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  Poor thing.

  “Why? To have your wicked way with me?” I snorted. I was filthy. Covered in what looked like soot and goo. Snottish material if you must know. Bleuregh.

  “Well, first we’ll hose you down,” he asked, feline eyes twinkling. When I punched him none too gently, he let me. “But yes,” he said against my ear so that I trembled a little. More than me had been trapped in that black nothingness.

  “Let me guess, you want to express how upsetting it was for you to think of this world without my sunny presence,” I snorted.

  “Well, actually—” He walked me backward away from the small throng of people. He pressed me into the corner of the hallway, partly behind an open door. Then he dropped a kiss on my lips. “Yes. I was upset.”

  This was an entirely different kind of kiss. Where the others had been urgent and feverish and hurried, this one was almost…tender. I know, ick! I said almost. I parted my lips to let his gently probing tongue into my mouth and soaked up his attention. “Oh,” I said, dumbly.

  We stayed that way for a moment. Me feeling utterly safe with a solid wall to my back and Sean to my front. No black smoke was going to suck me up again in a supernatural vacuum. Ever. Thank goodness.

  His thumbs rubbed gently along my hips and he held me still, kissing my forehead and my nose. Brave man, I was streaked in goop of an indeterminate origin. I’m not sure how long we stayed tucked in that little corner, kissing and murmuring to each other. Time had become elastic to me. And then, “Hello?” said a feminine voice from below and Roxy hung her dreadlocked head over the banister and announced, “The Unitarian Minister is here! Let the crossing over begin!”

  “Olé!” I said softly and Sean laughed.

  He took my hand and we made our way slowly down the hall. “Come on. You did battle with Arthur The Terrible, it’s only fitting that you should be front and center,” he said.

  “He wasn’t so terrible,” I sighed. We took another flight of steps, making our way to the basement where the box was. Where Arthur had been found and where the minister and the handful of folks brave enough to stick it out waited. “He was just sad, lonely, a little nuts and beaten down by life. I’d be a liar if I didn’t say I hadn’t been there before.”

  “Me too,” Sean said. “But maybe we can change that.”

  This turn in the conversation threw me for a loop but warmed something on the inside of me that had been cold for a long, long time. “Maybe,” I mumbled.

  “I think we can,” he said and kissed me when I opened my mouth to respond. “Shh. Let’s do this.”

  So we did it. We sang and yes, god! we chanted. We showed Arthur the light and we wished him well. We spoke and burned sage and incense and that damn fucking box. And then we left. Sean’s friend Patrick admitted he’d be putting the house on the market pronto and Roxy wished us well.

  “You two are cute together,” she said. “And you can look out for each other,” she said.

  “Because?” Sean asked, grinning. Probably figured it was some hippy dippy kind of deal.

  “Because once you’ve been involved in something like this it tends to happen again. You have a mark on you. Like a watermark on paper. So…you never know.”

  “Oh, great!” I said but before I could truly go apeshit, Sean Tierney, the man I had been determined not to like, hustled me out to his smoking hot Mustang and took my grimy ass home.

  Chapter Five

  “I didn’t like it that you were there and then you weren’t,” Sean Tierney said as he pushed me under the hot spray. Somehow he’d gotten me in the door and up the steps and naked in between hot kisses and soft words. As far as blind dates go, tonight had been the best of the best and the worst of the worst. Hot, kind, sexy, funny cop boy versus rabid, crazy smoke monster from a stranger’s basement. All in all, I’d have to call it a balanced night.

  “Trust me, being in that…emptiness wasn’t so fun. It was a tiny bit disorienting.”

  He pushed my head under the hot rush of water and I sighed at the nice kiss of warm fluid that rained down over my hair. “I thought you were dead. I thought they were all dead.”

  “Well, we have to give Arthur credit. He had collected souls but everyone came back. Gross and covered in ick, but fine. Beyond a bit freaked out, I think.”

  Sean forced sheets of water down my breasts with his palms and smiled when I gasped. My nipples spiked under his hand and the rush of hot water. “Yeah, you are filthy.”

  I smeared my still-dirty hands over his face and shirt and he gaped at me. “What?” I said. “Now you are, too,” I said and hauled him into my very tiny shower before he could recover his cop senses and dance away from me.

  “That is so not fair,” he said, but his mouth came down on my shoulder, my throat, my chin. He found my lips with his and the water beat at us with a relentless flurry of drops.

