Read Online Of Consuming Fire by Micah Persell - Free Book Online Page A

Picture someone else.”
    Seth laughed. “I always do with this one.” Then he flopped himself down on top of her.
    His hot breath fanned her face with the stench of cheap beer. Joe’s excited breathing echoed behind her head; his fingers dug into her skin with unforgiving force. Grace turned her face into her shoulder as tears pooled in her ears, trying to ignore the fact that her pants were being yanked down her legs.
    Seth shoved her legs apart with his knees. Horrid, gut-wrenching terror speared her at the foreign feeling of an erection pressing against her naked flesh.
    “You’re nothing,” Seth whispered to her. “Nothing but a stupid bet.”
    He drove into her body, and after the first searing sting, the only thing she felt was the shattering pain of his hands on her body.
    With a cry that neared a scream, Grace wrenched her hand out of her panties. She rolled violently to the side, finding air and then the unforgiving floor, pain shooting up through her knees and hands as she hit concrete.
    For several heart-wrenching seconds, Grace thought she had lost all of the control she’d gained over the last thirteen years. The entire rigor she’d put her mind through. All of the knowledge she’d gained. The prestige. Her work.
    For a moment, she feared she had degenerated to the wallowing mess of a teenager she’d once been in the years after …
    She hovered on the precipice of complete mental breakdown for a few seconds more before she was able to pull her panic back a fraction. Several more seconds saw the panic pulled back by half. Five minutes later, she was frazzled, but back to as close as she would ever get to “normal.”
    She rose to her feet unsteadily, and then once she was sure she wouldn’t collapse with her first step, launched herself at her pants. She pulled them on with jerky movements, her harried breaths echoing around the room.
    Once her armor of ugliness was in place, she allowed herself a deep breath.
    “You’re okay,” she told herself, the words coming to her from the hidden place of daily repetition and long-term memory. “You depend on no one. You are your own person. Just make it through today.” Her voice cracked.
    The words didn’t have the same effect they usually had, and she stared at the bed with longing.
    Just one day,
she thought fervently.
Just one day in bed. I won’t let it get like it was in the beginning
. When she had spent several months without once leaving her room.
    With a resigned sigh, Grace returned to bed, lay down, and pulled the covers over her head. Feeling as though she had taken a giant step back through years of progress, Grace wept.
    • • •
    Jayden leaned back against the pile of rubble and counted silently in his head, trying desperately to block out the sounds filling the hallway.
    The defilers were … having
sex
.
    The mouthy one and the blond one were in a room in the middle of the hall. The woman was moaning her mate’s name over and over, and the blond one’s accelerated breathing was so loud it sounded like continuous groans. But even more shockingly, similar sounds were coming from the room two doors closer to where Jayden stood where the blue-eyed one and the small, pregnant delicate one slept. What they could be doing when the female was so pregnant that
breathing
was uncomfortable, Jayden had no idea. And he tried hard not to imagine.
    Jayden wanted to be disgusted with their obvious weakness for each other, but even his jaded mind had to acknowledge that what was happening between the couples was more than sex. Their emotions were rolling through the doors and slapping him upside the mind again and again. They were so in
love
with each other. Every thought that reached him was dripping with unbelievable pleasure and unbelievable care for the person they were with.
    Jayden was about to fly apart at the seams.
    He wanted his Temptation so badly he could taste it. He was standing as close to freedom and as far from the happy couples