Read Online Dark Refuge by Kate Douglas - Free Book Online

gave it all up to Em, every sensation, every bit of touch and reaction, of arousal and need and the lightning-fast journey from impending orgasm to completion.
    Em screamed and her back arched as she forced him even deeper. Her mental climax was a veritable firestorm of color, of heat and light and pulsing shadows and stars, shared with Gabe, as she hovered for one brief moment on the precipice.
    But when they leapt, what should have been light and completion, a sense of the sublime, was scarred by darkness. By a roiling cloud that followed Em over the top and buried her in the deepest shadows of despair.
    He lay on top of her, gasping for air, holding her close, protecting her from whatever that thing was that seemed to intrude on her climax. On his. A dark shadow unlike anything he’d ever experienced, but he’d also known this was something Em lived with. Something she’d always lived with, or at least for as long as she could remember.
    He wrapped his arms around her and rolled to his back, taking her with him. She trembled against him, and he wondered if it was fear or the aftermath of what had been—up to the intrusion of that dark something—a most remarkable sexual and emotional experience.
     
    • • •
     
    She couldn’t look at him, wouldn’t look. It had been so perfect. Everything she’d ever dreamed, better than she possibly could have imagined. What she’d always thought of as okay sex didn’t even rate as bad sex compared to what Gabe had just shown her, what he’d shared with her. It had been absolutely perfect, until the darkness.
    Obviously there was something terribly wrong with her. Something that must have disgusted Gabe. He still hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t done anything but cover her with his big body, pressing her into the tumbled blankets so perfectly that he made her feel safe even when she knew she wasn’t. That she hadn’t been for a long time. Would most likely never be, but why? What was the darkness that haunted her? Was it the reason her parents were so overprotective?
    Gabe nuzzled the sensitive spot beneath her right ear and then kissed her cheek. “I hope you realize things can’t go on the way they were.”
    She froze. Had it been that awful for him? Was she that awful, with her mind suffused in some unknown . . .
    “Because I am not letting you go. Ever.”
    He rose up on his forearms and kissed her, but her mouth was open in shock and he took the kiss so much deeper than she knew he must have intended, but that didn’t stop her from kissing him back, even though her mind was absolutely flooded with questions.
    “What do you mean? That darkness in my mind. You had to feel it. It’s always there, it’s . . .”
    “It’s something we’re going to fix if it’s the last thing we do.”
    He cupped her face in his big hands and forced her to look at him. His dark amber eyes sparkled, and he had that sexy little half smile on his lips, and Goddess but his lips were sexy. Warmth surged between her legs and all her internal muscles clenched. All from Gabe’s smile.
    Well, that and the realization that he was growing hard again, still locked deep inside her where she could feel the subtle stretching as his arousal made itself known. Except she didn’t want to be sidetracked. Not now. “How, Gabe? How can we fix something if we can’t know what causes it?”
    “We ask Eve.” He kissed her nose.
    “Eve’s busy. She’s a goddess, Gabe. We can’t ask her stuff like that.”
    “Why not? Lily does, and she gets answers.”
    “Well, Lily’s special. She also goes on the astral and has some sort of weird celestial wine and catches up on gossip with Eve because they’re friends.”
    “Weird celestial wine?” He cocked an eyebrow and thrust his hips forward at the same time. “What brand is that? And what’s the vintage? Astral date nine billion and twelve?”
    “Ah!” She lifted her hips on a gasp of pleasure. How could he carry on a conversation when he was