  “Sorry. I tend to cheat a bit. If I can get away with it.”

  “Hmm. We’ll have to work on that.”

  I ripped at his shirt and jeans. The water made all that fabric even less cooperative, but we managed, together, as a united front, to get him naked. “Oh, god!” I said but sighed when I found a lone rubber in his pocket. I had some in my room, but really, who wanted to leave a gorgeous, wet, horny man if you didn’t have to?

  “You’re an eager one,” he said.

  “Not at all,” I laughed, rolling the condom onto his cock, holding him tight in my hand, kissing him urgently.

  “More life-affirming sex?”

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  When he pressed me to the wall, I was grateful. When he pressed into me, I was blissed out. I stayed flat to the wall under his warm bulk, legs splayed so he could rock into me. Holding me by the waist just enough so that I didn’t tip since I had to perch on my tippy toes.

  “I like to affirm life this way.”

  “Hush up and wrap your legs around me.” He clasped my ass in his big hands and kept me wedged to the slippery tile. I kept picturing us going down in a tangled heap of water and limbs, but it was a risk I was willing to take.

  I wrapped my legs, felt his cock nudge my G-spot even as his mouth found my nipple and he bit me just hard enough to make my eyes fly wide. “Sometimes a tiny nip of pain can make you feel alive,” he explained and did the other one.

  “Oh, yeah?” But he was right. The sizzle of sting and blip of pain and kicked off a spasm in my pussy and before I knew it, I was gripping his shoulders and shaking as he thrust into me harder. I came with a long loud cry that sounded like a cross between a banshee and jungle bird.

  “I think that sums it up,” Sean Tierney, hot cop extraordinaire said softly and then grunted, his mouth to my neck, his muscles trembling with the effort of holding me and coming. He let me slide down the slippery wall ever so slowly and I said, “Thank you for not dropping me like a sack of cement.”

  “Welcome,” he said and smacked me on the ass so hard I yelped. Then he washed my back and my front and I did his back. We made it as far as the red bathmat and the medicine cabinet where I had forgotten a few condoms lived before we were at each other again.

  It was on the sofa about an hour later, tangled together under a light throw, that he said, “I think we should go on a proper date.”

  “Yeah?” I poured him some more wine and topped off my own glass. On the TV someone was trying to sell us self-sealing storage bags.

  “Yeah. I think you deserve a good proper date.”

  “No smoke monsters?”

  “None.”

  “No voyeuristic mediums?”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Come again.”

  “Well, I’d like to,” I said and put my hand in his lap. He was in a pair of my sweats since his clothes were currently taking a ride in my dryer.

  “Voyeuristic?”

  “I’ll explain later. While you’re in me,” I said and squeezed his cock.

  “Ah, dirty then?”

  “Pretty.” It was four o’
clock in the morning but I was buzzing like a neon sign, wide awake. “I mean if you like kinky.”

  “A bit,” he said, waggling his eyebrows. I laughed when he made a grab for me. “Now about that proper date.”

  “I’ll go. On one condition.”

  “What’s that?” He was peeling down my pajama pants and I was letting him.

  “You have to pick me up on the Indian.”

  “Oh, a wild child, are you?”

  I threw myself at him and he gave an oomph! Before kissing me hard and pushing his hands into my still damp hair. “Jesus. Have you not been paying attention?”

  “I have. I have,” he said. “Trust me. A wild child and wicked cool, I have been paying all kinds of attention.”

  “Good to know,” I said, rubbing my body against his.

  I heard the crinkle of the wrapper and sighed when he seated me on his lap, my thighs wide, my body ready for him despite being sore and exhausted. He twined his fingers in mine and when I started to move he said softly, “Now tell me about this voyeuristic medium. And don’t spare any details.”

  About the Author

  Sommer Marsden writes from her cozy Baltimore home, which she shares with a very patient family and a chunky wiener dog. She’s widely published in the erotica genre. Her work has appeared in dozens of anthologies, multiple magazines and on numerous websites. When she’s not writing, you can find her haunting thrift stores, walking, drinking red wine and eating frozen blueberries. Often simultaneously. Visit Sommer at her blog, Smut Girl (www.smutgirl.blogspot.com), to keep up with her dirty ramblings and daily updates about her life of controlled chaos.

  Sommer welcomes comments from readers. You can find her website and email address on her author bio page at www.ellorascave.com.

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  Also by Sommer Marsden

  Base Nature

  Corporeal

  Sensitive

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