even as weightlessness fell in on him. Pleasure radiated out from his core. His orgasm began to build—an all-encompassing sensation. Slapping sounds of their wet joined bodies penetrated the rapture. Erion snapped from the trance.
No
! He could not shift. Kenna lifted to meet his frenzied thrusts. Faster.

Her channel tightened around him. Another moment and she would orgasm—this time, with him inside her. Her skin glowed. He startled at the sight of an ethereal aura surrounding her. Nearly white, the energy radiated from her in dancing waves. Of its own accord, his wind funneled from his core into the primal fire smoldering within her.

His heart soared. Like the gravitational pull of the sun, her fire drew his energy. Heat intensified, glowing brighter. Spasms clenched her internal walls tight to his shaft. Hot cream flooded from her pussy onto his balls. Scorching heat radiated from her and surrounded him.

He gritted his teeth against the compulsion to merge. Kenna opened her eyes. Fire glinted in her desire-clouded gaze. If he stared into that fire…
No
! Erion pulled from her body. The white light snapped back around her like a rubber band. She cried out. He forced back the shock of separation. Her fire had died without his air. He breathed in ragged gasps. Her element was safe…and he had remained a man.

He lifted her from the table and set her feet on the floor. “Bend over and hold on.”

She stared, eyes unfocused, and he roughly turned her. “Grab the table,” he ordered.

She grasped the edges. Erion gripped her hips, slipped his cock inside her channel, and pistoned into her drenched passage. She rose onto tiptoes, giving him deeper penetration. He groaned. Arm muscles bunched as his grasp on her hips tightened.

He ran his thumb over the dimples just above her buttocks. She threw her head back, auburn hair cascading over her shoulders. He thrust into her with greater force. Kenna convulsed around him. Her entire body clenched and trembled with release.

The exquisite friction drew his balls up tight. Blood rushed from his head. “Ah, fuck.” A final thrust, hard and deep, lifted her off the ground. His cock pulsed as hot ribbons of cum shot from his shaft. He remained buried full hilt until the last of the spasms ebbed. He wrapped his arms around Kenna and clutched her close to keep her from collapsing.

Erion closed his eyes, trembling, and breathed deeply of her scent. What had he done?

****

Erion leaned against the wall. He’d put on his jeans but left the button undone. He shouldn’t touch her again, but he’d proven he could and not shift into element form—and he intended to have as much of her as possible until she was out of reach. He wasn’t sure what he’d do once her fire emerged, but getting as far away from her as possible was number one on the agenda. The moon might not be far enough, but he’d bury himself in some hole in China if he had to.

Once her element emerged, it would call to him with an intensity that would make what they’d already experienced look like child’s play. And it would be like that every time their
sparks
were compelled to merge. If not the first time, eventually, he would consume her. She would
never
be safe with him.

“We’re going to begin with an easy piece,” Kenna’s soft voice broke into the cloud of desperation forming around him. She dipped the tip of a preheated blowpipe into the crucible and gathered molten glass on the end. “You want to pick up the glass like you might gather honey on a spoon.”

He heard the words, but his attention was on the movement in her arms, the flow of energy between her and the heat. He’d never seen anything like it. She had no concept of how she controlled the fire in the glass. He bit back the laugh that had been tickling the back of his throat since she’d stretched the red-striped tube socks with toes cut out over her arms.

“I didn’t see socks in the art-store supplies.”

Kenna chuckled. “This glass is about two thousand degrees.” She cast him a glance over her shoulder. “Which explains the orange glow.”

“Smart-ass.”

“You’d be the expert on asses,” she said, “since you’ve been staring at mine the last hour.”

“It’s a beautiful shape.”

“My ass or the glass?”

A corner of her mouth twitched, but she kept her eyes on the glass as she rolled the ball of molten mass onto a thick flat sheet of steel to cool as she shaped it. When she picked up the blowpipe and pressed her lips to the tube to blow, Erion took a step toward her.

She put up a hand in warning. “When you’re near, I get feverish. I need to work the piece before it cools.”

“So once you commit to a blowjob, you see it to the end?”

She rolled her eyes but snorted a laugh and continued to blow and work the piece against the fruitwood blocks.

Minutes turned into an hour, and Erion found himself lost in a world of shapes and color he hadn’t known existed. Her world. Though she wasn’t yet aware of it, Kenna had already begun to merge with her art. She lost herself in the art and seemed unaware of his presence until she picked up a new tool, named it, explained its use, then demonstrated with a patience that touched him.

First, she formed a bottom, then began blowing sides. Erion soon recognized the beginnings of a scalloped bowl. Once the cantaloupe-size bowl was formed, she curled one end up on itself, then began blowing something into the bowl’s center. One, two, and finally three thinner scalloped bowls shared the space in a variety of fluttering shapes and iridescent blues, pinks, and purples. The sea, Erion thought, and pictured filmy sea creatures floating through their watery element. She transferred the piece to an iron rod she’d called a punty and spent another half hour finalizing sides and edges.

When she finally sat back, scrutinized the piece, then proudly pronounced it finished for now, Erion forced himself to breathe, then extended a hand. “Come here.”

Kenna smiled, and mischief sparkled in her hazel eyes as she rolled the socks down her arms. She dropped them on the floor and hurried toward him. His cock thickened, pushing boldly against his jeans. His balls tingled and tightened. Kenna stepped into his arms. Heat pulsed in his core.

A tremor rocked his belly. Fire,
her element
, the cause of both color and form, was calling not just his element, but his body, emitting powerful waves of energy. Always, Element sought Element. The body was the pleasure point. But now…Erion breathed deep and kissed her, releasing a breath into her mouth and, despite knowing he only shortened their time, fed the fire emerging in her.

The tingle increased, vibrating out his cock. As her element drew closer to the surface, she would need more from him. Like any hungry beast, she would take as much as he allowed. She deepened the kiss, her mouth moist and warm. He envisioned endless days with her at the furnace, him feeding her fire while she created art, her feeding his need for her. Tasting her, licking her, fucking her. He was her mate. It should be him who completed her just as she would him. Instead, he was the man who would spread dirt over her empty grave if he stayed with her.